The war for the ownership of the smartphone in Dogfight

From the week of June 9th, 2014

For humans, competition is a wickedly sharp double-edged sword. It has driven us to rise up out of the muck of subsistence to build a diverse, technological, multifaceted civilization that is forever improving upon itself. And yet, it has also fostered, and empowered, individuals who possessively lay claim to their little contribution to that societal progress, jealously guarding it as though it alone was the key to all else. Wanting credit for one's work is nothing new. After all, in a world where rewards often only flow to those who receive credit, it's hard not to want to promote one's contribution to the whole. But when guarding that contribution grows into wanting to deny it to others unless they pay for the privilege, then we have all, in some sense, lost. This is the difficulty that lies at the hard of Mr. Vogelstein's excellent document of one of Silicon Valley's most recent and consequential wars.

Though modern computing has existed as an industry for the better part of a century, it wasn't until the introduction of the iPhone that computing became a global phenomenon. After decades of clunky desktop towers, underpowered netbooks, battery-sucking laptops and chunky cellphones, the iPhone crammed everything one could reasonably expect from a personal device into a sleek package that apple, its creator, was able to market to brilliant effect. No more expensive infrastructure, no more cluttered desks, no more tangled nest of cables... Just a simple versatile, wireless device that could exist happily in one's pocket.

For this triumph, Apple understandably wanted credit, not only in the social arena but in the technological as well. It filed numerous patents to protect what it considered to be their crowning glory. And yet, there was no individual aspect, or component, of the iPhone that was innovative or new. Rather, Apple's genius was in assembling those various components into an attractive, functional package that put Apple on the road to being the most powerful brand in the world.

Understandably, Apple would disagree with this view. They would argue that, over years of toil, secrecy and countless man-hours, they invented the modern smartphone. And that, for this singular achievement, they should be rewarded. This position has not only set Apple on a path to litigation, against other smartphone makers, it has permanently damaged its relationship with Google, a once-close ally in the creation of a new, post-Microsoft world. Amongst billion-dollar lawsuits and hyperbolic threats of corporate warfare, the world's largest companies busted up over who gets the credit.

This and more Fred Vogelstein argues in his engrossing Dogfight From the Sidekick to the iPhone, from the early days of Apple and Google against the world to the bitter falling out that has seen the companies abandon friendship for rivalry, the author blends opinion with fact to create an entertaining micro-history of the smartphone that takes few prisoners. Though he clearly admires the innovative spirit and entrepreneurial cultures of both companies, Mr. Vogelstein also properly upbraids them for the arrogant attitudes that cause both to believe that the world would be immeasurably worse without them in it. And yet, it's the extent to which these jealousies and insecurities have dictated their actions that the true damage can be found.

For most of the world, the smartphone is synonymous with iPhone. This isn't true because Apple is litigious. Nor is it true because Apple holds patents for various components within the iPhone. It's true because the iPhone was new, innovative and powerful. It's true because people loved it to such a degree that it transformed a luxury item into a household toy. This didn't happen because Apple got its proper credit. It happened because Apple created a good product. And yet, when faced with competition from companies like Sam-sung and Google, Apple, rather than trust in their own success, rather than capitalize on their clear advantage over everyone else to stay ahead, talked about betrayal, of copycatting, of "thermonuclear war," as though theirs was the only touch-enabled hand-held device with wireless radios allowed to exist. But of course, if that were true, then the iPhone would have never existed at all.

And this is Dogfight's central revelation. There is nothing in the technological world that is truly new. Everything that we have now, and will have in the near future, is a refinement of an older, less successful idea. Attempting to take credit for that idea is not only disingenuous, it is a betrayal of the very spirit of competition that these companies claim to treasure. Worst of all, though, it exposes the truth that these companies don't genuinely believe that a better product will win the day. They believe that hobbling their rivals' ability to compete is the path to victory. That is not only cynical, it's depressing.

A delightful and sobering look at the pitfalls of competition and at the extent to which the powerful fool themselves into thinking they are indispensable... (4/5 Stars)

An extraordinary mind, a tragic life in Tesla

From The Week of March 17, 2014

There's an element of madness in innovation, a capacity to seize the unknown that is foreign to the rest of us. We are born in established worlds, baked into environments that have been shaped by centuries of tradition and generations of experience. And so it is no surprise that our tastes, even our thoughts, are influenced by customs we cannot ignore. Not so for the visionaries in our midst who are, in some fundamental way, immune to the transmission of cultural DNA, who reject the known for the alien shores of undiscovered frontiers of science and philosophy. This is what makes them special, not their products or their plaudits, not their lives and the hagriographies written in their honor, this altered sight that allows them, for just a moment, to glimpse the beautiful chaos of the unformed. The glories and the costs of such perspectives are detailed thoroughly and methodically in Bernard Carlson's engaging biography of an exceedingly strange legend of history.

Born in a 19th-century Europe obsessed by the dying days of empire, Nicola Tesla would become one of the most transformative, American inventors of the industrial age. Widely credited with the creation of systems to harness the powers of Alternating Current, and having made powerful contributions to the understanding and usage of wireless transmission of both information and electricity, he was celebrated, in his day, as a wizard of science, a man who used his expansive imagination to dream up fanciful technologies and demonstrate them to crowds in awe of his discoveries. His insights and designs, even today, underpin technologies in everything from cars to smartphones. Many have won greater fame and awards for achieving far less. After all, were it not for Tesla Motors, named in homage to the great inventor, would anyone in mainstream culture even remember the man?

Why such a genius has had his star burn so dimly for so long has a complex answer rooted in Tesla's eccentricities and his society's biases. A likely bisexual who never married, Tesla did not conform to the social customs of his turn-of-the-century day. But as much as we would like to blame his lack of fame on something as simple as societal ignorance, we cannot. For it's equally clear that Tesla possessed a fondness for making boastful claims that he often failed to back up. Repeatedly, his more fantastic projects encountered unforeseen problems that set him back years, eventually earning him a reputation as someone whose bark was louder than his bite. These factors combined to banish him into relative obscurity, until a recent spate of biographies has re-established him as one of the great minds of our age.

At times revelatory and opinionated, Tesla is a thoughtful biography of a complex genius. Mr. Carlson, who does not shy away from attempting to explain both the man and his insights into electricity, its properties and the manner in which it interacts with our world, does an excellent job describing Tesla's successes, his failures and his methodologies. The reader is not only furnished with an understanding of the importance of 19-century patents, but with the science contained within those patents and how it has outlived Tesla himself, growing to become a fundamental technology upon which a large swath of our world operates.

But these explainations, however educational, are secondary to Tesla himself, a man with a remarkable life story that Mr. Carlson largely handles with respect and fascination. The author details his tragic family history, his personal drive to succeed, and the numerous ways in which the meritocratic United States aided him in turning his drawing-board scribblings into products and standards that could quite literally light the world. It's here that Mr. Carlson shines. For he is perfectly willing to speculate on Tesla's mentality, his drivers and his demons, doing so with an openness that is as refreshing as his insights are compelling. We'll never know for certain what Tesla the man was like, but Tesla does a wonderful job conveying a consistent impression of a man buoyed by a profound belief in himself and his capacity to overcome every obstacle. That this was both the great gift and central tragedy of Tesla's life will surprise no one who reads this book.

Where Tesla wanes is in the less interesting chapters of the inventor's later life. Mr. Carlson spends ample time on the disputes and the grudges, the insights and the patents, during the heady days of the 1890s. But Tesla is allowed, with only minimal comment, to lapse into his long twilight. Perhaps this reflects what little we know of Tesla's last 38 years, but one senses that the author was far more interested in the feverish years than he was in how a genius lives when the world stops paying attention to him. This, along with the absence of any effort to connect Tesla the man to Tesla Motors, much less the AC age that he gave birth to, seems a notable oversight.

