Tag: bookreviews

The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game (review: 4/5)

~ Mark ~ 2 Comments

I have never cared that much about football. Playing can be a blast, but I never watch it and I have only a vague sense of when the college & pro seasons begin. So, I was surprised that I enjoyed this book so much. The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game has a couple of stories going on. One, it’s about the evolution of football. And it’s also about race and class in America.
Michael Lewis starts with the evolution of the NFL strategy and the market for players. The NFL has roots as a rushing game, but later changes in official rules and informal bias led to the rise of passing and the notable West Coast offense. The new passing offense of the NFL befuddled some observers—quarterbacks thought to be below-average were able to perform well beyond expectations. And great quarterbacks, even better. It was the system, with all the right parts in place, that made it all work.

With passing as the preeminent strategy, you need premium quarterbacks. And with high-value quarterbacks, the opposition fields players (e.g. Lawrence Taylor) who want to destroy those quarterbacks. Which means that the formerly hum-drum role of left tackle becomes essential, as the protector of the quarterback’s blind side. And the demand in the NFL trickles down through college and into the high school level.

Enter Michael Oher, one of the top left tackle prospects in years. Explosive, nimble, flexible. Oh, and also 6’6″ and 322lbs. But he could have been stereotypical fall-out of inner city neglect. He was one of 13 kids with no father raised by a junkie mother in a blighted, predominantly black area of Memphis. Not good, all too common. But, through happenstance he got connected with a white family with money, social connections, high expectations, and a deep, abiding love—a social version of the West Coast offense. A potential statistic becomes a potential star.

The Book on the Bookshelf (review: 4/5)

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

The Book on the Bookshelf is a book about books… and shelving. If that doesn’t catch your attention, then there’s no hope. I’ve lost you already.
It’s a study of part of our relationship with books, the ways we created, studied, shared, and stored them. Henry Petroski touches on developments in bookbinding, the evolution of outward-facing spines, and the history chained books, among other things.

I love the research that Petroski did. In many of the chapters scrutinizes old photographs, architecture, and especially the illustrations that can be found in old books—Renaissance scholars in their studies, Medieval monks in their libraries, etc.. How big are the books? How are they bound? How are they physically organized? How do they lay? A book is both a container of information and itself a piece of historical evidence. Pretty cool.

Small is the New Big: and 183 Other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas (review: 3.5/5)

~ Mark ~ 1 Comment

I love the jacket design Small is the New Big. Really, how could you not pick it up? And luckily, the contents of Seth Godin’s collection don’t disappoint too much.
This is one of those books I like to call “toilet books”–a collection of short, snappy sparks to get you thinking about how to be better. Sort of a daily devotional for marketing and entrepreneurial nerds. It’s hard to summarize because he zips (or is that zooms?) from topic to topic, but you’ll find that Godin is obsessed with: freebies, lagniappe, surprises; JetBlue; change; agility; remarkableness; customer advocacy; etc. And he’s similarly frustrated with: protocol, American Airlines, stagnation, old-school advertising, risk aversion. Worship is reserved for the relentlessly focused who are doing special work on their own terms. Cool. It’s a nice little anthology, Godin has some great ideas and thought experiments, and I had some truly ‘eureka’ moments. But is it remarkable? It’s worth a glance or two.

The 9/11 Report: A Graphical Adaptation (review: 2/5)

~ Mark ~ 2 Comments

At the least, I can say that I’m now more interested in the original 9/11 Report than I was before. I really wanted this one to be good; it was just frustrating.
Jacobson and Col??n got off to such a good start with a slick 10 page fold-out timeline that tracks the four flights concurrently. It was a truly powerful experience to juxtapose the events of my own morning with what happened in the air. But it all went down from there. The illustration was disappointingly inconsistent, mixing some really clever, accurately rendered scenes next to some that are just a little sloppy. I’m not sure if scattershot, somewhat arbitrary imagery is due to the nature of the original Report. The lettering and narrative boxes really killed me, though. The box geography was awkward, so I ended up stumbling around the page. Out of hundreds of comics I’ve consumed, I’ve never had so much trouble doing the basic task of reading.

Regarding the actual Report material, it’s not so bad. For someone like me, who generally steers clear of popular politics, it’s a nice intro to the history, who is who among the terrorists, and who is who among the white men in suits. Here’s my #1 piece of loveably laughable advice the Commission offers: “It is crucial to offer a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination.”1 Oh, I really wanted this to be good.

