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.

  • Beyond The Crash by Gordon Brown

    On leaving office, Gordon Brown immediately spent a lot of time hammering out a book Beyond The Crash. Unlike Peter Mandelson this wasn’t the Westminster equivalent of a sordid kiss-and-tell exposé or a Tony Blair-esque sales brochure to secure speaking engagements. Instead Brown set out to do what he does best, putting on page deep thought and analysis about the knotty problem of global finances. He did an excellent job of marshaling ideas and sources in the book. His grasp on Asian economics and China in particular is very good. There is a whole section on the Asian crisis of 1998 which is well worth reading on its own.

    In this respect, the Beyond The Crash is a solid piece of work, Brown isn’t as compelling a writer as other economic thinkers that the Labour party has looked to like Will Hutton; but he does a good job at making his ideas and concepts understandable to the average reader.

    Where things go wrong with the book is where Brown tries to humanise his writing. His comments of praise for colleagues and other politicians feels wooden, as if it was written into his book as a postscript. And it is because of this that we see a glimpse of Brown the politician; the polar opposite of his predecessor Tony Blair. Someone who thought at great depth and knew what to do but didn’t have the surface finish.

    If you are prepared to persevere with the book, it is a good read, and is currently for sale in Amazon Marketplace at a massive discount to the cover price. More book reviews here.

  • Idea Man by Paul Allen

    Self-described ‘Idea Man‘ Paul Allen was the technical foil to Bill Gates’ when he founded Microsoft. Much of the Microsoft story is the story of Bill Gates – partly due to the way the company’s PR machine built Gates up as a software superman. The wheels came off the wagon with the Judge Jackson trial video testimonial. Allen dropped out of the story despite being instrumental in many of the key early products; instead he became known as a local billionaire who liked to jam with rock star friends and owned some local sports teams. Now he is trying to reinsert himself carefully in Microsoft’s story with Idea Man.

    Gates is now re-inventing himself has a modern-day Rockerfeller through charitable donations, trying to redefine his place in history as a convicted monopolist. With this change, Allen becomes even less significant. A cynical person may describe this book as Paul Allen’s attempt to write himself back into history, but without the Gates stigma. This view was reinforced by the books launch occurring round about the same time that Allen took legal action against many of the most successful technology companies for alleged patent violations.

    A student of Microsoft’s history would recognised the flawed human portrait of Bill Gates who is portrayed  as argumentative, ruthless, driven determined and petty. So in many respects Allen doesn’t add much to the Gates canon; Allen acts as an apologist for Gates in many respects being exceptionally tolerant of his faults; a co-founder equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome. Ballmer comes across as being a more decent human being, yet Allen’s accurate but unnecessary visceration of Microsoft’s performance feels as if it is aimed more towards liquidating Ballmer’s historic legacy.

    What I didn’t get from the book was the sense of Allen the person, what is he really like? What drives him? What are his demons? In this respect, Allen is absent from his own memoirs and the book comes across as two-dimensional because of it.

    There are sections on his relationships with famous musicians and sportstars, but it didn’t mean that much to me so I can’t comment beyond saying  that I didn’t find it that engaging.

    If you are going to read any book that touches on Microsoft and the PC era; I would instead recommend Robert X. Cringely’s Accidental Empires or Jennifer Edstrom (daughter of Waggener Edstrom’s Pam Edstrom) and Martin Eller’s Barbarians Led By Bill Gates.

  • The Dentsu Way by Sugiyama

    The Dentsu Way highlights a very integrated approach to marketing communications. When I first started off in public relations Japan was described as a ‘backward’ market. This was supposed to be because PR wasn’t highly valued and Japanese advertising agencies like Dentsu would run an end-game around PR agencies. There wasn’t a specialism in the industry to the same extent as the US or EU. Of course, the reality was rather more complex. In the same way that the division of media and creative adversely affected the advertising industry, so has the division of earned and paid media. One agency, one integrated strategy has a better chance of delivering results.