Notwithstanding its shortcomings, Tesla is a mind-altering examination of the powers of imagination. For it is in no way a simple matter to conceive of an unmade world. Tesla is a blind man who managed to draw the blueprints to a city without having ever seen one, by simply willing himself to imagine it, to know it, to possess the whole of it. That act of purely mental discovery is remarkable. And that Mr. Carlson chose to position it at center stage of his biography is as laudatory as it is thought provoking. A good glimpse into a unique mind... (4/5 Stars)

the heartbreaking legacy of corruption and ideology in The Oligarchs

From The Week of March 10, 2014

However much we may debate its merits and pick at its flaws, there can be no doubt that capitalism is the engine that empowers the progress of civilization. In providing markets for products and rewards for risk, it has banished agrarian economies to the dustbin of history, rejecting its centuries of stagnation in favor of the decades of swift progress generated by industrialism. In doing so, it has been the mechanism by which positive change has built our world and given us hope for better futures.

But for all of capitalism's power, it is not a self-guiding system. It requires men and women to refine its rules and establish its aims. No surprise then that capitalism comes in many flavors ranging from the relatively free markets of the United States to the authoritarian ones in China. These strains are shaped by history and culture, experiences and values, from the tragic to the revolutionary, that characterize economies. Nowhere is this cultural influence more apparent than in Russia's 25-year relationship with capitalism, a journey chronicled here by Mr. Hoffman.

In 1991, with the arrest of Mikhail Gorbachev and the ascension of Boris Yeltsin, Russia's 70-year experiment with Communism came to an earthshaking end. After decades of speeches and marches, of command economies and five-year plans, the Soviet Union could no longer hide, from an ever more sophisticated world, that it had fallen into the past. Where the West was rising high on profitable markets demanding fancy cars and ever-more-powerful planes, the USSR, despite its countless bureaucrats and endless training, could not even manage to fill its stores with fresh vegetables, let alone entice anyone to choose its brands. Its promise, that the organized power of the people would ignite a worldwide revolution and a new age of enlightenment, had collapsed under the weight of its inefficiencies, its corruption and its politics, none of which encouraged innovation.

Over the next five years, Russia would embark upon one of the most ambitious and fraught economic experiments in human history. Through shady auctions and even shadier schemes, it would sell off its nationalized banks and oil companies, airlines and car dealerships, hoping to create an entrepreneurial class that would fill new markets with new products that the people would be proud to purchase. Instead, in its haste, it created opportunities for a handful of ambitious individuals to control Russia's most powerful and profitable assets. Practically overnight, oil barons and media titans, kings of construction and lords of finance, became Russia's board of directors, using their outsized influence to shape government policy and shape a better future for themselves and those who'd invested with them.

A chronicle of the lives of Russia's new class of industrial titans, The oligarchs is a thorough examination of a pivotal period in Russian history. David Hoffman, an author and journalist for the Washington Post, so thoroughly reconstructs the sociopolitical climate that characterized Russian life during the fall of the Soviet Union that the outcome -- the accretion of power into the hands of an extraordinarily exulted few -- seems inevitable. From the voucher schemes to the influence peddling, from the banker War to an actual war, we watch as men of unbridled ambition steal, cheat and grind their way to power, largely at the expense of the Russian people who, thanks to life under Communism, are ill-prepared to be worked and swindled for the benefit of others.

Though the work is primarily an introduction to the first generation of Oligarchs who rose to power in the early 1990s, vividly describing their lives both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union, The Oligarchs reaches for something grander than a dry recitation of past events. In diving deeply into the mechanisms that were meant to transition Russia to capitalism, Mr. Hoffman paints a portrait of the perniciousness of influence peddling and how it has disfigured the Russian economy. In allowing favoritism to play a key role in the minting of fortunes, in the merger of corporations, even in the selling off of national assets, a handful of officials have managed to create a version of capitalism in which the winners have already been chosen. The people, whose decisions ought to shape the markets, have no choice but to use untrustworthy banks and consolidated oil. After all, the very government that should be regulating these industries is simply encouraging them so long as they follow a few proscribed rules that suit the men who happen to be in power at the time.

Every system, be it economic or political, has some level of corruption. And yet, The Oligarchs does such a good job describing how its pervasiveness, its institutionalization, has lead to the present moment in Russian history that it is hard to care about the Boris Berezovskys and the Mikhail Khodorkovskys of the world. Their stories may be individually different, but the result is the same. They were winners who either demanded to be chosen by the system, or were chosen by it anyway. Yes, their ascendance required skill and cleverness, but it was also completely inevitable given the manner in which Russia was privatized. Someone would have won. And in doing so, they would have reaped absurd riches that were bound to create class resentment for generations to come. The flaw is in the system, not the men who simply fail, here, to be interesting.

An interesting primer on one of the sketchiest and most formative moments in recent Russian history... (3/5 Stars)

The next Walmart and the life of its genius creator in The Everything Store

From The Week of January 13th, 2014

Genius is a fascinating and complex virtue. From physics to literature, from mathematics to philosophy, it has allowed the gifted among us to make quantum leaps of understanding that have changed our world and benefited us all. But while such gifts are to be admired, and perhaps even envied, by us mere mortals, they do not come without a price. For to be so far beyond one's peers in a particular area is to understand what it means to be alone, to see the world the way few others do. It's only natural for this to encourage arrogance at the expense of empathy, to foster autocracy at the expense of collaboration. Many geniuses will be socially connected enough to avoid this fate, but others, particularly those who find themselves at the pinnacle of powerful organizations shaped by their particular talents? Perhaps not. The ups and downs of just such an adventure are chronicled by Brad Stone's engrossing history of Amazon.com.

One of the earliest successes of the internet age, Amazon.com, known now as simply amazon, began in 1995 as a small bookstore operated out of a Seattle garage and has, in the years since, grown into one of the world's largest retailers. Shaped by an unwavering devotion to the customer, it is the Walmart of the Internet, luring in many of the world's best and most ubiquitous brands with the promise of its 200-million users and deploying that market power to relentlessly drive down costs for the benefit of the consumer. From books to toys, from music to jewellery, it has extended its tentacles into virtually every aspect of modern commercialism while investing its profits into 21st-century industries like cloud computing and digital streaming, ventures that promise to position amazon as one of the most vital companies of the next 20 years.

But how did a tiny internet startup grow to rival Walmart? The dreamchild of Jeff Bezos, amazon's gifted founder, it was conceived in the halls of a new-York-City hedge fund as an "everything store," a a customer-first retailer that would leverage the advantages of the internet to put products in the hands of customers swiftly and smartly. Without much backing from external sources, however, Mr. Bezos began more modestly with a bookstore that would use its vast warehouses to collect every book in print, giving consumers access to literature that rarely, if ever, made it onto shelves of brick-and-mortar booksellers. Early success with this model made the company one of the internet's dot com success stories, opening a geyser of investment that Mr. Bezos would use to make his dream of an efficient, universal marketplace a startling reality.

The controversial history of this legendary company, The Everything Store is an arresting work of non-fiction. Mr. Stone, a journalist for Bloomberg Business Week, takes the life of Jeff Bezos and the rise of amazon and interweaves their narrative histories into a united tale that is much about the complexities of business as it is the personal characteristics of amazon's brilliant and driven founder and CEO. Despite having little access to Mr. Bezos himself, or his immediate family, the author constructs a detailed portrait of amazon's ascendance on the back of dozens of interviews with men and women who played key roles in its rise. Though many of these accounts are critical of Mr. Bezos and his managerial style which seems, at times, abrasive and obsessive, their admiration for his gifts and respect for his devotion is nearly universal. Their anecdotes coalesce into a portrait of a man who is both brilliant and uncompromising, insightful and reckless, but who is nonetheless seized by an entrepreneurial will so potent that it suffuses this work with its passion.

The Everything Store is more than an assemblage of legendary meetings and dramatic near-misses, celebrated acquisitions and quiet grudges. It is, at its core, a work about the unique strain of corporate philosophy imposed upon amazon by its fixated founder. Since launching the company in the 1990s, he has refused to let himself, or his company, slow down to catch a breath. Believing that consumerism on the Internet is a landgrab that the old stalwarts of commerce are ill-equipped to capitalize on, he has relentlessly pushed for amazon to grow, often, far beyond its capacity to handle the demands placed upon it by customers who expect satisfaction, who have no sympathy for its eccentricities, and who have no idea of the mad scramble to both keep the website running and their orders fulfilled. On the surface, this strategy seems insane. Shouldn't one consolidate one's gains before thrusting one's pride and joy into new frontiers? And yet, Mr. Bezos' frenetic pace, though costly in terms of personnel and failed ventures, has not destroyed amazon. It has, instead, shaped it into a rival to Walmart which was already the world's largest retailer before Amazon was even being conceived. Reckless, perhaps, but successful? No question...

