June 3, 2012

The top 10 most-read books in the world

Thanks for this link to my friend Jeevan Sivasubramanian at Berrett-Koehler Publishers. I borrowed this item from his superb newsletter, the BK Communique. Hats off to Jared Fanning for creating the infographic, too!

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June 2, 2012

The Pentagon and the CIA take a lot of punishment in this novel of rendition and torture

A review of The Midnight House, by Alex Berenson

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

The Midnight House of the title is a secret site in Poland where high-value prisoners in the “war on terror” are clandestinely flown to be interrogated outside the jurisdiction of U.S. law and even the U.S. Military Code of Justice. The term of art for this process is, of course, rendition, and the tactics employed by the secret team assembled by the CIA and the Pentagon can only be called torture. There’s nothing subtle about this novel.

The events that take place in the Midnight House over a two-month period in 2008 are so explosive, and so shocking, that they lead to an upheaval in relations between the U.S. and Pakistan, end the career of a senior U.S. intelligence official, and spark a series of brutal murders. As I say, there’s nothing subtle about this novel.

Berenson writes from an omniscient perspective, revealing the thoughts of a long series of minor characters as the story moves forward, but his soldier-spy-hero, John Wells, dominates the tale. Called back into action from an escapist vacation in the mountains of northern New Hampshire, Wells is maneuvered into investigating what appears to be the sequential murder of the members of the top-secret team that operated the Midnight House. Together with his nominal boss, Ellis Shafer, Wells soon finds himself enmeshed in a bewilderingly political set of tense, interlocking relationships among the principal figures in the story. As it turns out, nothing is what it seems.

The Midnight House is the fourth of Berenson’s six John Wells novels to date. There’s no sign he’s slowing down.

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May 30, 2012

Before Silicon Valley, Bell Labs was America’s hub of innovation

A review of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, by Jon Gertner

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

Ask yourself why the United States of America has remained the dominant economic and military power on the planet for nearly a century now. Is it the superior universal public education system we used to brag about? Is it the wealth of our natural resources: millions of acres of rich, arable land and bountiful mineral and petroleum wealth? Is it the peculiar American ability to build and manage efficient large enterprises? Is it the size and the demographic richness of our population, constantly renewed by the influx of resourceful people from other lands and cultures?

Jingoistic rhetoric aside, it’s most likely that your list of reasons — even, possibly, your only reason — is “American know-how,” the homegrown phrase that points to what seems an unusual national talent for creative thinking and innovation. In fact, it’s difficult to overlook the disproportionate presence of the United States on the lists of Nobel Prizewinners, industrial patents, and other markers of forward thinking in science and engineering throughout much of the 20th Century.

In The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner examines one period and one place where the evidence of American know-how was most pronounced: the time from the end of World War II to the late 1970s in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where AT&T’s Bell Laboratories was headquartered. There, an extraordinary assemblage of brilliant scientists and engineers, guided by a succession of equally brilliant managers, invented or developed into practical form the fundamental advances in science and technology that have shaped the world we live in today: the transistor, the laser, quality assurance methods, communications satellites, mobile telephony, digital photography, fiber-optic communications, and a number of much less well-known but equally important technological advances as well as a long list of innovations in weaponry and spy technology that many of us would prefer not to know about. (In fact, the relationship of Bell Labs to the Pentagon, especially its National Security Agency, remained close throughout the period studied in this book.)

It’s difficult to exaggerate the impact of the work at Murray Hill and its outlying sites following World War II. The transistor — the brainchild of three Bell scientists, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley — is frequently cited as the single most important invention of the century. Certainly, the transistor lies at the heart of all things digital today. Even more fundamental to the world we inhabit is the information theory of Claude Shannon, who explained how computers might communicate with one another long before anything resembling today’s computers existed.

As Gertner explains in great detail, most of Bell Labs’ work was carried out in service of the growing AT&T telephone network. (If you’re young enough to confuse that AT&T with today’s business of the same name, be advised that AT&T was America’s government-regulated telephone monopoly from the 1920s through the 1970s.) Those familiar with the network called it the biggest and most complex machine in the world. “The system’s problems and needs were so vast that it was hard to know where to begin explaining them,” Gertner writes. “The system required that teams of chemists spend their entire lives trying to invent new, cheaper sheathing so that phone cables would not be permeated by rain and ice; the system required that other teams of chemists spend their lives working to improve the insulation that lay between the sheathing and the phone wires themselves. Engineers schooled in electronics, meanwhile, studied echoes, delays, distortion, feedback, and a host of other problems in the hope of inventing strategies, or new circuits, to somehow circumvent them.”

Gertner makes absolutely clear, however, that “this book does not focus on those tens of thousands of Bell Laboratories workers. Instead, it looks primarily at the lives of a select and representative few,” chiefly scientist-managers Mervin Kelly, Jim Fisk, and William Baker and scientists John Pierce and William Shockley. Every one of these individuals was exceptional, and Gertner does an excellent job giving us glimpses of their eccentricities and missteps as well as their extraordinary lives and character and their accomplishments.

