MysteriousFaith

Q3 2007 Bookshelf

The Dip by Seth Godin

Godin is perhaps the web’s leading e-marketing savant and his most recent (very brief) book is an interesting insight into knowing when to stick with an idea, and when to quit. He does a good job of clearly articulating one of the basic challenges to being a successful entrepreneur: anticipate “the dip” which occurs in any idea worth taking to market, when things dry up and the future looks bleak. If you can make it through that, and believe the idea is worth the sacrifice, then suck it up and move your way through “the dip.” If you can’t do that, then move on. Knowing when to do each of these things – when to stick, when to quit – is what he sees as a key to success. He characterizes those who always have a new idea they are running off to as those who do not have a fully mature understanding not only of business, but how “the dip” impacts their ability to bring an idea to fruition.

Thomas Paine’s the Rights of Man by Christopher Hitchens

One has the sense in reading this biography of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man by Christopher Hitchens of men forever separated by time and history who were very much of the same mind about life, political philosophy and religion. This is a wonderful introduction to Paine’s book and the events surrounding his tense relationship with America and the progenitors of its founding (both within the country and those who contributed to the Enlightenment ideas inseparably connected to its creation).

Playground: a Childhood Lost Inside the Playboy Mansion by Jennifer Saginor

This started out as a bit of mind candy, but became a moving memoir about Saginor’s life growing up with a very dysfunctional father. Her dad was the doctor to Hugh Hefner and she literally grew up “Inside the Playboy Mansion.” It is an interesting biography and has something important to say about a too casual approach to human sexuality.

Mediterranean Summer: a Season on France’s Cote d’ Azur and Italy’s Costa Bella by David Shalleck with Erol Munuz

A truly wonderful book about a summer spent cooking on a yacht for a particularly discriminating European family, Mediterranean Summer is part travel memoir, part tale of a professional coming into one’s own, and very much a celebration of the uniquely passionate food culture that exists along the Mediterranean. Fortunately, I am exhausted by travel at the moment or else this book would have made me salivate over a desire to go back to the Mediterranean as soon as possible!

Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son: a Memoir by Kevin Jennings

Jennings has written a painful biography about being raised by a widowed mom whose husband was a philandering Baptist indigent minister. The experiences Jennings had coming to grips with his own sexual orientation and the discrimination he experienced led him to found GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network) where he seeks to educate teachers, school administrators and students about how to successfully create a positive environment for gay students. The book is about many things, but seeing how Jennings has turned his own pain into a constructive life’s mission is warming and enriching.

Bind, Torture, Kill: the Inside Story of the Serial Killer Next Door by Roy Wenzl, Tim Potter, L. Kelly, and Hurst Laviana

Criminology remains a hobby for me, and the tale of the BTK’s crimes at times reads like a good crime novel with the mindfulness that it is very much real. The banality of Dennis Rader (aka the BTK) is always an aspect of the perversions inherent in serial killers that is shocking.

The Nasty Bits by Anthony Bourdain

For someone who loathes the commercial machine that is celebrity chef-dom, Bourdain’s collection of short stories The Nasty Bits, is the by-product of his own celebrity life and not original work. Undoubtedly designed to catch Bourdain fans with old materials compiled into one volume when he did not have new writing available seems a bit disingenuous – a bit like the PR zeitgeist he does not care for. I had read a number of the pieces in other periodicals, so little was new for me, and it’s certainly Bourdain being his grouchy best, but a boycott on this book might be a subtle way of reminding him of his roots!

God on Trial: Dispatches from America’s Religious Battlefields by Peter Irons

This book exhausted me. It is about an important issue, the role of religion in contemporary legal trials, but it caught me at a time I was frustrated with the whole question and the lack of clarity. Irons has written a very comprehensive treatment of the relevant legal battles taking place, and in that sense the book is recommended.

FDR by Jean Edward Smith

Possibly the seminal biography on FDR, Jean Edward Smith’s recent work is very good. It does an interesting job showing FDR coming to terms with his polio, which was as significant a moment of personal triumph and as illustrative of his internal strength, as his myth would suggest. FDR was not without his own oversteps when he did become President, and Smith does a good job bringing these to light parallel to his moments of success.

The Collectors by David Baldacci

Brain candy for vacation. A fictional book about book collectors … and believe it or not, actually interesting (hey, don’t let anybody tell you differently, us bibliophiles are a crazy bunch).

Heat by Bill Buford

Of all the culinary literature I have read, Buford’s Heat is without question my absolute favorite. From his time in Mario Batali’s restaurant Babbo to his time in Italy learning how to make sausage from a Dante-quoting butcher, the passion about life, love and relationships comes through more clearly in Buford’s book than in anything else I have read. Wonderful read, regardless of whether you are a foodie or not.

The Outlaw Sea: a World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime by William Langewiesche

Among the ranks of travel writers, Langewische stands as one of the better current writers. This book is about what life on the sea is really like in all its outlaw forms. The sea, that majestic pulsating master that covers the majority of our world, remains lawless, even in the 21st century. And Langewische explores it at its margins – telling us the stories of the sailors who reach out from disadvantaged Third World countries, trying for more and ending up giving their lives inside the hull of a storm ravaged tanker. A wonderful book.

The Reach of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman

Ruhlman, friend of Bourdain and one of the modern fathers of the cultural infatuation with all things food, has written a series of books about what it means to give your life over to the perfection of the craft of cooking, and what it means to own a restaurant that stands for excellence and for your passion as exhibited in every plate you put out. It is a form of art that too few have the opportunity to appreciate given our rushed eating habits. This particular Ruhlman book revisits a series of people who he original profiled in The Soul of a Chef including Thomas Keller and others who went through the Culinary Institute of America.

