jmadigan

0 of 1 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 1 stars

“This book by Jim Collins is one of the most successful books to be found in the "Business" section of your local megabookstore, and given how it purports to tell you how to take a merely good company and make it great, it's not difficult to see why that might be so. Collins and his crack team of researchers say they swam through stacks of business literature in search of info on how to pull this feat off, and came up with a list of great companies that illustrate some concepts central to the puzzle. They also present for each great company what they call a "comparison company," which is kind of that company with a goatee and a much less impressive earnings record. The balance of the book is spent expanding on pithy catch phrases that describe the great companies, like "First Who, Then What" or "Be a Hedgehog" or "Grasp the Flywheel, not the Doom Loop." No, no, I'm totally serious.

I've got several problems with this book, the biggest of which stem from fundamentally viewpoints on how to do research. Collin's brand of research is not my kind. It's not systematic, it's not replicable, it's not generalizable, it's not systematic, it's not free of bias, it's not model driven, and it's not collaborative. It's not, in short, scientific in any way. That's not to say that other methods of inquiry are without merit --the Harvard Business Review makes pretty darn good use of case studies, for example-- but way too often Collins's great truths seemed like square pegs crammed into round holes, because a round hole is what he wants. For example, there's no reported search for information that disconfirms his hypotheses. Are there other companies that don't make use of a Culture of Discipline (Chapter 6, natch) but yet are still great according to Collins's definition? Are there great companies that fail to do some of the things he says should make them great? The way that the book focuses strictly on pairs of great/comparison companies smacks of confirmatory information bias, which is a kink in the human mind that drives us to seek out and pay attention to information that confirms our pre-existing suppositions and ignore information that fails to support them.

Relatedly, a lot of the book's themes and platitudes strike me as owing their popularity to the same factors that make the horoscope or certain personality tests like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator so popular: they're so general and loosely defined that almost anyone can look at that and not only say that wow, that make sense, and I've always felt the same way! This guy and me? We're geniuses! The chapter about "getting the right people on the bus" that extols the virtue of hiring really super people is perhaps the most obvious example. Really, did anyone read this part and think "Oh, man. I've been hiring half retarded chimps. THAT'S my problem! I should hire GOOD people!" Probably not, and given that Collins doesn't go into any detail about HOW to do this or any of his other good to great pro tips, I'm not really sure where the value is supposed to be.

It also irked me that Good to Great seems to try and exist in a vacuum, failing to relate its findings to any other body of research except Collins's other book, Built to Last. The most egregious example of this is early on in Chapter 2 where Collins talks about his concept of "Level 5 Leadership," which characterizes those very special folks who perch atop a supposed leadership hierarchy. The author actually goes into some detail describing Level 5 leaders, but toward the end of the chapter he just shrugs his figurative shoulders and says "But we don't know how people get to be better leaders. Some people just are." Wait, what? People in fields like Industrial-Organizational Psychology and Organizational Development have been studying, scientifically, what great leaders do and how to do it for decades. We know TONS about how to become a better leader. There are entire industries built around it. You would think that somebody on the Good to Great research team may have done a cursory Google search on this.

So while Good to Great does have some interesting thoughts and a handful of amusing or even fascinating stories to tell about the companies it profiles (I liked, for example, learning about why Walgreens opens so many shops in the same area, even to the point of having stores across the street from each other in some cities), ultimately it strikes me as vague generalities and little to no practical information about how to actually DO anything to make your company great.”

jmadigan wrote this review Wednesday, July 30 2008. ( reply | view 1 replies | permalink )

• Rated 2 stars

“I originally picked this book up based on a recommendation from another blog I read, but I'm kind of sorry I did. Belonging squarely in the "Horror" section of the bookstore, Scott Smith's The Ruins tells the story of a quartet of American college students who hook up with a couple of new friends while on vacation in Cancun, Mexico. The group decides to go looking for one member's brother, who left some time before to explore some ruins out in the jungle and hasn't been heard from yet.

Okay, I'm going to step into some slight spoiler territory now, but it's nothing you don't learn early in the book and it's necessary to really explain my opinion of the book... When the group, almost comically unprepared for a jungle journey, fumbles their way to the ruins, they find it overgrown by a strange vine with blood red flowers. A group of Mayan villagers tries to get them to leave, but when one of their members inadvertently makes contact with the sprawling vines, the Mayans change their tune and force the whole group, under threat of murder, to wade through the vines and into the dig site. From there the Mayans hold them prisoner and the group is systematically terrorized, tortured, and in some cases devoured by ...the vines.

