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.

  • Barbarians Led by Bill Gates

    I started reading Barbarians Led by Bill Gates after the I’m a PC campaign tried to humanise the brand image of Microsoft. Barbarians is an unusual book: it is unspun lacking the fingerprints of public relations-led storytelling and yet fits uncomfortably between gonzo journalism and business history book. This partly explains the negative reactions that the book received on its release, in that it is a curates egg of a book.

    Its isn’t strictly a history that describes Microsoft, instead it like it reminds me of a great definition for art “art isn’t about what a thing looks like, but what a thing is.”

    It peers inside the software company and shows how chaotic happenstance, internal politics and ego rather than smarts managed to bring the company from being a lowly start-up to one of the world’s biggest and most powerful corporates which would match a reasonably sized country in earning power. The smarts came in when they realised the opportunities that they had been handed and the magicians art of promoting a new product: and a key part in this magic was my former agency WE Worldwide and in particular senior executive Pam Edstrom aka Gates’ keeper.

    If you are in PR, the descriptions of the planning that went into campaign execution and long-term relationship building alone will be very instructive. For me, the description of life on the inside of Microsoft rang true, as it resonated with my own experiences in-house at Yahoo! as projects ebbed and flowed in priority on an almost weekly basis.

    The book is also the story of how Marlin Eller gradually fell out of love with the company he had help build, how politics triumphed and expertise waned as Microsoft grew from a scrappy start-up to being part of the establishment. The portrayal of Bill Gates ultimately makes him more human because of his fallibility and indecision. Things that were polished out of his official image.

    Although the book finishes its story in 1998, it is by turns instructive and provides an interesting prism to view the company through, as the experiences described shape the legal and commercial environment that Microsoft operates in today. For instance, Google’s openness mantra is designed to be a judo move on Microsoft’s historic business model, using the corporations own strength and size against itself.

    Barbarians led by Bill Gates is also an artifact, staring back into marketing and PR before The Cluetrain Manifesto and The Naked Corporation, but comparing and contrasting with the present can provide a a useful aid to learning a number of powerful lessons. More book reviews can be found here.

  • Underground

    Murakami is best known for his book Norwegian Wood, but I chose Underground: the Tokyo gas attack and the Japanese Psyche as my first Murakami book. It is his only non-fiction work to date (at least to my knowledge).

    Murakami fled Japan after the success of Norwegian Wood and was lacking context around the Sarin attack on the Tokyo underground in 1995. It was a fantastical and terrible event that sounds like it has been plucked from the pages of a Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum novel.

    You have a weapon of mass destruction cooked up by a cult that has echoes of the Mansion family about it.

    Underground was his way of making sense of it. He interviewed survivors and protagonists telling the stories in their own words.

    It is antithesis of Tom Wolfe’s new journalism: Murakami manages to let the people speak for themselves. Murakami removes himself completely from the work, which is the antithesis of the personal nature in a novel. Instead you get uncoloured reportage. If Wolf did new journalism, Murakami has done ‘Muji journalism’. Simple unadorned content which lets the story be the story.

    What comes out of their stories in Underground a strength, modesty and stoicism that shines through the horror of the experience that the people went through. I was reminded of that oft quoted Japanese saying ‘fall down seven times, stand up eight’.

    I was told that it was a dark book that is heavy going, but I didn’t find this to be the case at all. These people and their response to the Tokyo underground gas attack are an example to us all confronted with sudden adversity.

    The Tokyo gas attack was a shocking event and both systems and processes broke down, but what came out also was the heroism of the people involved in dealing with the tragedy and their deeply ingrained ethical system. More details of Underground here. More Japan related content here.

    Picture courtesy of NeilsPhotography

  • Nation of Rebels Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter

    With Nation of Rebels, Heath and Potter set out to square the circle on how consumerism and counterculture aren’t mutually exclusive.  how the hippies of the 1960s and 1970s become the yuppies of the 1980s. They put together a skillful argument in the early part of the  book that counterculture is an extension of the bohemian artistic view of the world that has been around for centuries.

