Ged Carroll

Category: oprah time | 書評 | 서평 : 文芸批評

Welcome! I guess the first question that you have is why oprah time? Well in my last year of college I used to sit in the house that I shared with my landlord and write my essays whilst watching cable TV.

There I would be sipping tea, writing away and referencing from text books spread around me on the couch and coffee table. One of the programmes on the in the background was Oprah Winfrey. A lot of the show was just background noise. But I was fascinated by Oprah’s book club.

She’d give her take on a book, maybe interview the author. And then it would be blasted up the New York Times bestsellers list. This list appears weekly in the New York Times Book Review. Oprah’s book club was later emulated by other talk show hosts, notably the UK’s Richard Madeley and Judy Finegan.

On the high end you had Melvyn Bragg‘s South Bank Show when they profiled an author of the moment.

When I came to writing my own review of books that I’d read, I was was brought back to that time working on a sofa. Apple laptop in hand. It made sense to go with Oprah time.

You might also notice a link called bookshelf. This is a list of non-fiction books that I have kept. And the reasons why I have kept them.

If you’ve gone through my reviews and think that you’d like to send me a book to review. Feel free to contact me. Click this link, prove that you’re human and you will have my email address.

  • Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and The Great Secret of China by Simon Winchester

    Bomb, Book and Compass

    Simon Winchester’s Bomb, Book and Compass delves into the history of science and innovation. The old adage of the victor writing history applies not only to wars but also the history of innovation and science. Everything you were taught in school about the history of science is likely to be wrong. It usually having a European focus; from the Greeks and Romans to the Italian-based renaissance via the wisdom preserved within the monasteries of Europe during the dark and early medieval ages.

    Book, the book and the compass

    The Chinese, in comparison, were seen as inscrutable and cunning rather like the Fu Manchu character of Sax Rohmer’s novels but less sophisticated than their European counterparts. This diacotomy helped assuage the consciences of empire-builders who had designs on the riches of the Chinese market, from bringing away silk and porcelain to finding a ready market for Indian-grown opium and laying the foundations for the modern-day heroin trade.

    Up until the European’s arrived China was the world’s largest manufacturer, counting for about 30 per cent of the economic activity by value in the world. This time of weakness is what the Chinese refer to as the century of shame, which was finally laid to rest when they claimed back Macau in 1999.

    Joseph Needham

    Bomb, Book & Compass is the story of Cambridge biochemistry professor Joseph Needham and his quest to find the real truth behind the history of science and China’s role within it, he did this during the chaos of the second world war, when he had the chance to get at the documentary evidence.

    He then spent the rest of his life curating and writing material for a vast series of books Science and Civilisation in China. These books were not only a historical record that put China closer to the centre stage position that they deserved in science, but also put the country on a more even standing with the ‘civilised world’ restoring or enhancing its reputation. In some respects Needham’s work could be considered to be the largest unpaid (in that China didn’t pay for it) corporate reputation campaign in the annals of public relations.

    Bomb, Book & Compass is a compelling read, by turns adventure, travelogue and political intrigue. I would recommend it, if nothing else for the very human portrait it paints of Joseph Needham as a man of great intellect and passion, but also a man with some very human failings. More book reviews here.

  • Who is your city? by Richard Florida

    Richard Florida is famous for his works on the rise of the creative classes. Who is your city? is an exploration into how clusters develop wrapped up under the guise of a self-help book. The book was recommended by a friend to mine who has been studying architecture and urban design. Florida looks at the characteristics of different cities (predominantly in North America) and explores factors that attract people at different life stages. You can see similar patterns in China around the rise of Shenzhen as a new city in the space of a few decades, or the way London draws talent from across the rest of the UK across various creative services.

    Flordia provides some of the starting points to the age-old regional planning question ‘How do we make another Silicon Valley in <insert region name here>?’ by listing some of the factors involved. There is an interplay between planning and organic effects. Korea is currently facing these challenges as it tried to have Sejong City meet its full potential

    Unlike many books he hasn’t fallen into the classic bad science trap that correlation and causality are the same thing. For instance: whilst no two neighbouring countries with a McDonald’s restaurant may have gone to war, that doesn’t make Ronald McDonald a prime candidate for the next United Nations secretary general.