A review of this work would be incomplete if it failed to address the controversies that have swirled around it. Many of amazon's luminaries, both those who granted Mr. Stone interviews and those who did not, have gone public with their complaints which have ranged from accusing the author of mishandling their quotes to making profound factual errors that might undermine the confidence of some in its authenticity. As there's no way to verify these claims, it is pointless to even contemplate siding with either party. However, some of the accusations do have some corroborating evidence. Mr. Stone does take liberty with his characterization of Mr. Bezos, occasionally straying into his mind during certain key moments to guess at his feelings, his thoughts. Mr. Stone also meddles in the personal history of Mr. Bezos in a manner that is, at best, presumptuous and, at worst, ethically questionable. However, the former is but a relatively small crime in the world of narrative fiction and the latter is a matter between the principals and not us. For the rest, one will have to decide for oneself who is more believable, the journalist attempting to thoroughly tell the story of a tech titan, or those inside trying to protect their friends and the brand they've all worked so determinedly to build. Given the balanced tone of the work which, to my mind, has few if any hints of a deeper agenda, I side with the journalist.

An inspirational and transformative work about an exceptional company and the even more exceptional minds and spirits that shaped it... A must-read for 2014... (4/5 Stars)

The life of one of our century's most gifted designers in Jony Ive

From The Week of January 13th, 2014

Humans have a complex relationship with objects of their own creation. Built to express needs ranging from the pleasurable to the essential, their utility ought to be far more important than their beauty. After all, valuable resources must be gathered and precious time expended to manufacture them, making it foolhardy for form to trump function. And yet, a simple glance at the clothes and phones, the houses and the vehicles, present in our world tells us that the opposite is true, that beauty overpowers utility at every turn. Why this is so remains unclear. Certainly, peer pressure plays a role; humans signalling to their fellows that they have taste. No doubt aesthetics also has its say, precision of design pleasing our powerful sense of geometric rightness. But no sense of fashion, no matter how strong, should have the power to overcome an object's utility, a truth most thoroughly pummeled in Leander Kahney's fabulous biography of Apple Inc. Visionary designer.

Coming of age in England's Winter of Discontent, an era of political discord, economic stagnation and social upheaval, Jonathan Ive has become the world's foremost designer. Raised by a celebrated educator who challenged and encouraged him, he won awards for school projects in his teens, was a partner at a designed firm at 23, and, at 25, had moved to California to begin work at Apple during the lost years between Steve Jobs' controversial departure and his triumphant return. Since then, he has gone on to shape the industrial design of virtually all of Apple's successful products which, since the introduction of the first iPod in 2003, have revolutionized technology, transforming it from the quirky fascination of geeks and hobbyists into a hundred-billion-dollar industry that lives in the pockets, on the desks, and in the hands of consumers the world over.

Chronicling these two transformative decades, Jony Ive is a spellbinding journey through the life of a brilliant designer at a fabled company. Mr. Kahney, a long-time technology journalist, has largely overcome the legendary secrecy of Apple and its chief designer to construct a fairly thorough portrait of both company and visionary. After dispensing with Mr. Ive's early life, the author marches us through apple's string of celebrated products, from the iPod to the iPhone, vividly capturing not only their aesthetics, but the innovations of design and manufacturing that made them possible. Consequently, the reader becomes fairly fluent with the modern mysteries of manufacturing, processes so exquisitely intricate that they have brought about the age of mass-produced products of exactingly high standards.

But while Jony Ive opens the door on the nature of 21st-century manufacturing, it is, at root, the depiction of one man's talent and how that talent has re-shaped an industry. Steve Jobs has been rightfully hailed for his vision and his marketing prowess; no one else has had the will to turn computing into a high-end commodity capable of compelling a substantial percentage of the world's population to buy what are fundamentally expensive toys. But perhaps his wisest, and bravest, decision was to redesign his own company, elevating Jony Ive and his industrial-design team above the Apple engineers who would bring their products to life. This decision has understandably created tensions within the company, jealousies that have seen engineers leave for other firms like Google where engineering is both paramount and sacrosanct. But however many of these battles apple has lost, it has, over the last fifteen years, won the war. By recognizing Mr. Ive's singular abilities, and by giving him and his design team the keys to its princely kingdom, it has inaugurated an age of beautiful computing that no one else has come close to matching.

As much as Jony Ive succeeds in conveying the visionary nature of company and designer, it is necessarily limited by Apple's famously tight lips. Apple considers virtually everything that goes on within its walls a trade secret, refusing to divulge even trivial details about its processes or its people. This philosophy extends to its manufacturing partners as well, Asian corporations too afraid of losing Apple's business to speak out about their own innovations. This is a pity. For there is no doubt that this is a royal marriage of design and process, of form and function, one that has shaped the early years of our century. And to have the vital moments of that marriage obscured by a silence bordering on the petty is as sad as it is neurotic. Consequently, Mr. Kahney is forced to unearth the broken pieces of a complex whole, doing what he can to fit the pieces together in hopes of getting some sense of the bigger picture. That he succeeds at all is a credit to his diligence.

For anyone interested in the intricacies of industrial design and the almost magical powers of modern manufacturing, an absolute must read. Jony Ive leaves no doubt that we live on the brink of a fascinating future, a future substantially stewarded by a soft-spoken Englishman with a rare gift. (5/5 Stars)

the fascinating and disturbing Economy of Prestige

From The Week of October 15th, 2013

Though we should all be wise enough to accurately and appropriately value artistic contributions to our various cultures, one glance at the ubiquity, and the absurdity, of awards, and award shows, for entertainment and science, peace and philanthropy, disabuses us of this notion. For not only do these programs capture the public's interest, a wave they often ride to the top of TV ratings, they seize the minds, and the passions, of our artists and our cultural curators as well, ensuring that everyone who consumes such content will be aware of the extent to which it has been adorned and celebrated. This is a shame because it conveys power over the culture into the hands of the elites at the expense of the consumers who allow their faith in their own tastes to wane in favor of their more famous and favored critics. This is a point wonderfully illustrated by James English's excellent cultural study.

Launched by the inauguration of the Nobel prize in 1901, the modern-day notion of the award show has gone viral, spreading to every corner of human culture. From the Oscars to the Tonys, from the Peace Prize to the Orange Prize, everything we read and watch, every measure of science and every tool of industry, has been hailed by some body, some organ, as the thing to do, or have, or know. While some understandably rebel against such curated conceptions of quality, most respond by participating in it by either vehemently agreeing or passionately dissenting, neither of which hurt the award in question. For agreement is merely another brick in the wall of its power while disagreement merely fuels the desire to create another award, one that more accurately represents an unmeasurable standard.

This world of glitz and self-congratulation, of power and taste, is vividly characterized in Economy of Prestige. Mr. English, an author and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, approaches his subject with admirable efficiency, laying out the anatomy of the award, revealing its costs, which are exorbitant; its mimicry, which is considerable; its power, which is immeasurable; and its popularity, which is indisputable. And in this, we learn not only fun facts -- Michael Jackson received 240 awards in his lifetime --, but we come to understand that, at almost every turn, we are being influenced by this world of agents and publicists, movie studios and book publishers, each of whom want both the ego boosts and the profits from award-winning products. Their hunger supplies the energy and the competition that awards and award shows thrive on which in turn become commercial vehicles for advertising disguised as product, all of it hitched to the notion that the gods of culture are letting the consumer in on what is good.

There is a problem with this, of course. Good cannot be objectively measured. It cannot be generalized, distilled, or agreed upon. In fact, good defies such standardization. For there are simply far too many personal factors, from mood to taste, that contribute to the manner in which a product lands on the consumer. Yes, we can agree that some products are more remarkable than others, that, thanks to a preponderance of appreciable consumers, they withstand the test of time to remain relevant long after their creators are gone, but this does not make them good, or laudatory. It simply makes them good in the eyes of some. But of course, such truth is inconvenient for awards which are only meaningful in a world where art is objective, where their seal of approval means something. But if that were the case, awarding bodies would never err in their selections. And were we to categorize their mistakes,such a list would be far longer than this review.

