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.

  • Ireland by Frank Delaney

    Frank Delaney’s Ireland was one of the most enjoyable books that I have read in a long time. The book has been compared to James Michener‘s books and Alex Haley’s Roots – fiction based on history with more elemental truths in it than most non-fiction.

    The book is complex and multi-layered, but easy-to-read. The story focuses on a young boy in a middle class household in rural Ireland during the 1950s and how his imagination and interest in the country’s myth and history is fired by a traditional storyteller. His search for the storyteller unravels some of the elements of his own family story which people have sheltered from him.

    The book accurately reflects the social environment of my parents Ireland. A rural-based community bound by morality, coming to terms with its fractured identity post-independence and oppressed by its own family secrets. It highlights the reasons why I used to get chastised as a child when I was willful or bold (and I wasn’t actually that bad) with ‘you’ll disgrace us’ or ‘you’ll disgrace the family name’.

    The clash with modernity lived on in the small farms that I grew up on for much of my childhood. Electricity made it to my uncle’s farm when I was a toddler and I can remember helping to foot the turf, drinking stewed tea and red lemonade along with a packed lunch as we worked in the bog, filling the high sided cart with sods of turf to be dragged home by a donkey and stored in a shed down the yard.

    I was in primary school before they moved away the traditional cocks of hay to bales and sudden bounty of shiny nylon twine that tied the bales was a wonder material that held fittings, extended electric fences and acted as a temporary way of securing a gate to a post. The excitement of making silage with all the heavy machinery running around the place compensated for the eventual reduction in the nylon twine supply.

    My only criticism is that the book portrays this rural life in a rosy way like the Famous Five books of Enid Blyton and her ‘scones and lashings and lashings of ginger beer’. Whilst the upside of a closely knit community would have been more a sociable people that cars, a faster pace of life and commuting no longer facilitate. Life is hard and it requires commitment to get up and ‘fodder’ animals in the early hours of a winters morning, clear out stables, dig out potatoes out of a storage heap that’s frozen over, pull in hay in the baking sun, dig a turf bank or repair ditches.<

    The Raleigh bicycle with one gear and a heavy frame that you could get in any colour so long as it was black was the standard mode of transport. They lasted forever, it would be common to see these rust covered scrap heaps parked up and then the owners come along jump and go. This was also the only way to get your shopping (or messages as it would be called). It had levers rather than brake cables with thick chromed steel rods and linkages running to both the front and the rear brake pads. That may mean a round trip of 14 – 20 miles with your shopping on a bike.

    The only concession to modernity would be a seat protector – there would be a plastic fitted shower cap put on over the leather coil sprung seat so that when the owner came out to ride the bicycle away he would not have the discomfort of a wet bum. More book reviews can be found here.

  • How We Got Here

    Over at R/C Towers we have been a bit quiet being all bookish, reading Al Qaeda by Jason Burke, When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein and a preview PDF of Andy Kessler’s forthcoming book How We Got Here.

    Through a former work colleague of mine, I managed to get an invitation to a lecture run by The Policy Exchange, a UK think-tank. The lecture was given by Jason Burke on the subject of Islamic terrorism. I found the lecture enlightening as it highlighted the fragmented, loosely connected, fluid nature of Islamic extremism. The credibility of Mr Burke’s lecture was heightened by the amount of ‘FCO and Home Office’ staffers in attendance. Burke’s book expands on the themes of his lecture and goes into much more detail. He writes in a clear and concise style that gets a lot of information over very quickly. One of the big takeouts is the long term difficulty in achieving victory in the war on terror by hard measures alone.

    The collapse of Long-Term Capital Management was something I was only vaguely aware of, as I was too focused on keeping up with the latest technology news starting my PR career representing TMT clients. When Genius Failed documents how arrogance, dogma and market conditions almost tore apart the world’s stock markets. It is a very easy read and tells the story of the hard and soft issues behind the collapse. The collapse affected some of the biggest names in Wall Street economics including Robert Merton and Myron Scholes, both of whom were responsible for the Black-Scholes model used by investors to calculate the ‘true value’ of a share or other financial instrument.

    (In a six-degrees of separation sort of way, one of my friends had met Myron Scholes when they went for an interview at Salomon Bros many years ago. The meeting went badly, Scholes was described to me as very arrogant and opinionated. Though in When Genius Fails he comes across as one of the more human characters.)

    Finally, How We Got Here tells the story of how the technology sector and the market economy got were it went today. Written by financier, perfect-market advocate and writer Andy Kessler, he traces the technology sector from the steam engine, patents from when they were awarded by royal warrant and stocks and shares from the privateering ways of Sir Francis Drake. Whilst you may not agree with Kessler’s views on economics (he famously riled Wired magazines readership with an op-ed advocating getting rid of the US Postal Service), he writes in an intelligent, accessible and humorous fashion. I would go as far as to put his forthcoming book as essential reading for anybody looking to work with modern technology companies alongside Accidental Empires by Robert X Cringely and Steven Levy’s Hackers.