I can fault this exhaustive study in only one way: it’s exhausting, expecially in its concluding chapters, where Gertner spends far too many pages dwelling on the eulogies offered up by the managers who ran Bell Labs when it was alive and well, before the break-up of the old AT&T that was consummated in 1983.

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May 27, 2012

Joseph Wambaugh’s latest paints Los Angeles in many clashing colors

A review of Harbor Nocturne, by Joseph Wambaugh

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

When you read Joseph Wambaugh on the endlessly diverse “coppers” of the LAPD or the equally colorful denizens of their turf, you know you’ve met the truth. Listen as he describes three of Hollywood’s zoned-out derelicts:

“Their shirts and trousers were so stained and filthy they’d lost their color and seemed to sprout from them like fungus. Two had splotchy skin with open sores, and there were not twenty teeth among them. As younger transients, they’d covered more territory than Lewis and Clark, but as they got older they’d begun to vaporize into spectres that nobody really saw until they spoke. The unholy ghosts of Hollywood Boulevard.”

No, the world of Joseph Wambaugh and his creations who people the Hollywood police station isn’t pretty. It’s wild, gritty, funny, outrageous, and above all endlessly surprising. Wambaugh has walked these streets. He knows whereof he writes.

The harbor of the title is the shore of San Pedro, a portion of the Port of Los Angeles. Two of the town’s younger residents, Dino Babich, a longshoreman, and his childhood buddy Hector Cozzo, reflect the variously Croatian and Italian history of the place, and their renewed relationship becomes a central factor in the plot.

The story Wambaugh tells revolves around human trafficking and prostitution — and the unsavory people who profit from it. The plot works well and offers up tension and surprises to the end. However, Harbor Nocturne is much less a novel of suspense than it is a character study of the Los Angeles Police Department, as embodied in the coppers of Hollywood Station. If there is an overarching theme to this novel, it’s the extraordinary diversity of Los Angeles today, where 200 languages are spoken. The book features characters of Mexican, Serbian, Italian, Croatian, Korean, Russian, Japanese, African, and Jewish as well as plain old white-bread European descent.

Harbor Nocturne is the fifth and most recent novel in Wambaugh’s Hollywood Station cycle, which began in 2006. Like its predecessors, Harbor Nocturne takes us inside the station and inside the heads of the cops who staff its evening and early-morning “midwatch.” Familiar characters from the earlier novels feature prominently here: the sun-bleached surfer cops “Flotsam and Jetsam”; aspiring actor “Hollywood Nate” Weiss; and young Britney Small, who earned the respect of the “OGs” — the Old Guys of the station — by shooting a violent offender to death. and wishing she’d gained it some other way.

Wambaugh, now 75, is the author of 20 previous books, 14 of them novels. From his very first novel, The New Centurions, in 1971, Wambaugh has been winning acclaim and selling books about the police in very large quantities. The man knows how to write!

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May 22, 2012

The power of unreasonable people, and how they’re changing the world

A review of The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World, by John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

For more than a decade I’ve been deeply immersed in the world of social entrepreneurship. Yet somehow I neglected to read this important book when it was first published four years ago. (I acquired a copy, stuck it on a shelf, and promptly forgot all about it.) To my mind, The Power of Unreasonable People ranks with David Bornstein’s seminal work, How to Change the World, as a point of entry into this fascinating, and increasingly important, realm.

The field of social entrepreneurship, still early in its development after Bill Drayton first gave the concept prominence early in the 1980s with the launch of Ashoka, is rife with disagreement. Some observers insist that a social enterprise must be a not-for-profit enterprise. Others assert that only for-profit ventures qualify for the label. Fortunately, Elkington and Hartigan believe that the whole range of organizational forms can be thought of as “social enterprises.” I say fortunately because (a) I agree with them, and (b) to insist otherwise is to miss so much of what is exciting in the field.

The Power of Unreasonable People covers the landscape, describing examples from virtually every area of interest in development, from healthcare to education to poverty eradication. In fact, the book is most rewarding in its presentation of vignettes of individual social enterprises, including interviews with many of their principals. A lot of the examples are familiar to anyone active in the field. Some are not. However, this is no mere collection of case studies. The authors embed each organization within a typology of their devising, allowing the reader to get a sense of how they may be compared with one another. The Power of Unreasonable People concludes with a discussion of the structural changes that are essential if humankind is to prevail in the face of endemic poverty on three continents, ethnic and religious conflicts, and the growing impact of climate change.

John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan are two of the most qualified people in the world to have written this book. Elkington, a force in the area of corporate social responsibility for three decades and a prolific author, co-founded the consultancy SustainAbility in 1987 and originated the term Triple Bottom Line in the 1990s. Hartigan served as founding managing director of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship from 2001 to 2008, partnered with Elkington to establish the consultancy Volans, and now works as Director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford University.