Perhaps the most revelatory note played here, however, is Mr. English's well-argued contention that antipathy towards awards and their selections drives the industry. For this passionate disagreement encourages the disagreers to create their own standard of good which invariably ends up mirroring the standard of those with whom they were in opposition. This, along with revealing how artists themselves campaign for their own works to win awards, leaves little doubt that we are far more obsessed with validating our tastes than we are with actually enjoying artistic works, confident in the strength of our own tastes.

This is engaging work that is both scholarly and fascinating. However, it leaves little room to feel positively about our culture and about the rights of individuals to choose and to stick with their choices in the face of cultural consensus. It is difficult to read this fine study without coming away with the impression that we are all damaged and diminished by the culture of prestige. (4/5 Stars)

The genius and the curse of Walmart winningly captured in The Walmart Effect

From The Week of August 12th, 2013

Of all the traits humans share with their fellow organisms, a desire for a efficiency must be considered the most pervasive and consequential. For though it does not rise to the surface of our everyday thoughts, in governing everything from the way we walk to the manner in which we approach daily tasks, it shapes our every action. This is not altruism, nor is it a conscious effort to leave as little a footprint in our wake as possible. It is an outgrowth of the harsh discipline evolution has stamped upon our genes. For when energy is scarce, as it has been for most of our genetic history, what little is available must be preserved at all costs in order to improve the odds of survival. Unlike every other creature on Earth, however, humans have freed themselves of the chains of that limited energy environment and exploded into a world where the desire for efficiency can have a global impact. And it is difficult to imagine their being any organization to better represent both the glories and the tragedies of this truth than Walmart. Charles Fishman explains.

Launched with humility and little fanfare in 1962, Walmart has become, in the decades since, a retail phenomenon that has swept the globe. Sporting a workforce of 1.6 million associates, enough to populate a small country, and amassing sales that make it larger than much of its competition combined, it has deployed the singular vision of its founder to create a retail empire unrivaled in human history. Eschewing flashy sales and headline-grabbing headquarters that so often tempt its competitors into profligacy, its philosophy is shockingly simple; sell for the lowest price possible. Then, next year, find a way to sell for even less. And continue until every possible inefficiency has been wrung out of the retail system. This not only fosters trust in customers who don't have to worry about waiting for half-off sales to purchase their goods, it drives their suppliers to streamline their practices until every non-essential element has been eliminated from their business.

This thirst for the lowest price has had a transformative impact upon the retail chain, allowing customers to purchase goods at prices that, adjusted for inflation, are a fraction of what they once were. However, it has also placed many of Walmart's suppliers in an impossible position. For there are only so many inefficiencies to eliminate. Once they are gone, Walmart's relentless drive presents them with one of two unpleasant options: lower the quality of their goods in order to save money, or lowering their prices and eliminating their profit margins which exposes them to the risk of being hurled into bankruptcy at the next bump in the economic road. Their only other choice is to remove their goods from Walmart's stores which, given Walmart's reach, would be tantamount to business suicide. This is the new reality and one entirely created by a company that did not exist fifty years ago.

The Walmart Effect is a revelatory examination of a remarkable company. Mr. Fishman, adopting a frank and conversational tone, walks the reader through not only Walmart's history, but the philosophy that has made it one of the first organizations to master the commercial opportunities of the global economy. From the humble wisdom of its founder to the everyday realities of its suppliers, the author discusses in glowing terms the delightful ways in which Walmart's single-minded devotion to the lowest price has improved the practices of countless companies, passing these savings onto the customer. We're invited to revel in the simple brilliance of a company that understands the basic human desire to get the best deal and not to be made to feel the fool, desires that Walmart has woven into the very fabric of their business.

However complimentary, The Walmart Effect in no way shrinks away from the company's dark side. Walmart's zealous pursuit of the lowest price has not only driven many of its suppliers out of business, it has forced many others to eliminate their unaffordable American workers and export their manufacturing needs to Asia where a toxic mixture of poverty and unenforced labor laws have created a fouls stew in which millions of desperate people are forced to toil for pennies. Walmart, like many other American retailers, makes all the appropriate noises about ensuring that it sources goods only from reputable suppliers, but these lame assurances ring utterly hollow, especially when one considers that Walmart would have to violate the core tenet of its belief system to avoid using virtually indentured workers. It would have to raise prices.

For all its virtues, The Walmart Effect, feels terribly dated. The degree to which it exposes Walmart's unforgivable insensitivity to the plight of those affected by its drive for efficiency is still relevant, but Mr. Fishman published his work in late 2005, before the rise of Amazon.com which, though still not as massive as Walmart, threatens the Arkansas giant's entire business model by offering the customer an opportunity to get the lowest price without even leaving his couch. Walmart's inability to combat amazon.com with a comparable online presence suggests that amazon will eventually consume Walmart once it can guarantee same-day delivery of its innumerable products. This is a consequential chapter of this story that Mr. Fishman did not foresee in 2005.

Nonetheless, this is a fascinating read. Walmart has undoubtedly done the customer a great service in making all manner of products more affordable, but in doing so it has helped to create a monstrous system of exploitation that cannot be ignored. Engaging work... (3/5 Stars)

The fusion of marketing, the Internet and SciFi in Pattern Recognition

From The Week of July 29th, 2013

As much as we would like to claim that capitalism rests on high-minded ideals of freedom and free markets, it is, inescapably, a system designed to encourage people to buy stuff. For it is only through this base consumerism that businesses can be profitable. Profitable businesses hire more employees which results in more people with employment. And what do employed people have? Money that they can spend on more products. This, capitalists argue, is a virtuous cycle, a means by which to iterate and innovate humanity towards a better, brighter future, but how can we know that it is not just a single, enormous pyramid scheme designed to line the pockets of the privileged few while everyone else is sold, through advertising, a vision of progress that most of them will never actually benefit from? Perhaps we can't know this for certain, but this first in William Gibson's contemporary works of science fiction will surely offer some cause to be cynical.

It is the summer of 2002 and the world is still recovering from the aftershocks of 9/11, an event which particularly haunts Cayce Pollard, a 32-year-old advertising consultant who lost her father on the same day, and in the same city, as the World Trade Center attack. Possessing both an affinity for the cultural effectiveness of trademarks and a peculiarly allergic aversion to brand logos potent enough to drive her to completely eliminate branding from her wardrobe, she is an invaluable asset to corporations looking to capture the zeitgeist of consumers and ride that wave to unimaginable riches.

This insight into the nature and value of semiotics, however, is a double-edged sword for Cayce. For while it has provided her with a skill that is as rare as it is prized, it has also driven her to seek patterns in everyday life in a manner similar to paranoid schizophrenics. This obsession comes to a head when Cayce finds herself mesmerized by snippets of mysterious footage leaked onto the Internet, the origins of which she must find. With the encouragement and aid from her friends in an online forum, she journeys to Tokyo, London and Moscow in an attempt to untangle a knot she cannot resist. For it in it lies truths about herself and her father that she must know.

A departure from the cyberpunk dystopia that made Mr. Gibson famous, Pattern Recognition is a headlong plunge into the vagaries of modern marketing that represents the culmination of the author's peculiar ideas about the zeitgeist begun in The Bridge Trilogy. Mr. Gibson's unusual insights into the manner in which some people process information were best represented by that trilogy's protagonist, Colin Laney, a man modified by a cocktail of drugs to find patterns in oceans of data. Cayce is, in a literary sense, the origin of that story, a creature who manifests an earlier, and considerably less potent, strain of that particular talent and uses it to locate and unknot significant events of the moment. Few people have explored this avenue of thought. Even so, it is difficult to imagine anyone doing it more justice than the author has here with his unique blend of weirdness, grace and cool.

More broadly, Pattern Recognition is, in spite of its protagonist's aversions, transfixed by brands. Scarcely a paragraph goes by in which a product name is not referenced. Moreover, Mr. Gibson drives home the degree to which brand names have become synonymous with their products by only referring to them as brands, iBooks, not computers. This creates a delightful reading experience, but more than that it invites the reader to contemplate marketing's power which only promises to grow as people and algorithms get better at understanding our eccentric tastes.