    The book is interesting in the way that a Malcolm Gladwell book is interesting; I would prefer for Richard Florida to surface more of the modelling and research that went into Who is your city. The book is a serious academic piece of work that is devalued by reducing it to dinner party talking points. The section of questions at the back seem logical enough for someone thinking about relocating, there is no rocket science in them. At the end of it, I was left wondering how much utility did Who is your city? have for the average European or Asian reader? More book reviews here.

  • The Playful World by Mark Pesce

    The Playful World was written by Mark Pesce. Pesce was an early pioneer of the web. He was instrumental in bringing a 3d interface to the web through a standard called VRML. This was an early attempt to provide the kind of immersive ‘matrix’ experience envisaged by the likes of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson in cyberpunk literature. Were a digital double of the real world (or more likely a more attenuated digital version) provides for interactions in the virtual realm.

    Since then he has been applying his ingenuity and enterprise to academia  and futurism for the past decade and a half.

    The Playful World was written about a decade ago, yet was very prescient of today’s cutting-edge web and related technology trends:

    • Augmented web – the web provided a data overlay of the real world with applications like locative digital art and turn by turn directions for navigation. Putting this inside glasses rather than on a screen would mirror some of the human computer interaction work done since the 1960s for fighter pilots.
    • The web of things – items become intrinsically linked to the web with all the security risks that entails as well.
    • Custom manufacturing – smaller production runs, intellectual property becomes more important than manufacturing scale. Globalisation gets transformed. Waste could be reduced, though that would be affected by the kind of prototyping one goes through printing items in 3D printing from an existing file.
    • Gaming – lean forward entertainment becomes more immersive, though a lot of the growth in gaming has already happened

    Pesce knits his experiences together into an engaging narrative that would brings all of it together for the reader. If you want to get where things are going I recommend you have a read of Pesce’s book. You can find more book reviews here. More related content here.

  • The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil

    The Age of Spiritual Machines was written by Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil is a technological rock star, responsible for great music synthesisers and much of the developments around optical character recognition and speech recognition. This is what makes him a good futurist. The fact that he has had his hands dirty.

    The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence is a book of two parts. In the first part, Kurzweil outlines how technology has progressed since the dawn of computing with Charles Babbage’ difference engine. Kurzweil uses this trip down computer memory lane to demonstrated that computing power has been increasing exponentially since the dawn of time rather than just the dawn of Intel with Moore’s Law on the doubling of transistors. Even though silicon transistors may top out computing power will keep on trucking (though Kurzweil doesn’t necessarily have the answer of what is the next technology).

    The second part of the book is likely future scenarios; and this is where things get interesting. Kurzweil is setting himself up for a possible fail.

    Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold missed the internet in the first edition of The Road Ahead when it was first published in 1995 and Kurzweil sets himself up for a potentially bigger fall in the scope of his book. Even if Kurzweil has his timing a bit wrong or doesn’t get everything right his book is still a great thought experiment in how intelligent computers would impact humanity.  More book reviews here.

  • A Colossal Failure Of Common Sense by Lawrence G. McDonald with Patrick Robinson

    Every financial point of inflection be it a recession or a boom has its signature event. The internet boom was marked by the IPO of Netscape and the merger of AOL with media company Time Warner. The internet bust was marked by Worldcom and Enron’s collapse. The current subprime implosion in the US was marked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers which is what A Colossal Failure of Common Sense is about.

    Lawrence McDonald is a former vice president at Lehman Brothers got his story out in A Colossal Failure of Common Sense. Unlike similar books like Barbarians at the Gate, A Colossal Failure of Common Sense was written too close to the event as the author’s recollection is very emotionally charged, McDonald sets up the story with his own story front-and-centre.

    I found it interesting that McDonald discussed the kind of derivatives employed by Lehman Brothers as a radical new low.  To this relatively unsophisticated reader these seemed not that dissimilar to financial instruments involved in previous scandals. In his writings McDonald referenced Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker  which illustrated the dark side of bonds and derivatives some two decades previously as a book that he knew well. Liars Poker covers how derivatives were sold and then blew up, causing the US savings and loans scandal. Porter had a ringside seat as he talked about his experience as an employee of Salomon Smith Barney (now part of Citigroup). I found the parallels between McDonald and Lewis quite spookily similar in their observations, yet decades apart.

    McDonald talks about the efforts that his department made to try and balance out the carnage that collateralised mortgage debt caused at Lehman Brothers. Ultimately it reads like a litany of stupidity and missed opportunities. It’s like as if two decades after Liars Poker and F.I.A.S.C.O. that no one learned any lesson at all. More book reviews here.