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.

  • The Strength of the Wolf

    I chose The Strength of the Wolf  by Douglas Valentine as I needed a good paperback to read as I travelled back to Liverpool. It seemed strangely appropriate that I read a book about narcotics travelling there; given that Liverpool’s recent history and cultural renaissance has been intertwined with its association as the UK’s narcotic equivalent of the Square Mile. Characters like Curtis Warren as it’s big swinging dicks as Liars Poker author Michael Lewis would have called them.

    The premise of The Strength of the Wolf by Douglas Valentine is that the US and other foreign governments have had their fingers in the drug trafficking pie for hundreds of years.

    Indeed Great Britain fought two wars over the opium trade. However, this is thought to be history.

    The US as the 20th century empire ‘ruler’ is alleged to have carried on the practice supporting Chinese nationalists running heroin through the golden triangle, right-wing military figures in South America, friendly factions in the Middle East to smuggle opium to the French Connection and allowing the mafia a degree of freedom in return for using their supply.

    Valentine also describes how drugs were used as a way of controlling minorities and how politically-motivated drugs laws fanned demand in the US rather than choking it off.

    These allegations are made as Valentine tells the story of the FBN (the federal bureau of narcotics), its successes, it’s failures and its politics. How officers trod the line between doing their job, whilst not upsetting the establishment players who most benefited from the drug trade that they combated.

    The book covers the inner real politik that tore the FBN apart and the global narcotics market as it evolved from the early 20th century.

    Valentine eventually decides to pursue so many leads from Jack Ruby’s involvement with drugs, the CIA and narcotics business associates link with the Kennedy assassination (which sounds only slightly more credible than the Warren Commission finding that Oswald did it on his own with an Italian carbine), DeGaulle’s link with Corsican criminals to fund French intelligence work and Mossad’s alleged involvement with money launderers and Lebanese narco power-brokers.

    At times these allegations and avenues come out like a stream of consciousness and the thread of the plot leaps around like an epileptic break dancer. Whilst Valentine has obviously done a very thorough and comprehensive job in researching the book, it seems that he had too much material to work with in too little time.

    The book becomes hard to follow because of the huge amount of information and cross-linkages that it tries to convey and not exactly ideal reading material for travelling.

    I stuck with the book, not because of the drugs and intelligence drama, but the more human tale of how the agents careers were created and trashed like failed drafts being thrown in the paper basket. The book on balance, deserves the plaudits that have been heaped upon it, but who will recognise the achievements of the reader who pushes through to the end? More book reviews can be found here.

  • American Pastoral

    While reading American Pastoral I was reminded of when I was young I was told the tale of an old Chinese farmer. The farmer who had a son and some fine horses. The neighbours thought that he was lucky.

    One day the son was out riding one of his family’s horses, he was thrown and broke his leg. The villagers thought that it was bad luck, further bad luck was considered to fall on him when the kingdom went to war and the farmer had his horses taken by the army.

    The war went badly and the army rounded up the sons of the villagers, but the farmers son with a broken leg was left behind.The villagers thought that the farmer was unlucky because their sons were sure to bring home booty from the battle.

    When their sons didn’t return, they thought that the farmer was lucky.

    This juxtaposition of luck or fate is captured in American Pastoral by US author Philip Roth. Roth tells the story of an All-American success story, initially through the eyes of a high school reunion and then lifts the lid on all the elements that were tearing him apart from the inside. A domestic drama featuring a mentally unstable spouse and a counter-culture terrorist daughter plays out against a backdrop of globalisation shaping the US manufacturing sector, civil rights and social unrest during the latter days of the Vietnam war.The main protagonists life comes apart at the seams whilst seemingly been fine.

    Roth has written a melancholy story which is strangely compelling in a similar way to Requiem for a Dream. It is an easy read that I would recommend. More book reviews here.

  • Cosa Nostra and other things

    I finished a book by Cosa Nostra – A history of the Sicilian mafia written by John Dickie. Dickie’s work demystified the glamour and media perpetuated stereotypes of the mafia. They were never men of honour. In a surprising degree of personal honesty unusual in these type of books, Dickie is forthcoming about the elements that he doesn’t know or understand about the Cosa Nostra. Usually loose ends are glossed over or used to take the material in another direction – a la many conspiracy theorists.