    In terms of class: the traditonal landed gentry whose riches are in heirlooms have been supplanted by the merchant classes and now with the knowledge economy there has been a rise of a creative class.

    Nation of Rebels

    Nation of Rebels take things further when they seek to disprove the fallacies that they see the counterculture has been built on. Many of their points are valid, however where it falls down is in its criticism is in its opposition to the ‘appropriate technology’ aspect of counterculture. This is where the Homebrew Computer Club came from, the community norms for successful web 2.0 pioneers like Flickr, the EFF, open web technologies and open source software. Their whole argument is that libertarian values on the web were responsible for the rise of spam. To me this was like saying that the laser printer and the laminating machine are responsible for underage drinking.

    The laser printer and the laminating machine can be used to make fake IDs, but they can also be used to make notices in community centres and legitimate IDs that help utility company personnel reassure vulnerable consumers that they are the real deal.

    Nation of Rebels is a fascinating well-researched read: its authors Heath and Potter are masters in the art of rhetoric, however I wouldn’t take everything at face value in the book. More book reviews here.

  • The Writing On The Wall China And The West In The 21st Century by Will Hutton

    Before we get into The Writing On The Wall I thought it would be best to talk about how I got into reading books like this. I didn’t start reading economics for fun until I read Will Hutton’s The State We’re In when I was in college. I was interested to find out what Hutton thought about China and the west in his new book The Writing On The Wall. China has a history of technological and legal progression going back three millenia and made an unprecedented move back to the forefront of the global economy.

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    The Writing On The Wall China And The West In The 21st Century by Will Hutton writes in a narrative style that would be familar to readers of The State We’re In. Hutton covers how the teachings of Confucius led to a ‘modern society’ in China when my ancestors were building Brú na Bóinne.

    How the western colonial powers (notably the UK, France, Germany and the US) managed to embarrass and humble the celestial kingdom? The hard choices which the communist party had to make and the hard road that the country has walked to gain its present status and the challenges that the party faces in maintaining an even keel.

    Whilst Hutton is critical of some Chinese measures, he points out were the west has made similar mistakes and the lessons learned from them. Some readers may feel mis-sold as Hutton discusses the global politics of energy and protectionism by the US. However the world is connected and I feel his discussion of the intertwined fates of the US and China is a valid one. More on China here.

  • Spook Country by William Gibson

    I read Gibson’s seminal cyberpunk works a decade ago and felt it was time to visit Gibson’s more recent work. I am not reading them in order, just as they come off the shelf. Spook Country is set in a world similar to the one that we know, and closer in time to now, than his sprawl trilogy books.

    Blue Ant

    The story  revolves around branding and features a future-gazing advertising agency called Blue Ant seeking to grasp the future. In it are cutting-edge artists utilising augmented reality and where 2.0 technologies to make ‘locative art’.

    Whilst it is implied in his earlier works globalisation and container shipping also play a major role in this one.

    Web of no web

    Gibson uses the plot of Spook Country to recant the virtual reality dream of the ‘matrix’ that he painted in his earlier books. This vision feels out of place despite inspiring other cyberpunk and science fiction writers from Neal Stephenson to Earnest Cline. Instead Gibson sigues augmented and virtual reality into the more prosaic web that we have today. The augmented reality of the Wii, Sony PlayStation’s eyetoy,  geocaching, Google Maps, QRcodes and iPhone applications like Carling’s virtual pint. This is what I like to call the web of no web because in essence, the world becomes ‘the matrix’.

    Spook Country has the brand awareness that is a signature of Brett Easton Ellis’ work (particularly American Psycho) and the storytelling of John LeCarre. Gibson pulls multiple strands together weaving the story tighter and tighter together as the thriller gains momentum. You can find more book reviews here.