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.

  • From satori to Silicon Valley by Theodore Roszak

    I have read a number of books on Silicon Valley, many of which allude to the impact of the beat generation and 1960s counterculture.  Many of which tie it into the rise of what we now know as Silicon Valley. Roszak’s From Satori to Silicon Valley is really an essay. In his essay is a deeply personal history of how the counterculture influenced Silicon Valley and then devolved into the yuppie culture of the 1980s.

    The essay was originally written for a lecture to be given at San Francisco State University. I was particularly struck by a piece at the beginning of the book:

    A few weeks before the lecture, a student in the Public Affairs Office at San Francisco State called me to arrange some campus publicity. He had a question from a student.

    “Where’s Satori?”

    “What?” I asked.

    “Your lecture is called ‘From Satori to Silicon Valley,’ ” he explained. “I know where Silicon Valley is. But where’s Satori?”

    “The Zen state of enlightenment … you never heard of that?”

    “Oh. I never took any courses in Oriental religion “

    I started to explain the term, spelling out its once obvious connection with the counter culture of the sixties.

    This exchange was had by Roszak in 1985. My own views were rather different. For me the ideas that fired the counterculture revolution had a vibrancy that excited me. Yes hippies were a cliche, but they left a lot of concepts behind.

    They had moved orientalism beyond interesting antiques to vibrant ideas. They had tried to marry libertarianism with utopianism that inspired early online culture. They had rooted down into the very nature of quality through metaphysics. This had inspired my wider view of things that gave this blog its name. In terms of eastern high and low brow culture and a holistic ‘renaissance man’ viewpoint.

    Yet in that conversation, Roszak highlights the huge gulf that lay between the counterculture that had fuelled so much of Silicon Valley up until then and the new generation. A 30-something Steve Jobs would have choked with incredulity at that conversation.

    Roszak’s work is credible because of his personal memories make it real for the essay reader. He was in the trenches shaping the brightest minds to find their way to Silicon Valley. This brings that transition into focus in a way that other authors such as John Markoff had been unable to do.

    Roszak’s writing isn’t as witty or snarky as Robert X Cringely’s Accidental Empires. From Satori to Silicon Valley doesn’t try to build a mythologise around the messiness of the counterculture movement.

    If you want to understand where technology is taking us (into a digital version of the robber baron gilded age) read From Satori To Silicon Valley. At 64 pages long and smaller than a typical paperback book it makes an easy read on the tube too.

  • The Three Tensions by Dodd and Favaro

    While reading The Three Tensions I was reminded of a plaque that I used to have. It was one of them demotivational poster designs.

    The Three Tensions

    When I was leaving a previous agency I was given the plaque as a leaving present. On the plaque is the message ‘If you can’t solve a problem, there is good money to be made in prolonging it‘.

    Consultants and management thinking yo-yo from one area to another. For instance, from the 1960s to the 1980s conglomerates were the fashionable way to go, for instance ITT, Xerox (who had an insurance business to balance their cash flow) and Coca-Cola who owned a film studio. Now there is a focus on the companies core competences, in fact organisations often outsource so much of their infrastructure that they scarcely have any physical existence.

    An extreme example of this was Enron, who was advised by management consultants to move away from being a natural resources infrastructure company to a more asset light structure. Throw in some corruption and the rest is history.

    Dominic Dodd and Ken Favaro in their book The Three Tensions aim for a more balanced approach to moving a business forward. The three tensions of the title are:

    • Profitablity vs. growth
    • Short term vs. long term
    • Whole vs. parts

    The authors relied on long term research of a number of companies. The balance that the book advises businesses to obtain is not easy. The book also makes it easier to diagnose the faults within an organisation. More on the book here. More business related posts here.

  • Here comes everybody by Clay Shirky

    Here Comes Everybody – The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky is the book of the moment.

    V for site safety

    It is an on-trend now in 2008 as Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point had been previously. Shirky writes a book about the way that productive, collaborative groups form–groups that are larger and more distributed than at any other time: the places where our social networks and technological networks overlap.

    Shirky’s prose provides some great case studies that I am likely to turn into slides when I present to teams and clients. It provides important food for thought particularly for those involved in reputation management and crisis communications programmes. Shirky writes in an accessible easy-to-read way that moves his book beyond an audience of web-centric wonks like me to the ‘everybody’ of the book title.

    What the book lacks is quantitative data to support the qualitative anecdotal research that Shirky had pulled together. We don’t know how efficient and effective these techniques actually are. They can’t be benchmarked against other tactics. My other concern is that people will think that social media is excessively easy to do. It isn’t; for every successful campaign there are countless numbers of campaigns that don’t get the attention they deserve – the Boycott Strada and Cafe Rouge Facebook group being a case in point.

    Here comes everybody is likely to be on your reading list, simply because it will be extensively referenced at least in the near future. More book reviews here.

  • Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey

    I got an uncorrected proof of Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey to review as part of the Amazon Vine programme, so here goes.

    Bright Shiny Morning

    The book documents the lives of Los Angelenos and history of Los Angeles in a series of vignettes that happen in parallel. Without giving plot spoilers away the various stories told include an alcoholic vagrant trying to find redemption, a hedonistic film star, a Mexican-American domestic worker with self-image issues and the employer from hell and a pair of runaways from the Midwest trying to get by. Their lives are told in a empathetic way that keeps you gripped.

    The star of the book in its horror and glory is the city of Los Angeles itself from its grime and traffic to the distinctive character and history of its neighbourhoods.

    The book is ideal for commutes and tube journeys because of the short nature of the vignettes and the way Frey ends each section with enough tension to make you want to reach the next episode (rather like the old Buster Crabb performances as Flash Gordon in the 1930s film serial of the same name).

    One unusual design touch the spine of the books dust jacket dispensed with the book title and author, instead just carrying the URI to the authors website.

    Bright Shiny Morning

    I don’t know if this will make it on to the spine of the retail version as it could mess up the way retailers like Waterstones and Borders would display the book. More book reviews here.

  • Microtrends:The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes by Mark Penn and E. Kinney Zalesne

    Microtrends is one of them must-read books if you want to recognise where your peers get some of their slideware and buzzwords from. Author Mark Penn has a rich pedigree with this, having been the political wonk who was partly responsible for popularising the ‘soccer mom‘ phrase during the late 1990s; this was to US politics what ‘white van man‘ was in the UK in terms of zeitgeist.

    So with a bit of reluctance I gave it a read. I was not looking forward to reading what I assumed would be a book that tries to do for market research what Stephen Levitt’s Freakonomics did for the dismal science and obsesses about US demographics, I mean part of my job is explaining to my colleagues eight time zones away in Portland and Seattle how different and diverse Europe is, rather than a homogenous mass like the congealed contents of a used fondue set.

    Penn to his credit make at least some of his observed groups relevant to an international audience by discussing implications for international audiences.

    The value of Penn’s book however is not in the segments it digs up, but in the way that it allows the reader (even for a short while) to see the world through different peoples eyes.  Having learned the lesson the hard way at Yahoo!, I try to see beyond my own early adopter web 2.0 otaku nerd world view and think about the man in the street. Penn’s book is a useful device to do this.

    Would I use it as a way to find niches to target in client campaigns? Probably not, as soon as the niches were committed to paper in Microtrends they were probably running out of date as the zeitgeist is a fickle and illusive beast.  If you want to read a copy, grab it whilst its hot or not at all. More book reviews here.