Now, it's true that The Ruins is readable. Apart from a few "Look at me, I'm just like Stephen King!" attempts at character building through flashbacks that bog the narrative down, the pacing is quick and it's hardly a challenging read. And I was pretty much constantly wanting to know what would happen next. The problem was that the concept of these teens being tormented by malicious plants possessed of a sinister intelligence is so risible that I had trouble feeling much in the way of suspense or fear. The vines don't just consume with any kind of animal instinct, they're intelligent, cunning, and purposefully mean. It was just silly, and worse yet there is never any payoff. You never learn why the vines are capable of what they are, why they do what they do, or why the Mayans won't let people out of their deadly thicket once they're there.

The other big problem I had with The Ruins was that it never elevated beyond a simple slasher pic or gore porn mentality. Sure, Smith made some interesting attempts at showing the dissolution of the various characters' relationships when exposed to life threatening duress, and it feels like he almost gets somewhere with this. But ultimately the predicament is so contrived and so bizarre that any kind of characterization in this area seems ham fisted. And Smith doesn't seem to tackle any larger themes through the examination of the tourists' predicament. There's not much about good versus evil, man versus nature, the duality of faith, the perils of self destruction, etc. etc. There are kernels of some of these ideas, but none of them bear fruit on the vine. So to speak. It's just violence for the sake of violence, and that never interests me.”

jmadigan wrote this review Thursday, July 24 2008. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 2 stars

“I'm not entirely sure why I couldn't get into 1776, Jason McCullough's biography of one of the most pivotal years in American History. McCullough writes about major events in the eponymous year, including sieges on Boston, harried attempts at truce between the Brittish and American rebels, and the personalities of two key Georges --fledgling military leader George Washington on our side of the ocean, and often misunderstood King George II on the other. The best parts of the book for me focussed on these and other figures from history and how we often got the wrong or incomplete picture of things from our high school history texts. George Washington wasn't infallable, and certain leaders on the British side wanted to parlay and negotiate a lot more than others. There were also extended discussions about sieges and battles and preparation for sieges and battles, and the difficulty of maintaining an army full of farmers and misfits.

But for the life of me, I just couldn't get into the flow of the book. McCullough's style seemed dry and uninspired to me, and I couldn't stay motivated to keep track of the expanding cast of characters. I think the main problem was that that with a few exceptions the author failed to draw them out as actual humans. You got detailed descriptions of physical statures when available and maybe a paragraph on their pedigree, but beyond that most of the drama seemed to exist at too high a level and McCullough seemed intent on covering so much ground that I didn't get much flavor out of the thing. Maybe I'm just not as big a fan of history as I am of the stories of the people who make it.”

jmadigan wrote this review Thursday, July 24 2008. ( reply | permalink )

1 of 1 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 2 stars

“In My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey, author Jill Bolte Taylor takes us through her autobiographical account of what it was like for her to have a stroke --a really massive blowout, actually-- that left her in an almost child like state. With the left side of her brain swimming in blood (fun fact: raw blood is toxic to our precious, irreplaceable neurons), Taylor not only required invasive brain surgery, but also assistance from others to relearn almost everything about how to be a human being. Perhaps aptly, her greatest source of aid and care giving is her mother, who gets to in a way repeat Taylor's childhood, complete with the exploratory play, stories, sensory stimulation, and basic life skills that one usually associates with babies. A good chunk of the book retells the morning of Taylor's stroke with great clarity and detail, her rush to the hospital, the rapid unraveling of her mind, and her long return trip to normalcy and health. Spoiler alert: she made it.

And of course beyond this the book's hook is that the author just happens to be a brain scientist, someone who has made her career studying the human brain at a little place back East called Harvard. So the appeal to me were the streaks of science worked through the fabric of her story, including discussions on how the brain works, how strokes happen, and how the brain stops working so well when the two get together. In an effort to keep the book more mainstream Taylor keeps the science parts at a pretty high level, limiting things to right brain and left brain. I'm pretty sure that brain researchers could point to diagrams of gray matter with labels that rhyme with things like ooblongdoggle hypothancum and tell you that it controls our ability to figure out what 10% off a $.89 can of pinto beans would be, but Taylor shoves everything into either the right brain or left brain buckets.