    Dickie’s account leaves the alone the American cousins of the Sicilian mafia unless they impinge on the Italian story. The mafia story weaves a complex pattern around modern Italian history. More book reviews here.

    I also got to see Clerks II and The Departed. I love Clerks and I really liked what Kevin Smith did with the follow-on film, neatly answering the question how do you top a film that captures the existentialist navel gazing of generation x slackers?

    I won’t spoil the plot, but if you haven’t seen it you can look forward to some classic Jay moments, a boom box to die for, drama worthy of Days of Our Lives and inter-species erotica.

    The Departed is an American interpretation of Hong Kong classic thriller Infernal Affairs. Leonardo DeCaprio plays an undercover police man coming apart at the edges and Matt Damon is the mole inside the police department.

    The film is a good movie in its own right, but lacks of the polish of the performances in the original.

  • The Change Function by Pip Coburn

    Thinking about The Change Function as a book reminded me as an agency person, it is not enough only be a good, but to understand something about your clients. Are they a winner or a flamer?If they are a flamer, you want your cash up front and start contingency planning for how you replace them with another piece of business.

    If they are a winner, then you can be more flexible and possibly take a bath if they are going to be a flagship brand on your client list.

    What is the compelling reason to purchase their product or service.

    Rule one: Clients are generally too close to their products, consumers will work out how they become relevant to their own lives or not

    Rule two: The greatest lie after ‘I love you’ and ‘I can guarantee you coverage in the Financial Times’ is ‘Our product is unique’. If the problem can be solved another way, it means that the product is not unique because the customer has a substitute choice. Believe: flickr was not unique, it was an innovative way at looking at the same problem. The iPod was not unique, Compaq made the first hard drive-based MP3 player back in the late 90s and the Mac wasn’t unique because it got the queues from Doug Engelbart and Xerox PARC.

    The Change Function by Pip Coburn makes an interesting read as it shows by example why some technologies take off, while others flame out.

    What’s the crisis the product or services solves? People will generally only adopt the new, new thing if there is a compelling reason for them.

    Is the crisis one for real-world people, or just for rich people (who fly business class three days in every week and think that having a social life is messaging fellow college alumni on their Blackberry once every six weeks)?

    How high is the total perceived pain of adoption?

    Is your client user-centred: do they use language that shows they look at things from the users point of view?

    Do they have an iterative development cycle? (Do they roll out improvements on a regular basis, based on user feedback and their technological roadmap rather than blockbuster updates.)

    Pip Coburn elegantly codifies common sense; its the stuff you know instinctively, like the smartphone that you only use voice and texting on and yet still listen to music on your iPod, or the latest cool web 2.0 service that you registered for but then never seem to go back to. More book reviews can be found here.

  • Unstuck

    Quick reviews of Unstuck and 11 1/2 Ideas that work.

    I had been meaning to get around to reading this book for a good while. Unstuck is a trouble-shooting guide for situations when you can’t think your way out of a problem or are suffering from inertia. The book was based on a set of flash cards developed by the authors as part of an MBA module that they taught at Harvard.It is quite easy to imagine it as a big decision tree or one of them Dungeons and Dragons books that the geekiest kids at school used to read all the time as you are guided from problem recognition and diagnosis through to resolving the problem in a creative manner.

    The best thing of all, unlike technical support helplines and customer service functions you are not kept on hold for an hour because they are swamped with other callers. Definitely one to keep in the desk drawer.

    11 1/2 Weird Ideas That Work was a book that I read on the way back from Dresden. It is a thinkpiece for managers on how they can further develop innovation within an organisation that is not too corporate in its culture by bringing in disruptive influences and processes – a sort of ‘grain of sand’ in your shoe effect. Sutton is very particular about laying out the parameters of what kind of organisation his techniques will or won’t work for. He cites extensively examples from organisations like design and user experience company IDEO through to small business units in large corporates like phone-tapping technology company Hewlett-Packard.

    Whilst the book makes for interesting reading, applying its ideas successfully may be much harder to do .