Amusingly, this fixation conjures up Pattern Recognition's most charming feature, the degree to which it is rooted in the now quaint technologies and rhythms of the early aughts. Cayce uses Netscape instead of Chrome, newsgroups instead of social media, laptops instead of smartphones. Indeed, written five years before the first iPhone, the mobile economy and the extent to which it has completely altered the information-sharing landscape is not present here in any way. Had this book been written merely three years later, we can well imagine Cayce having found her mysterious footage on youtube which almost seems designed for the express purpose of feeding Mr. Gibson's information obsessives.

This is by no means a perfect work. The plot is weak unto non-existent. The author makes some attempt to connect Cayce's journey to something that resembles action and drama, but this has mixed results at best. No, this is a novel almost entirely about the merits and flaws of men and women who, for reasons both internal and external, are compelled to live outside the box. In this, it engages our every sense. But if such speculative musings fail to capture the reader's interest, there's almost nothing else here.

Charming, fascinating, and sobering work... (3/5 Stars)

The history and science of that most desired part of the female anatomy in Breasts

From The Week of June 3, 2013

As much as we'd like to think that humans are creatures of the mind, empowered by intellect, shaped by morals and fired by curiosity, we are still driven by the base desires for what we can see, touch and taste. We can create the most complex technologies and philosophize at length over the finest points of Aristotelian logic, we can implement free-market economies and devote our days to the beauty of the printed word, and still we are consumed by food and sex, by shelter and family, by kisses and caresses. Perhaps this is well. There is, after all, a great deal of joy and comfort to be found in the treasures of fleshy, epicurean delights. And yet, these same excitations have the power to consume us, to reduce our grand intellects to the pursuit of pleasure at the expense of all else. Of these temptations, few hold the power and the objectification of the female breast, a truth expanded upon in Florence William's eminently engaging exploration.

Throughout recorded history, in carvings and sculptures, in song and story, we have celebrated the breast. It has been a source of nourishment and obsession, of critiques and signalling, of pleasure and frustration. It comes in a dizzying array of forms and sizes, a symbol of sufficient power as to warrant the creation of taboos in its name. But what is the breast made of and why has it become such a potent symbol of womanhood?

From the academic controversies that have swirled around its origins to the medical research that has revealed its vital role in the nourishment of newborns, Ms. Williams attempts to not only answer these questions, but to provide this most fetishized part of the female anatomy with some entertaining context. Beginning with its uniquely omnipresent manifestation in human women and ending with a sobering analysis of the ways in which it acts as a dumping ground for toxic chemicals that have accumulated over the lifetime of its host, she investigates, in Breast, its form and function, its social impact and its medical mysteries, all in an attempt to better understand this object of so much cultural attention.

Alternately humorous and chilling, Breasts is no fluffpiece masquerading as literature. There is no titillation here, nor is there any moral posturing. It is a serious and sincere attempt to determine the value and the purpose of the breast, to record its history, to measure its trends and to predict, in some limited way, its future. Drawing upon dozens of interviews and almost as many personal experiments with diet and environment, Ms. Williams sifts years of data and research into an eminently readable chronicle that leaves the reader as informed about the breast's physiology as he is about its augmentation. To have reduced such a mountain of information into such a digestible and engrossing product is, to say the least, a triumph.

While readers will be no doubt entertained by the vicarious glimpse of the breast-augmentation industry, Breasts is strongest when it stands firmly on scientific ground. Ms. Williams familiarizes us with fat and milk glands, with estrogen and other hormones. But most importantly, she enthusiastically joins with those researchers who have sounded the alarm about the way in which our modern world has disturbingly played with and reprogrammed the female body, tricking it into maturing earlier and earlier. These trends suggest devastating consequences for women in the future, exposing them to a host of savage cancers that have the power to rob them of good health and good fortune. Her call to arms, for increased regulation of these damaging chemicals, is heartfelt and level-headed. There's no wailing here, no rampaging feminism masquerading as popular science. Ms. Williams is calm, clear and thorough in a manner that should inspire plaudits.

Women's health is a fraught field in which to wade, one that contains as many opinions as it does curatives, as many clarion calls as it does conflicts. Breasts won't avoid drawing criticism. But that its purpose is clear, its motives pure and its conclusions eye-opening ought to earn it a place of prominence, even amongst this challenging crowd. (4/5 Stars)

Technical brilliance and corporate imbecility in Dealers of Lightning

From The Week of May 13, 2013

As much as corporations have helped to create and empower our modern world, supplying it with pools of labor and capital to bring products to our markets, they are no wiser than we are. Despite their fortunes being inextricably linked with being able to predict what's next, they cannot escape the biases, doubts and cynicism that befall us all. How is this possible? Because, while corporations possess far more intellectual might than the individual, they often fail to channel that might in any kind of productive way. Having emerged as a result of innovation, they become machines for printing money, not machines for making bets on the future. Some corporations escape this trap, but most invest in harnessing the next generation of companies, bringing them under their own umbrellas and praying that this infusion of innovative energy keeps them relevant for just a little while longer. But while this strategy works in the shortterm, the piper must eventually be paid. Few demonstrations have made this point more eloquently than Michael Hiltzik's history of Xerox Park.

Birthed in the first wave of technology firms that spawned companies like IBM and Eastman Kodak, the Xerox Corporation was a mid-century American titan. Its copiers ruled offices the world over, reducing to mere moments jobs that had once taken people hours to complete. Their brand became so ubiquitous that its name became synonymous with copying, a reality that will embed Xerox in the cultural consciousness for as long as the culture has documents to copy.

Flush with profits, Xerox could easily afford to make bets on the future which is what it did in 1970 when, in what was then just becoming the Silicon Valley we know today, it created Xerox Park, a research and development lab staffed by the first generation of computer scientists who had actually been exposed to these hulking machines while in university. Helmed by healthy egos and powerful personalities, Park became a theatre of experimentation that not only nursed key inventions like Ethernet which, even today, empowers networked computing, it created laser printers and personal computers, early models of the machines that would soon transform our world. This remarkable tide of innovation would culminate in the Xerox Star, a 1981 office product that married a personal computer with a graphical interface that could be manipulated with a mouse. The Star would also prove to be park's downfall, a grossly expensive commercial failure that heralded the mainstream arrival of IBM, Microsoft, Apple and the rest of the corporations that executed the technological revolution.

Packed with riveting characters and corporate dysfunction, Dealers of Lightning is a tour de force. Mr. Hiltzik, an American journalist, vividly captures not only the dawn of the mainstream computer age, detailing the early versions of the technologies that are so commonplace today, but the egos and the jealousies, the intellects and the foibles, of the men and women who created it. All this while painting a devastating portrait of Xerox's corporate culture, one which completely blinded the company to the reality that it held the intellectual keys to virtually every vital component of modern computing, keys it frittered away out of foolishness and ignorance.

The work is narratively driven by the young minds at Park. Drawing upon interviews and personal recollections of the principals who participated in human civilization's most glorious revolution, Mr. Hiltzik animates a host of fascinating characters who range from the irascible to the humorous, from the artistic to the introverted, capturing at once their brilliance and their frustrations. For in as much as these recent college graduates of the flower-power generation were churning out the technologies of tomorrow, their efforts seem to have been blocked at every turn by a company that understood them as poorly as it understood the future.

This leads us to the work's most effective theme. For while the quirks and the rivalries that characterized Park's geniuses are interesting enough, Dealers of Lightning is fundamentally about the abject failure of Xerox's corporate culture. Mr. Hiltzik convincingly describes Xerox as a company that had long-since parted ways with the notion of being a company about technology and had become a company about making money. He details how its fleet of managers focused on making sure the money faucet was stuck open, that this was their only concern, a reality that understandably doomed the company to a most appropriate irrelevancy. For no corporation that squandered the foundational technologies of our generation deserves to be the steward of information technology, a mantle Xerox thoughtlessly sacrificed for the sake of riding the gravy train until it ran out of track.