Indeed the best parts of the book are where Taylor is melding this kind of brain science with her personal accounts, like when she describes how her wounded brain had to relearn the concept of edges in objects and figure out that stepping on the cracks between concrete sidewalk slabs was okay, but stepping on the edges to the right of the sidewalk was tricky, because that was a curb she could stumble off of. The early parts of the book are full of little tidbits like this, and it's a good melding of science and personal story. I just wish there were more of it.

Unfortunately, Taylor periodically traipses off into dippy hippy la-la land with prolonged discussions about how to control her positive energy, how to meditate on her mood, and how to be a really super all around pleasant person just by thinking about how the right side chunk of her brain works in the wake of the stroke. There's little science in these parts to appease the left part of your brain, and things really did get far out, man. It was about the time that she was talking about how our right brains control our ability to send "waves of healing energy" to those around us that I lost most of my interest in the remainder of the book. If you feel the same way, feel free to stop reading about there.”

jmadigan wrote this review Thursday, July 24 2008. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“Ah, another parody of the fantasy genre by Terry Pratchett. This one returns to the Unseen University, home of powerful wizards and Rincewind, one of my favorite Diskworld protagonists. On the Disk, the 8th son of and 8th son becomes your ordinary wizard, but the 8th son of an 8th son of an 8th son (i.e., the 8th son of a wizard) is a sourcerer, a source of magic so powerful that he endangers, well, everything. Normally wizardly celibacy keeps sourcerers out of the picture, but not everybody plays by the rules, and thus you get the events in this book. Coin, a sourcerer, is born to the world and attempts to remake things more to his liking while Rincewind and the other inhabitants of Unseen University flip-flop between opposing him and just going along for the ride.

At this point I'm not sure what else to say about Pratchett's work. It's funny, madcap, and particularly satisfying if you're familiar with the conventions it parodies. I will say that Sourcery nicely highlights Pratchett's ability to stamp out a huge cast, mainly focusing on what by all rights should be one-joke characters that somehow go on to carry the show and not wear out their welcome. There is, for example, Conina. She comes with a fine barbarian pedigree (being the daughter of the Disk's greatest barbarian "hero" Cohen, who himself is a Conan the Barbarian parody) and she can kill five different ways to Tuesday, but all she really wants to be is a hairdresser. And then there's my favorite, Nijel the Barbarian, who unlike Conina has absolutely no aptitude for the barbarian business. Instead he resembles a typical adolescent nerd who is trying to be a fierce barbarian by following a how-to book, which itself seems to read a lot like the Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook, complete with random encounter tables and other impractical rules. As you might guess, Nigel isn't very good and being a barbarian, and Conina isn't very good at NOT being a barbarian. And the three-way relationship between them and the cowardly wizard Rincewind results in a lot of fun.

The best bits of the book still focus around Rincewind (and, relatedly, his magical and homicidal Luggage), though. For some reason Pratchett seems to be at his best when he's taking us through Rincewind's rationalization for any given cowardly action, and I haven't gotten enough of it yet. Sourcery meanders a bit towards the end so it's not the best Diskworld read I've had to date, but I still liked it well enough.”

jmadigan wrote this review Thursday, July 24 2008. ( reply | permalink )

2 of 2 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 3 stars

“I liked Terry Pratchett's first two Diskworld books so much that I drove forward into the awaiting pile of his subsequent writings with great relish. Unfortunately Equal Rites didn't impress me nearly as much, mainly for its lack of the funny for the first half of the book.

For those of you in need of a refresher, Pratchett's shtick is that he lampoons the high fantasy genre (wizards, barbarians, dragons, all that) without having his books drown in their own mockery. He's also very funny, even apart from the whole satire angle. Equal Rites focuses on not only the fantasy conventions of wizards, witches, and the apprenticeship thereof, but also on more contemporary issues like gender equality and women in the workplace. The main character, Esk, is a young girl who displays talent at the traditionally male craft of wizarding. When nobody else will have anything to do with her, she's taken on as an apprentice by a witch named Granny Weatherwax, a practitioner of the female half of the magic yin-yang. Granny, who is old, proud, insular, set in her ways, and distrustful of the world outside her cottage, makes it her quest to escort Esk from the country to the big city where she will enroll at Unseen University as the Disk's first female wizard. Hilarity ensues.