Some other links for your curiosity… here’s a good review over at Salon, an NPR interview with Jacobson and Col??n, and Slate offers an excerpted version online & an interview as well.

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1*ahem* Some other important thoughts on bureaucracy…

The Law (review: 5/5)

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

Frederic Bastiat was an economist and writer in France in the early 1800s. His short book/ long essay The Law is one of the best pieces of political science writing I’ve read in a while. I loved this book. The Law is about the purpose and place of law in society, and Bastiat makes his case so clearly it brings me to tears.
One of the sections I particularly enjoyed was his critiques of other well-known French political theorists like Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Condillac. He examines the pessimistic worldview that informs their visions of society, in the end saying,

Oh, sublime writers! Please remember sometimes that this clay, this sand, and this manure which you so arbitrarily dispose of, are men! They are your equals! They are intelligent and free human beings like yourselves! As you have, they too have received from God the faculty to observe, to plan ahead, to think, and to judge for themselves!

I also thought Bastiat’s critical look at classical education to be pretty perceptive. The case he makes is this: that classical education necessarily focuses on ancient thought, and that “antiquity presents everywhere ‚Äî in Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome ‚Äî the spectacle of a few men molding mankind according to their whims, thanks to the prestige of force and of fraud”. Learning about these ancient societies is not a problem per se. The problem arises when thinkers and teachers “offered them for the admiration and imitation of future generations… They took for granted the grandeur, dignity, morality, and happiness of the artificial societies of the ancient world.”

Some other great moments: the tired, dangerous notion of the “great man”; that “a science of economics must be developed before a science of politics can be logically formulated”; and some relevant, challenging words in light of our misadventures in Iraq and elsewhere:

I defy anyone to say how even the thought of revolution, of insurrection, of the slightest uprising could arise against a government whose organized force was confined only to suppressing injustice.

Read this book.

The Tipping Point (review: 2/5)

~ Mark ~ 2 Comments

I’d seen this book pop so often recently I figured it was some sort of sign. I have to say, The Tipping Point was about as disappointing as Malcolm Gladwell‘s more recent book, Blink. Which doesn’t necessarily mean it was bad, just disappointing.
The topic is the “tipping point,” that mysterious fulcrum where obscure flips to famous, niche products turn to commodities, where just a nudge can cause dramatic changes.

What I was really interested in was the tipping point itself. I wanted Gladwell to really dig in to that moment, that place of change–what I actually read was mostly about popularity and influence in general. I think the book suffers from too few examples explored too deeply–e.g., 40 pages on strategies for children’s television production. Perhaps more disappointing is that, like Blink, this is something of a “feel-good” book, even though it still feels journalistic. I didn’t perceive much passion or much challenge. The book ended up feeling less like an well-constructed argument than a guided tour.

On the upside, I can appreciate that Gladwell is perceptive enough to come up with this idea, to identify some tipping influences, and show how this arises in everyday life. As in Blink, he does a great job of digging up those obscure little psychology and sociology studies and expanding on them, not to mention some great interviews. Like always, Gladwell’s writing is very accessible, and it only takes a couple hours to breeze through. Take it or leave it.

The Botany of Desire (review: 3.5/5)

~ Mark ~ 4 Comments

This Sunday I read Michael Pollan’s book, The Botany of Desire. The book is a natural history of man and four plants: the apple, the tulip, cannabis, and the potato. Now that I think of it, this might be the only life-science book I’ve ever for recreation, but there are certainly worse places to begin.
Michael Pollan is not only a writer, but a gardener. Throughout the four sections he draws on history, biography, genetics, economics, biotechnology, and culture at large in a delightfully consilient manner. The high botanical drama of man’s Apollonian quest for order versus his yielding to Dionysian revelry is interwoven with Pollan’s own personal experience.

While it is not a dedicated study of eco-issues, the work is nicely book-ended with thoughts on the man-environment interaction–the plants we domesticate, and the ways we are subtly domesticated in turn. I particularly like the discussion of “wildness” and “wilderness,” and some provoking thoughts on intoxication. I thought the apple section was the most interesting, but Pollan reaches his most filligreed and gushing moments in the chapter on the tulip. The potato section was a bit bland, but perhaps that is to be expected. Overall, the book is an interesting romp.