One would expect, then, that Dealers of Lightning would be a stinging indictment of Xerox. It's not. The blunders and the blindness so wonderfully depicted here is at least 30 years in the past, far too long for there to be any rawness to these wounds. Instead, this is a work of warning in the form of an epitaph to Xerox's cultural relevance, that it isn't enough to simply hire smart people and set them loose on the problems of tomorrow, that one must embrace change or die. No amount of money can help a corporation avoid this fate.

Outstanding work... (5/5 Stars)

A mesmerizing look inside the secretive perfume industry in The Perfect Scent

From The Week of March 18, 2013

Where there's wealth there's luxury. From the tribal leaders who collected gold and baubles to the corporate executives who accumulate diamonds and beach houses, this has been true for thousands of years. After all, what better way to signal one's importance, one's power, than to possess worthless trinkets and then ascribe value to them, to their scarcity? It is a means by which to express success and nothing more. And yet, thanks to capitalism's power to create wealth, luxuries are today a booming industry, aspirational brands that together are not only worth billions, but that have the power to announce one's arrival upon society's stage. Fine hats and expensive bags, priceless coats and be jewelled watches... These are today's gold goblets and steel-tipped arrows. These are our trinkets. For all of our enlightenment, our education, this trick still works. This lesson underpins Mr. Burr's excellent and entertaining work.

Of the many expressions of luxury, few are as potent as perfume. Considered a key weapon in the arsenal of the numerous secretive luxury houses that dominate the western world, it has been produced in a dizzying array of packages and compositions, from the innocent to the sexy, from the stayed to the eccentric, all in an attempt to obtain the perfect distillation of power and style that will not only cause humans the world over to surrender their wealth to possess it, but signal to those within range of its wearers that they are something special. Its seductions are predicated upon the evocative clout of the human sense of smell which, when activated, has an unparalleled ability to conjure up memories both new and old and, through this momentary connection, transport wearers to other places, other times.

In 2005 and 2007, first in Paris and then in New York, Mr. Burr was allowed a unique perspective of this secretive industry when, as a writer for the New York times, he was invited to write profiles of two very different perfumes. The first was Nil by Jean-Claude Ellena, a second-generation French perfumer, who was attempting to give Herme, the storied luxury house, a successful perfume to add to their other product lines. The second was Lovely by Sarah Jessica Parker, an industry hit that grew out of the Sex-And-The-City star's desire to realize a dream, to bring to market a perfume that expressed her own sense of sexuality. Through these two experiences, Mr. Burr ventures into the mysterious world of perfume, a 25-billion-dollar industry whose secretiveness is legendary and whose old-world practices seem decidedly out-of-step with modern reality and economics.

Though at times unflinchingly raw, The Perfect Scent is nonetheless a delightful expose of the world of perfume. Mr. Burr, who balances his fondness for his two subjects (Parker and Ellena) with searing critiques of the industry in which they toil, is an engaging guide into a world most of us know nothing about. Step by meticulous step, he details the industry's practices and biases, revealing not only the creative genius poured into dreaming up these exotic scents, but the stodgy management that decides which of them will go to market and which will be condemned to waste away in some forgotten cupboard, never to be savored by the people who invest so much money in these strange but evocative distillations of our world.

Though Mr. Burr's characterizations of Parker and Ellena leave the reader enchanted with their humility and arrogance, confidence and vision, it is the process by which perfume is created that steals the show. The author describes in fascinating detail the degree to which perfumery has been reduced to an alchemical science, leaving vivid in the minds of his readers the image of a lonely master unpacking the various components of a half-remembered scent and committing its ingredients to paper, measuring their weights, shooting this chemical breakdown off to a lab where these scribblings are given form, molecules precisely combined and returned to the perfumer for the examination of his nose. This singular hunt, to actualize an idea and then to perfect it, makes for a mesmerizing read, one that sports few imperfections. For though Mr. Burr may at times evince a certain infatuation with Parker and Ellena, this never strays into the kind of obsequiousness that would have obscure the truths present in his entwined tales.

Enchanting work made all the more powerful for providing the reader with knowledge of an otherwise unknowable world. One of my best reads this year... (5/5 Stars)

Outlaw Machine by Brock Yates

From The Week of October 08, 2012 Freedom is an elusive state. For as much as we proclaim its virtues and celebrate its proliferation, true freedom is antithetical to civilization, arising only when the individual is able to shrug out of the shackles of the state to become a liberated man, answerable only to himself. The truly free do not bow to anyone. They do not allow themselves to be enchained by restrictive laws or womanly vows. They are countries unto themselves.

Given the degree to which civilization has swept across the great body of humanity, there are but few places for the truly free to hide. There is no land they can claim, no banner they can rally to. They must exist as singular units within the broader superstructure of society, lampposts of righteous anarchism positioned along the dark road to the welfare state. They must hold tight to their values while the world moves away from them, towards its apparent destiny as a homogeneous melting pot into which all must be sucked and made to conform. Thus, to distinguish themselves, individuals must take on symbols, badges of honor and courage that signify them as creatures of enlightened thinking and singular attitudes. Mr. Yates covers the history of their most important symbol in this breezy and moving history.

Since the first of its kind hit the road more than a century ago, the Harley Davidson motorcycle has been a laborious machine only its owner could love. Prone to inexplicable dysfunction and hobbled by retrograde design, this infamous American bike lacks the power of its British brothers and the graceful perfection of its Japanese cousins. It is obnoxiously loud and notoriously difficult to drive, especially on the open road where more advanced models put it to shame. And yet, the Harley has not only stubbornly persisted, its popularity has, since its low ebb in the 1970s and 1980s, exploded, its fickle performance and its general inferiority transformed from drawbacks to virtues by its community of drivers seeking a means by which to separate themselves from the masses and express their unwillingness to conform. Every flaw, every drawback, becomes a badge of honor, a point of pride that, when repaired and endured, demonstrates to fellow riders a skill with ones hands and head that allow him to belong to a prized club of individualists who do not depend on society for their pleasures. This is a motorcycle that says something about a man, loudly and truly. He is not like you.

From its design to its corporate stewards, from the wars that gave it life to the gangs that made it infamous, The Outlaw Machine winningly captures the Harley Davidson motorcycle. Here, Mr. Yates chronicles not only the band of intrepid immigrants who envisioned it and actualized it, he gathers up the tricky skeins of cultural history that determined its fate. Though, at times, he waxes a bit too romantic over the bike's influence on the American psyche, this is a flaw easily forgiven in light of his unflinching analysis of the Harley Davidson Motor Company which, but for its most recent management, is rarely acclaimed. And yet, the fact that the motorcycle has not only survived but flourished successfully demonstrates Mr. Yates' argument, that, in some inimitable way, this flawed Hog is a perfect fit for those men and women who, though born too late to be cowboys, nonetheless wish to live beyond civilization's blazing lights.

This is not a story of corporate triumph. This is not a tale of engineering genius. It is not a history of a visionary. The Harley Davidson is antithetical to these clean, easy and even inspiring 21st-century narratives. No, this is a story about how a thing, almost accidentally, came to represent the angst of a subset of humanity who feel as though they have no place in the great, well-oiled machine that is civilization. It is a story about the limitations of order and about the means through which we all try to tell the world who we really are. And in this, it is beautifully done.

A vivid demonstration of how perfection can be overrated... (4/5 Stars)

A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

From The Week of July 02, 2012

For those of us blessed by fortune to have long lives, we will greet the dawn tens of thousands of times. We will wake from dreams and perform our jobs. We will consume our favorite foods and our favorite entertainment. We will ponder what's ahead while reflecting on what we've long since left behind. And in the midst of all of this thought, this life, we will try to understand our essential selves, to separate hype from truth, socially inspired flattery from real identity, to tease out that one fundamental kernel of personality that governs our actions.

Who are we truly? And which version of ourselves is the truest version? And if we're lucky enough to recognize that version, to understand it, to seize it, how can we hold onto it when the merciless abrasions of time are so good at wearing us down until we've released what we know into the chaos of the world beyond us? Ms. Egan considers in her ephemeral novel.

Though time stands still for no one, it has moved with particularly cruel speed in the world of rock music. From the exceptionally creative heights of the 1960s and 1970s to the soulless, corporate control of the more recent past, it has known the sweetest highs and the most decrepit lows in its journey to speak to the people about their lives and how they plug into the broader, complex world. It has endured deaths and drugs, breakups and lawsuits, file-digitizing and file-sharing, but though it lives on, is it relevant? Is it meaningful?