Well, hilarity eventually ensues. My main beef with Equal Rites is that it's really slow to get to the funny. The first half of the book preoccupies itself with Esk's coming of age as a sort of wizard/witch hybrid and her apprenticeship to Granny Weatherwax. They spend a fair amount of time stomping around in the wilderness learning about herbs and communing with animals, and other kinds of witchcraft. Pratchett strikes me as the kind of writer who can make anything funny, but it's like he's purposely holding back or too ill at ease with the whole scene to break out and be himself beyond the occasional wise crack. It's not until Esk and Granny arrive at Unseen University that Pratchett seems to find his groove and remind me so much why I enjoyed his previous two books. Maybe that's the reason why Esk has never reappeared to date in any other Diskworld novel (though I understand Granny Weatherwax becomes a major character in her own way).

So, while Equal Rites isn't a bad little comic relief, it's not as good as the other 5 Diskworld books I've read to date. And it's short, so it shouldn't distract you for long on your way to the better stuff.”

jmadigan wrote this review Saturday, June 28 2008. ( reply | permalink )

4 of 4 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 4 stars

“I've said before that I would hate to be a character in a John Steinbeck novel, but I think it would be worse to be one in a Carmac McCarthy story. Sure, Steinbeck's characters often end up getting mauled, shot, or starved to death, but those are still better odds than most of the folks between the front and back covers of McCarthy's books. And No Country for Old Men is no exception.

Where The Road was a kind of sci-fi horror story and Blood Meridian was kind of Western, No Country for Old Men is more of a contemporary thriller. Everyman Llewelyn Moss is out in the wilderness of Texas backcountry one day when he comes across the remains of a drug deal gone bad --dead bodies, bullet-ridden SUVs, stacks of heroin, and a suitcase bursting with money. Moss gets greedy and takes the money, and after a couple of early blunders he's on the run from three groups: the criminals who were trying to sell the drugs, the criminals who were trying to buy the drugs, and a genteel County Sheriff named Tom Bell who just wants to bring Moss in safely. Before long a psychotic hitman enters the chase, and things don't look good for Moss and his money bag.

It's really had to describe much of what happens next without giving away some surprises, but suffice to say that Cormac McCarthy's penchant for brutality, hopelessness, and long-winded philosopher/murderers permeates this book, though it's not as vulgar in its depiction of violence as Blood Meridian. Still, it's not a bad ride for a thriller, and McCarthy's elegant prose continues to grow on me. I also liked the parts that spoke through Sheriff Tom Bell's voice. To bring back the comparison to Steinbeck, McCarthy has a gift for authentically capturing the tone and dialect of certain people.”

jmadigan wrote this review Thursday, July 24 2008. ( reply | permalink )

1 of 1 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 4 stars

“I mentioned a while back how after a few false starts I eventually grew to appreciate Steven Erickson's Gardens of the Moon, the first book in his high fantasy series Mazalan: Books of the Fallen. So you shouldn't be surprised to find out that I moved on to the second book, Deadhouse Gates. In most ways, it's a lot better and a really good read. But in other ways it worries me and doesn't exactly motivate me to choke down the stacks of subsequent books in the series.


Deadhouse Gates establishes a pattern I'm told repeats itself throughout the rest of the series: it takes a few characters from a previous book, throws them in with new characters in an ever increasing cast, and moves the action far, far away from what you had been used to up to that point. In true epic fantasy style there are actually multiple plotlines and points of view in Deadhouse Gates, and following the laws of probability some of them are more interesting than others. The main event tying them all together is that the Mazalan empire is facing an insurrection in one of its desert kingdoms led by a prophet kinda sorta lady. Things get really brutal really quickly and a small company of the Mazalan army finds itself trying to protect tens of thousands of Mazalan refugees as they embark on a long and horrible trek across the desert that comes be known as "the Chain of Dogs." Oh, and also there's a couple of superpowered dudes who are looking for some magical gateway and a badass assassin who's looking for that same gateway so he can use it to get close to someone to assassinate her and a group of former nobles turned slaves who are escaped and on the run through the desert. Lots of plots.