    Of course, whilst the observations were true the facts drawn from them weren’t. Dentsu is one of the world’s biggest marketing communications groups not because it is backwards. The company has raised its profile in London due to the stand out work of Dentsu London over the past 12 months or so.

    Dentsu’s cross-communication offering looks remarkably prescient in many respects: insight-based planning is used to drive all activity. It is also interesting how closely psychology is linked to public relations campaigns looking to achieve product preference through attitudinal change. Whilst Bernays talked about this in his original work in the public relations field. The reality is that its used surprisingly little.

    For example a large PR agency pitching a vertical dinosaur-shaped lawn to be displayed in the middle of the Broadgate centre. The rationale was ‘its about plants’. This was while I was working inhouse on an FMCG relaunch, and the memory will forever stay with me.

    The Dentsu Way explains their organisation and an approach in an exhaustive manner and manages to quote Bruce Lee along the way with regards their approach to campaign planning. The book is easy to read and informative with great case studies from the Japanese market. I liked the book that I included it on bookshelf page of recommendations.

  • What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

    What Technology Wants is written by Kevin Kelly. If anyone deserves the term digerati its Kevin Kelly. Kelly worked on the Whole Earth Catalog, a hippy guide to useful stuff, he was involved in The WELL and was a founder of Wired magazine.

    What Technology Wants follows on from previous works that Kelly had written. Out of Control looked at how software created a parallel infrastructure to the real world. At the time ‘software agents’ were a thing and artificial intelligence was here but unevenly distributed. Out of Control was written in 1992, yet forecast ideas like ‘digital twins’ – software simulations that are currently in vogue.

    His book New Rules for the New Economy looked at the economic principles that technology and and web directly impacted. This seemed to build on work done to also write the Encyclopedia of the New Economy, which was published as a three part series in Wired magazine, the same year.

    So it seems appropriate that Kelly took a long term viewpoint and wrote What Technology Wants as a historical, economic and philosophical analysis of technological progress.

    Kelly puts forth the case that technological momentum, what he calls the technium has a momentum of its own and that it is inevitable. The idea that every innovation has its time. This is why innovation can seem lumpy and why innovations like television and the light bulb can claim to have dozens of inventors.

    The technium seems to build momentum with each key development put in place across fields science, technology and information theory.

    Short of societal collapse, it is not something that can be fought or turned back but can be managed to get the best from it. It also isn’t the kind of starry-eyed futurism that the likes of George Gilder had turned out in his book Telecosm. Kelly appreciates the double edged sword that technology represents.

    This then poses questions around a number of areas from economics to ecology.  I would expect this book to be dinner party fodder as a kind of thinking man’s Malcolm Gladwell. More book reviews here.

  • Zero History by William Gibson

    Zero History is an ideal book If you enjoyed William Gibson’s previous two works Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. Like the previous two books it dwells in the now, which is appropriate given Gibson’s oft quoted koan:

    ‘The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed’.

    I have written the review in terms of general themes so that I don’t put in any plot spoilers.

    It brings many of the major protagonists from the previous books in the Pattern Recognition series back and ties the plot together quite neatly. There are two ways to look at Zero History, in terms of chronology it arrives at the end of a logical order of Pattern Recognition and Spook Country; but in terms of its themes Zero History sits between Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. Like Pattern Recognition it questions the nature of brands, design and art. It borrows elements of locative art from Spook Country and throws private military companies and the military industrial complex into the mix.

    Marketing is portrayed as amoral, understanding the price of everything, yet having the value of nothing outside its grasp. The discussion of brands in Zero History is less about a well-designed logo and more about the brand authenticity – the way it matches the product – how much truth from it is designed into the product.

    There is also a sense that the quality of manufactured goods is in decline and creatives are trying to recapture this quality by going vintage and re-manufacturing old products. This creative effort is then concealed from marketers who would despoil it. Gibson forces the reader to think about how they relate to the brands they like and the marketing that they see around them, he also uses the story to address the rise of the corporation as a military entity a la AEGIS, Xe or Halliburton. More book reviews can be found here.