To a loosely connected circle of people who, at one time or another, live and work in New York City, the answer is ambiguous. For instance, Benny and Scott, once best friends and bandmates who fell out over a girl, hold opposite views. The former is now a powerful rock producer, president of his own company and a force listened to. Scott, meanwhile, is a vagabond, an aimless, damaged soul whose talent sparked up and died out in one chaotic night of rock glory now decades in the past. And yet Benny is the man struggling with his disenchantment while Scott lives free of such doubt. All around them, meanwhile, spin the lives of their friends and wives, assistants and children, orbits uniting and separating, merging and clashing as they too try to come to grips with the devastation of growing old in a world obsessed with the young and the new.

A rumination on the nature of time and lost selves, A Visit From The Goon Squad is a fascinating if insubstantial novel that manifests as quickly as it evaporates. A collection of formative experiences that span nearly as many decades as characters, it speaks to the nature of fame and relationships, notoriety and war, as a means of divining some measure of understanding about a life which is increasingly bombarded by false sentiments, false transcendence, false fame. In depicting the cutting betrayals and the life-altering bustups, the moments of painful truth and the moments of absolute fear, it directs us to hold on more preciously to the days and hours that pass us, to treasure them as dearly as we do our loved ones. For soon, they will only exist as phantoms in our memories which will grow increasingly unreliable as we decay into old age.

More interesting than the novel's plot, which at times borders on the brink of non-existence, is its structure. A Visit From The Goon Squad is comprised of shortstories that, while interconnected, could easily stand on their own as individually packaged set pieces. Consequently, Ms. Egan has permitted her novel's structure to hang so loose that the ordinary governors of plot, a notionally linear progression of time and events, are overturned, discarded in favor of a narrative that is unstuck in both time and perspective. This ambitious play largely pays off thanks to a cast of embittered characters who each entertain the reader with their quirky and self-destructive takes on a life that permits us very little by way of control.

However, though the structure largely succeeds in re-enforcing the themes of fame and decay that pervade the work, it fails when its characters fail. Ms. Egan has winningly rendered the divergent paths of Benny the sellout and Scott the authentic musician, but some of the peripheral players who have been touched by them never take flight. Rather than exposing us to their problems and their burdens, they merely delay a return to the work's centerpieces. Some readers are bound to have affinities for most of these actors, but rare will be the reader who has affinity for all, obligating us to wade through unenlightening segments for a very minimal payoff.

A Visit From The Goon Squad is a piece of literary art, an experiment in style, and a rumination on cultural trends. In this, it is pleasingly done. But the intentional weakness of the work's plot prevents it from making any lasting impressions. For an award-winning novel, it feels exceedingly forgettable. (3/5 Stars)

The Yugo by Jason Vuic

From The Week of October 10, 2011

To a pervasive degree, our world is shaped by fateful, corporate decisions. From the IPhone to the BMW, companies, the world over, produce innovative products in the hopes of maximizing both profitability and market share. Then, once these products are widely available, it is left to customer choice to separate the winners from the losers, the diamonds from the lemons. And boy, have there been some lemons. After all, for every Snapple, there is New Coke. And for every BMW, there is the Yugo.

This legendarily awful car, as Mr. Vuic demonstrates in this, his riveting look at an epic fail, is surely one of the worst vehicles in the history of personal transport. From its sloppy construction to its infamously underpowered engine, the Yugo, was the result of a slap-dash attempt by the communist Yugoslavia of the 1980s to generate a car industry that would alleviate its debts by servicing the world with a small car done dirt cheap. It should come as no surprise then that the Yugo, from its insubstantial weight to its problematic spare tire stored in the engine compartment, suffered numerous, devastating problems. And yet, despite its farcical faults, seemingly all of which have been memorialized in hundreds of jokes -- the best of which Mr. Vuic includes at the beginning of each of his chapters --, nearly 200,000 Yugos were sold in the United States from 1985 to 1989 when its problematic history finally overcame its bargain-bin pricetag and doomed it to the status of laughingstock.

As much as the folly of the Yugo prompts amusement, there is a serious side to this humorous story. From the pro-Yugoslavian lobbyists inside the American government who helped to make the car a reality, to the charismatic showmen who actually sold it, Mr. Vuic lifts the hood on the story of the Yugo, the little car that couldn't, in an attempt to understand just how such a poorly designed car could get through the rigorous screening that keeps most of the world's worst cars off American roads. He discovers that the Yugo likely wasn't as bad as it was purported to be, that its Yugoslavian designers worked hard and meant well when they modified the car from the Fiat it was based on, and that its disrepute likely stemmed as much from the chicanery of its salesmen as it did from its shortcomings as a vehicle. Here, Mr. Vuic is at his best, reconstructing the career of Malcolm Bricklin, a many-times-failed entrepreneur whose cockiness and boastfulness ensured that the Yugo would be a disappointment. For as much work as he did to seize upon the Yugo as an opportunity, to help steer it through the safety testing and bring it to market in the United States, his overconfidence, at best, and his fraud, at worst, clinched his and the Yugo's demise.

The Yugois a delightful tale about an epically bad car and its epically over-the-top salesman. Mr. Vuic is a talented author who balances, here, the humor of the Yugo's history with the dark side of capitalism. For as much as it encourages innovation by enticing winners with rich profits and widespread fame, it also encourages shysters to take shortcuts in order to attain that fame and fortune. There is likely no solution to this problem except, perhaps, to always doubt that which seems too good to be true. This is a thorough examination of a failed car, the era that spawned it and the high jinks that sealed its fate. As funny as it is informative and one of the best light-hearted efforts of non-fiction this year. (5/5 Stars)

Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein

From The Week of June 05, 2011

Why do we make princesses of our daughters? Though sons suffer the weight of their own set of parental expectations, these are nothing like the standards of purity and proper comportment we expect from our daughters. Are girls different somehow? Is this inequity a legacy handed down from centuries of doctrinally inspired societal thinking that promoted female chastity over all other womanly virtues? Is it a byproduct of the sophisticated corporate advertising which preys on girls by convincing them that they aren't real girls unless they have the right toys, play with the right dolls? Cinderella Ate My Daughter is one mother's effort to find an answer.

Ms. Orenstein, an author and journalist, explores, here, the rise of what she calls "girlie girl culture," or the princessification of young girls. From beauty pageants with five-year-old contestants to the line of Disney Princesses with whom girls are enticed to form an affinity, the reader is hauled down the rabbit hole that is the odyssey of raising a young daughter in the 21st century. She charts how girlie girl culture gained momentum after 9/11, as troubled parents turned to cocooning their daughters in the safety implied by fairies and magic, this while pointing out how much the corporates have influenced what is necessary, what is cool, what is desirable. Between tours of toy stores and interviews with the minds behind the products that fill them, Ms. Orenstein explores all of the psychological, social and biological influences that have converged to encourage young girls to remain innocent, immature, princesses for far longer than girls of prior generations. The picture that emerges is both knotted and devoid of immediate solutions.

This is not a polemic. Ms. Orenstein does not rail against Disney for its marketing prowess, nor does she blame the toy stores for proliferating such products. She appears to be a realist, recognizing that parents and executives alike are only trying in their own ways to fulfil the desires of girls to be girls. And it is here that Ms. Orenstein is at the peak of her powers. For as much as she has investigated cultural and commercial trends, she understands that every one of these efforts is an attempt on behalf of people to understand what girls want and, through the exploitation of parental bank accounts, to give it to them. And so Ms. Orenstein shifts her focus to the latest research into girl psychology. This isn't just an exploration of nature versus nurture,, or how much of what girls want is innate (internal) or how much is welded onto them (external); this is an examination of gender, how it differentiates us, how it impacts us, how it drives us.