I found myself enjoying the chapters about the Chain of Dogs the most, since they had a real epic feel for them and I liked seeing how the completely outnumbered and overburdened defenders kept finding ways to outsmart and out outmaneuver their dogged pursuers. It was just good drama and it had a heck of a payoff. The rest of the plot lines were okay, with the exception of the ones dealing with super duper badasses Icarium and Mappo. Those were incredibly boring yet reeked of 3xtr3m3 4ct10n!!!. I cared nothing for those characters and could barely tell what the heck was going on.

On balance, though, Deadhouse Gates is quick paced and exciting for what it is. The thing is that I can see how epic and LARGE Erickson is setting this whole thing up to be. It's not really a single tale, but a whole history of the Mazalan empire, and on that scale things are moving pretty slowly. And given that the rest of the books from here on out get pretty beefy --like in the 1,000+ page range-- I'm just not sure I've got the will to focus that long.”

jmadigan wrote this review Tuesday, June 24 2008. ( reply | permalink )

3 of 3 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 4 stars

“A few years ago I had tried to read Walter Isaacson's biography on Benjamin Franklin, but just couldn't get through it because the author mired everything down in pointless details. Despite that, I decided to give his more recent book about famed theoretical physicist Albert Einstein a try. If it turned out to be boring, I'd just drop it. Turned out, I loved it.

What I loved about Isaacon's book here is the way it delicately balances three aspects: the life of Einstein from a strictly biographical angle, the examination of his scientific works like special and general relativity, and the discussion of how Einstein impacted and viewed the scientific zeitgeist of the early 20th century --particularly within the field of physics. I could see how someone setting out to write this book might want to focus on just one or two of these facets, but that would really be missing a huge opportunity. Each member of this trio of topics interacts with each other, and Isaacson finds ways to discuss two or more of them within the same passage. We get interesting little tidbits about Einstein's personal life and character, but we see how those things impacted the way he pursued his scientific work and thinking, and how that body of work turn defined (or, later, ran counter to) the entire field of physics. Seeing how all these pieces intersected and linked was fascinating.

It's all pretty well written, too. We get neat little anecdotes about Einstein like how contrary to popular belief he never failed math, or how he married his cousin, had four citizenships, or how --SPOILER ALERT-- the coroner who performed his autopsy stole his fricking brain and kept it in a jar for years while periodically giving out pieces of it to friends. I'll admit that when Isaacson would go off on a lecture about special or general relativity my eyes would glaze over while trying to follow his discussion of say four-sided triangles in non-Euclidean space or whatever, but at least some of the time it was written at a level I could follow, at least conceptually. Enough to understand the impact it had on the field, at least until Einstein's own theories were supplanted by quantum theory. If I have any criticism of the book, it's that while Isaacson does an admirable job of placing Einstein's achievements within the context of scientific discoveries at that time, what he fails to do is give us much perspective on how much --if anything-- the modern science of today owes to Einstein and his theories. What did Einstein get wrong, and what parts of his theories have been crowded out by the inevitable march of scientific progress? Dunno. Didn't say.

All in all, though, I found the book fascinating and would recommend it. I think I may go back and give the Ben Franklin book another shot.”

jmadigan wrote this review Tuesday, June 24 2008. ( reply | permalink )

2 of 2 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 4 stars

“Much like Equal Rites, Mort deals with the subject of apprenticeship, but it does it in a fairly different way. The eponymous character, Mort, is a clumsy but earnest young lad who is unsuited for just about any job his well meaning father can find for him. At a hiring fair, Mort's potential apprenticeship is turned down by everyone until the stroke of midnight when the grim reaper Death himself appears and agrees to teach Mort his own macabre craft. Mort accepts and starts immediately, largely unaware of the slightly madcap calamity waiting for him but willing to give an honest go at it.

Pratchett really seems to hit his stride with Mort, and his knack for clever writing and endearing characters is on full display. The jokes-per-page ratio is sky high, and a lot of them made me smile, snicker, or even laugh out loud. And Mort is a great character --he's a klutz who doesn't know he's a klutz, and in the course of the book his character really does change. Even Death is made into a sympathetic and interesting character, and I always find the idea of Death as an entity with a job to do fascinating and ripe for satire.”

jmadigan wrote this review Friday, June 20 2008. ( reply | permalink )