Sahara Unveiled: a Journey Across the Desert by William Langewiesche

A very good book about Langewische’s travel across the Sahara. The unforgiving nature of the Sahara lends poignancy to his, at times grudging admiration for the place and the people who build their lives around this fragile mistress. Tales of wanderers who have made their way across other vast stretches of nothingness only to die at the unbending quality of the Sahara reminded me of man’s desire to seek out adventure in the hopes of finding meaning.

Know-How: the 8 Skills That Separate People Who Perform from Those Who Don’t by Ram Charan

Charan’s most recent book dovetails nicely with his last, Execution: the Discipline of Getting Things Done. His emphasis is always on setting aside the allure leaders who can speak and present themselves well from those who can actually get things done. He is very much a force against the celebrity CEO which has become a fad. Charan’s eight insights are: positioning on the fundamental idea that makes you money, read patterns to anticipate future change before others, helping a team to take form, accurately reading people and deciding who you can build with and who must go away, pull together a team of leaders, goals that balance long term big goals with what is achievable, “laser-sharp priorities”, finding creative ways to add social value beyond the traditional business/society models.

The Long March by Sun Shuyun

This book has been re-issued in the US from a UK edition available in 2006. It covers the real story of the Long March, a story much mythologized by Mao and his followers. I should have a review of the book published in the near future.

A War Like No Other by Victor Hanson

Hanson is perhaps the leading historian of Greek antiquity, and lends his prodigious academic skills to write a complete history of the Athens-Sparta wars. Exploring the dynamics of how both city-states made the decision to go to war, and how they conducted war once it began, holds grisly lessons for us even now. Among the reasons the Greeks withstand the test of time is that their experiences and observations seem to transcend time and characterize the life of man, regardless of the century. Hanson adds beautifully, if at times damningly, to our understanding.

Dead Certain: the Presidency of George W. Bush by Robert Draper

It would be a shame if “I do tears” was the only thing people remember about Draper’s biography of the presidency of George Bush. What Draper manages to do, which even I was impressed by, is make Bush seem human. Not because Bush has any cathartic opening up to Draper (the man’s internal life is largely void of anything which resembles introspection, his lack of doubt having nothing to do with certainty in the abstract, but only that if one never asks any questions doubt is easy to keep at bay), but because somehow Draper manages to humanize Bush. I finished the book with empathy for Bush that surprised me: since the first election between Gore and Bush, I have felt that the job of President was outside Bush’s capabilities. Not that he was a bad man; just that he could not do the job in terms of his management skill, intellectual ability or insight into the world. He reminds me of men I know who are good men, but who a job like the President of the United States would be out of reach. In this sense, if it could manage to make me feel for Bush, Draper’s biography is worth reading.

The Great Illusion (1933 Edition) by Norman Angell

Angell wrote two editions to his classic, The Great Illusion. The first in 1910 in advance of the Great War, and the second only six years before World War II. In it he argues, as do many current proponents of globalization, of the sheer madness it would be for an interconnected world to go to war. He attacks the ideas that war enriches the victor, and that man’s nature makes war inevitable. That he was unable to bend the discussion his way in both cases does not make him wrong, but it does make one aware that in some ways we are never more in danger than when we feel completely safe. David Fromkin’s Europe’s Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914? comments specifically on the phenomenon of how quietly war can find its way into an otherwise peaceful world.

American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin

The genius who managed our atomic bomb effort during World War II became a victim of Senator Charles McArthy because during his younger years he expressed appreciation of certain socialistic ideals. Oppenheimer was in many ways a tragic figure: a mind of incredible scientific capabilities was bound to a profound sense of the dignity of human life. That both these fundamental aspects of his character would have to co-exist while he invented the most catastrophically destructive weapon ever known to man is a burden Bird and Sherwin eloquently explore. This book is a great biography of Oppenheimer, but an even better one of the times he inhabited.

The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century by Steven Watts

Reading this book while in China touring factories made for an interesting experience. Ford was very much aware that by introducing mass industrialization he had reduced the lives of workers to repetitive monotony, which took away from the integrity of working with your hands, something he personally valued. The justification that allowed him to march forward was that the jobs he created, which intellectually not satisfying, were higher paying than others, and allowed his workers to have flexibility and freedoms they had not previously had. Watts does a very good job portraying the whole of Ford, who admittedly did have his rough side (his anti-Semitism being a sad reality given his otherwise strong record on the rights of African-Americans and his advocacy for women’s suffrage).

Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski

As a young Polish journalist, Kapuscinksi was asked by his paper to become a travel and political writer. His companion on his travels would be Herodotus, and his own journey would take him to many of the same corners of the world as did his companion. Easily one of my favorite travel books.

Blueprint for Action: a Future Worth Creating by Thomas P.M. Barnett

Barnett has his Angell-esque qualities. A futurist whose words should have been heeded more closely in advance of our Iraq misadventures, Barnett has decided that the only way things get better is if government (in his particular area of emphasis the Pentagon), understands how and where future conflicts are likely to come from, and develop systems which uniquely handle these situations. I will be writing more on this in the future as this book was very formative in my geo-political thinking.

Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson

The biographer of Franklin has most recently turned to Albert Einstein and written what is likely to become the seminal biography of Einstein’s life and academic work. By necessity, portions of the book are very technical, but Isaacson’s writing shows clearly the oversight by people such as Brian Greene who help make lofty ideas about physics understandable to the average person. My quick thoughts on Einstein’s God can be read here.

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• October 14, 2007

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