Cinderella Ate My Daughter cast a wide net, but the balance its author strikes between the commercial and the biological marks this as a success. Ms. Orenstein is notably short on solutions for the questions she's raised, but I prefer no solutions to the half-baked and sometimes dangerous theorizing typical of many investigations of parenting and its trends. More over, it's refreshing to read a piece involving commercialism and not have the author heap knee-jerk blame onto big corporations for every societal ill. Every human being has agency. And though it's regretable that corporations are able to market to children too young to have fully developed that agency, corporations are, in the end, only trying to sell an ideal product for maximum profit. This is too light to be scholarly, but heavy enough to have gravitas. (3/5 Stars)

The Starfish And The Spider by Ori Brafman And Rod Beckstrom

From The Week of July 18, 2010

Hope for the future of our world resides in open systems, decentralized social and technological networks which reject the traditional top-down power model that has been with humanity for millennia. Not only is the concept of a strongman, commanding a hierarchy (closed network) perilously susceptible to corruption and narrowmindedness, it assumes that the leader's single brain will out-perform the collective intelligences of everyone beneath him. This may have been true hundreds of years ago, when the lives of the vast majority of people were lived within the scope of a single, lightly populated village; but in a technological society based on connectivity, connectivity on a scale we've never seen before in the history of our species, the closed, hierarchical network collapses beneath the weight of millions of educated minds collectively contributing to the advancement of a particular aim. The Starfish And The Spider is a clever discussion of both this idea and examples of how it has been successfully applied to every day life.

The title of this work is a wonderful illustration of the book's argument. A spider is the strongman. Everything, power, food, flows to him through his web. Kill the spider and the web dies. There's no one left to tend it, organize it. A starfish, by contrast, is a completely decentralized network. Cut off any part of the starfish and it grows back. There is no part of the starfish more vital to its functioning than any other part. The authors offer another, human analogy. The Aztec empire which, at its height, had a population in the millions and territory covering most of South and Central America, was felled by 500 Spanish conquistadors, captained by a man who deployed classic divide-and-conquer tactics against the Aztec's unpopular leader. Contrast this with the Spanish experience with the Apache tribes who held that the Apache culture was equally carried and advanced by each of its tribespeople, that if one warrior died, the next would rise up to carry on the ethos. Such a system confounded the Spaniards who, coming from a hierarchical society, couldn't conceive of a world built and administrated without leaders. Though many other causes contributed to the failure of the Aztecs and the endurance of the Apache, and though starfish are not immune to killing blows, the point is that our traditional notion of investing our faith and, our trust and our self-worth in a single savior only makes us emotionally and societally vulnerable to that leader's ouster. Distributing an equal share of faith and trust across a community of people ensures survival and persistence in the group so long as a single member of the group draws breath. It is a powerful and convincing reversal of fortune, the conversion of a weakness into a strength, that is demonstrated most often in the Internet-based phenomena of the 21st century like Napster and Wikipedia and Facebook, entities which would not exist, which would not have distributable content, without their millions of contributing users.

While the authors are successful in depicting the optimistic view of open networks, they fail to speak to some of the difficult challenges of leaderless movements. Yes, they are difficult to kill, but what if they've served their purpose? Will they naturally wind down, or will they have accumulated enough power that they will persists despite the wishes of their members? The Tea Party is an excellent example of a leaderless movement that, once it has gained momentum, will be difficult to stop. With no leader to subvert, the Tea Party is a powerful force for political and economic change in the United States. This is good. But what will be enough for the Tea Party? When will they be satisfied? When will they stop? Will everyone involved, everyone who has been given a purpose by the Tea Party, collectively decide to walk away, content in the knowledge they've done good, or will its embryonic leadership convince its members that more must be done? Simply put, is an open network susceptible to being converted into a hierarchical network by the twin temptations of power and money?

This is a worthwhile discussion of an important and powerful idea. It is argued well and it's certainly entertaining, but a failure to discuss some of the weaknesses of open networks left me wondering if this is just wishful thinking. The egalitarian principles of leaderless movements are potent forces for change in our world, change for the good, but egalitarianism doesn't have the best success rate. We can only hope that this time will be different. (3/5 Stars)

Idoru: The Bridge Trilogy 02 by William Gibson

From The Week of March 14, 2010

Though Idoru exists in the same world, at roughly the same time, as Virtual Light, its progenitor, the reader is introduced to a cast of new characters and settings. While this frees the reader up to read Idoru as a stand-alone work of fiction, and while I believe this to be the best book of the trilogy, excising Berry, Chevette and the rest of Virtual Light's characters so completely from the story is jarring.

We shift our focus from disunited California to Tokyo where Colin Laney, a productive but brain-damaged American, is hired on by the loyal lieutenant of an aging rock star. Laney is ordered to turn his special talents -- Laney's disability seems to have given him unusual powers for intuiting bits of critically important data out of a sea of mundane information -- towards finding out if the rock star (Rez) is being manipulated by his enemies into marrying an artificial intelligence. Laney's world eventually collides with Idoru's second main character, Chia, a disaffected schoolgirl from Seattle who is designated by her chapter of the Lo/Rez fan club to travel on her own to Tokyo in hopes of finding out if Rez is serious about marrying the eponymous Idoru.

Though the story here seems superficial, Mr. Gibson uses the characters in Idoru to speak to a broader movement in his trilogy, chiefly that information has become the most valuable commodity. This truth not only makes the holders of information important, it makes the finders of information extraordinarily valuable. Though a story about the importance of information is hardly novel, Mr. Gibson's approach interweaves this notion with the excitement and risk of new, revolutionary technologies and comes out with a finished product which delights both intellectually and superficially.

Finally, a word on Idoru's characters. Laney is exquisitely tortured by his disability which hangs over him like the
sword of Damocles, while Chia is so naive that she can't even seem to conceive of how much danger she's in. But as good as the mains service the story, Mr. Gibson's supporting characters burn even brighter. Rez's search for love in any form as he descends from the zenith of fame is poignant, as is the undying loyalty of Blackwell, his chief of security. Most potent, for me, is Laney's domineering ex-boss at Slitscan which is a sort of futuristic
Entertainment Tonight on steroids. Kathy is wonderfully repugnant and, to the extent that she is in the novel, is a treasure. They all bring life to the best of the Bridge books. (4/5 Stars)

Up In The Air by Walter Kern

From The Week of February 21, 2010

I love quirky novels. Though I do not always enjoy them, they have an oddly potent energy and passion I find fascinating. Up In The Air does not disappoint in its strangeness. Far from it. Any piece of fiction about a lonely man's obsessive quest to earn a million frequent flyer miles has surely earned its weirdness credibility a million times over.

Ryan Bingham, our disturbed protagonist, loves to fly. He seems to love everything about it: the chance to talk to anyone from any line of work, the sensation of freedom that comes from being 30,000 feet up, the ability to be anywhere in only a few hours. He loves rental cars and hotel rooms as well. They allow him never to leave any part of himself behind, no footprint, no signature. This kind of impermanence is a fetish for Mr. Bingham who is madly trying to complete his quest before his boss realizes he has left his job and retaliates by cancelling the credit card Mr. Bingham is using to accrue his points.

The novel takes a decidedly dark turn when Mr. Bingham starts to believe that someone is stealing his frequent flyer miles to take flights to places he's never been. Or has he been to those places, those towns and simply forgot? How would he know if he was? Mr. Kern's has written a story that hinges almost entirely on one character, Ryan Bingham, which is a gamble, but a gamble he successfully pulls off. There's a disquiet the reader experiences while watching Mr. Bingham's deterioration, a kind of anxiety I can only equate to watching the deranged unravel before our very eyes. And yet, rather than come off as ridiculous, Bingham is a clever allegory for our dislocated times in which nothing that we have, nothing that we own, is permanent, is lasting. Everything comes and goes, replaced by something new, just like Mr. Bingham, just like this keyboard I type on.

A thoughtful and powerful read. It reminds me of the not-so-quiet desperation exemplified in films like American Beauty. There's a franticness about the protagonist that is urgent and worrisome. Highly recommended if, like me, you like pieces that are some ways off the beaten path. (4/5 Stars)

Influence by rRobert Cialdini

From The Week of August 09, 2009

Robert Cialdini, a professor of psychology and marketing at Arizona State university, and a self-confessed sucker, explores, in Influence, why we all struggle to say no to people who offer to sell us junk we don't even want! This is a quick and thought provoking read that details techniques companies and charitable groups use to separate us from our money and offers explanations, scientific and otherwise, for why they are so damned good at it, even when we know their game. (4/5 Stars)