  • America’s Secret War

    I recently finished reading America’s Secret War: inside the hidden worldwide struggle between the United States and its enemies, George Friedman’s book on the war on terror as George Bush calls the fight against Al Qaeda. America’s Secret War is interesting for a number of reasons. It discusses the war in a dispassionate manner, it slices rather more neatly than the media has ever been able to splitting the facts and propaganda from each other. Most importantly, in my mind it highlights a war that was not about oil or weapons of mass destruction, but a very expensive ‘Kirby Cleaner’ pitch. Years ago in an effort to make money, I considered selling these overpriced vacuum cleaners (even more overpriced than a Dyson). Anyway a key part of the sales person from Kirby is when they do a demonstration with a machine and show you what it is capable of (think HSN or QVC-type demos in your own living room).

    According to Friedman, the invasion of Iraq was part of an effort by the Americans to persuade the Saudi’s to get serious on terrorism. A demonstration of regime change through ‘shock and awe’ to show what happens to rogue regimes.

    George Friedman is a respected and very credible geopolitical pundit and heads up Stratfor.

    Who is Stratfor?

    Stratfor is an organisation which provides analysis of global and regional political and socio-economic issues to companies, organisations and government agencies. It has a client base made up of a wide range of blue-chip companies including the usual suspects in the energy sector, defence contractors, management consultancies and the media.

  • The Layer Cake by JJ Connolly

    The Layer Cake is a hard bitten crime novel of 90’s underworld London that the movie was based on. However the book is worth reading because the plot is similar but different to the film.

    I won’t go into too much depth because that would spoil it for you, but suffice to say its a great read. The book doesn’t have the slick quality of the film, primarily because it has more depth.

    From the thought that has gone into it, one may wonder as to how J.J. Connolly got his knowledge. Having worked and lived in clubland during the late 1980s and early 1990s the type of characters Connolly describes brought me right back to my early and mid twenties.

    The Layer Cake mixing the world of private military contractors and criminal endeavour reminded me of a former boss who had an address book. The address book was alleged to be full of ‘good lads’ who could solve problems ‘at home or abroad’. He was anything but the action man himself, being obsessed with his Hugo Boss suits at the time. He’d apparently been employed because of his work for a major name in the road construction industry, before I’d worked for him.

    Great fiction like other forms of art has an intrinsic truth hidden inside that otherwise wouldn’t be able to be told.

    Get out and buy the book; watching the film before the book doesn’t affect your enjoyment of it. More book reviews here.

    The Layer Cake

  • Running Money by Andy Kessler

    Andy Kessler’s Running Money, Hedge Fund Honchos, Monster Markets And My Hunt For The Big Score is a well written set of memoirs from a technology fund manager. Together with his partner-in-crime Fred Kittler, Kessler managed to survive the highs and lows of the technology industry in the late 1990’s, he tells the story in a very articulate way that is as powerful as Robert X Cringely’s book Accidential Empires. The expansion of the tech sector is told using the industrial revolution as an analogy.

    One of the first things portrayed in Running Money (and other books) is that the tech sector actually revolves around a relatively small group of people. In addition to writing his memoirs Kessler tries to make sense of it all and proves very illuminating to readers. In this respect it is far better than The New New Thing by Michael Lewis.

    Post-industrial, IP-driven economy

    The book looks beyond the technology sector to put a positive spin on the huge US deficit. Running Money explains that America is now an IP economy and assumes that the developing world will follow on behind as a wave sweeps across national borders moving the economic status through hunter gatherer, agriculture/extractive, industrial, service and intellectual property economies. In some respects the US with its IP economy is following Europe; what is the Swiss banking system, LVMH’s luxury brands and the continents big pharmaceutical firms if not part of an IP ecosystem?

    Conclusion

    I would recommend anybody to read Kessler’s book. I thought I would end however on some of the differences in viewpoint I have with his writing. Where some of Kessler’s writing differs from my own perspective is when he outlines his analysis of the current state of affairs and some of his future vision:

    • Kessler considers markets to be a perfect instrument in the long term; which I am not convinced about at all. Think the great depression, the S&L debacle of the 1980s for instance, markets can break and require occasional interference
    • The neat model of China being an industrial workshop for US intellectual property is simplistic. China is fast moving into building its own brands from mobile handsets to luxury watches (the first Chinese astronaut went into space with a relative expensive Chinese brand of chronograph. China and India has a huge film industry. It isn’t only China either, Japan is now a source of numerous fashion trends, hot movies in Korea have their scripts optioned by Hollywood, some of the best advertising creative teams come from South America and India)
    • Kessler talks about the entertainment industry as being part of this US IP powerhouse but this fails to see the many flaws and mismanagment in the music, media and film industries that make Worldcom seem well managed. The RIAA and MPAA have hid behind piracy to hide a deeper malaise highlighted in Michael Wolf’s Autumn of the Moguls
    • Kessler doesn’t talk about what the inevitable post-intellectual property economy looks like

    More book reviews here.