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May 19, 2012

Washington and Beijing get what they deserve in this satirical novel of politics and diplomacy today

A review of They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?, by Christopher Buckley

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

Put yourself into this picture (as you might if you were reading this book and identifying with its protagonist): Your name is Walter “Bird” McIntyre. You are the leading Washington lobbyist for Groepping-Sprunt, a major arms contractor for the Pentagon. A Senate committee is meeting to consider a huge appropriation for your latest weapons system — an ocean-liner-sized drone aircraft armed with every manner of destructive weaponry known to the military-industrial complex. Testifying on the company’s behalf will not be easy. ”On top of the ‘funding factor’ (Washington-speak for ‘appalling cost overruns’), Bird and Groepping-Sprunt were up against a bit of a ‘perception problem’ (Washington-speak for ‘reality’).” After embarrassing you with hours of pointed questions, does the committee approve the appropriation? No, it does not. And that, for all intents and purposes, is where this tale begins.

With Bird’s job now on the line and the company’s future in doubt because of the huge sums poured into R&D for the oversized drone, Bird’s boss forces him to raise the stakes: find a way to gin up widespread public hatred for China and thus scare Congress into springing for some other overpriced weapons system. Enter Angel Templeton, a mashup of Ann Coulter and Mata Hari; Bird’s fetching young trophy wife, an equestrienne who is bankrupting him with her passion for thoroughbred horses; Bird’s feckless younger brother, Bewks, who wanders around Bird’s house in a Confederate general’s outfit, channeling George Armstrong Custer (sic!), ready for a reenactment of the battle of Gettysburg at a moment’s notice; Rogers P. Fancock, the Boston Brahmin who is reluctantly serving as National Security Advisor; and Chris Matthews of Hardball (yes, by name). Those are the key characters on the U.S. side. A similarly comical collection of Chinese players — mostly the members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party — rounds out the cast.

In between the two sides is the 14th Dalai Lama (yes, the current guy). You’ll have to read the book to find out how he gets into the story.

They Eat Puppies, Don’t They? is political satire of the highest order. I found myself laughing hysterically, sometimes for pages at a time. But, like all superior satire, this book isn’t just funny — its droll treatment of politics in Washington and Beijing is spot-on accurate. For example, “Fancock scowled at the top-secret cable from the U.S. ambassador in Beijing alerting him to the development that had been announced on CNN twenty minutes before.”

Christopher Buckley knows whereof he writes. He is the son of the late William F. Buckley, Jr. and has held a number of positions in Washington, including a job as chief speechwriter for Vice President George  H. W. Bush. (I will forgive him for all that.) They Eat Puppies, Don’t They? is Buckley’s ninth satirical novel. He has also written several other books, including two travelogues and a biographal portrayal of his parents.

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May 16, 2012

The truth behind one of the companies you hate the most (and it ain’t pretty)

A review of Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, by Steve Coll

@@@ (3 out of 5)

Until recently, when GoldmanSachs emerged as such a deserving target of opprobium, ExxonMobil was, without doubt, our country’s most-hated corporation. The two companies probably compete for that distinction today. Private Empire is Steve Coll’s admirable attempt to explain how and why the world’s most profitable private oil company became a pariah — and to relate how the company has changed in recent years. Oh, yes, it has changed.

Unless you’re under the age of 20, you were already highly aware of the ExxonValdez disaster off the coast of Alaska in 1989 — the country’s biggest oil spill until BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil platform exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010. You probably also knew that ExxonMobil is the direct descendent of the Standard Oil trust assembled in the 19th Century by the quintessential robber baron, John D. Rockefeller. So, perhaps it’s clear how, when the company came into existence in its present form — in 1999, with the acquisition of Mobil Oil, another Standard offspring — it had already been rivaling its ancestor for public displeasure for a decade as a result of Exxon Valdez. (“Fortune had ranked the corporation as America’s sixth most admired before the accident; afterward, it fell to one hundred and tenth.”) It’s pretty hard not to know at least a few facts about a company that’s often ranked the biggest private enterprise in the world and supplies so much of the fuel to which we are so blithely addicted.

It’s no mystery why ExxonMobil stayed so unpopular many years after the Exxon Valdez spill. A heavy-handed Texan named Lee Raymond set the company’s tone and policy during his 12-year reign as CEO (1993-2005). ”Exxon maintained a ‘kind of 1950s Southern religious culture,’ said an executive who served on the corporation’s board of directors during the Raymond era. ‘They’re all engineers, mostly white males, mostly from the South . . . They shared a belief in the One Right Answer, that you would solve the equation and that would be the answer, and it didn’t need to be debated.’” And, whatever that One Right Answer might be, it was closely held unless Raymond thought it needed to be made public. As one new employee he brought on observed, “the oil corporation’s system for maintaining confidential information was far more severe than anything she had seen while holding top secret clearance at the White House.”

It was Raymond’s determined, some might say fanatical, insistence that scientists hadn’t proved the reality of human-caused global warming that led the company to invest heavily in Right-Wing think tanks and other front groups campaigning against any proposals to regulate carbon emissions. Raymond’s successor, Rex Tillerson, despite his similar background, proved far more resilient on the issue. He discontinued the corporation’s support for anti-climate change campaigners and later took a high-profile public position in favor of a carbon tax.

Interestingly, “Rex Tillerson believed that transformational change would upend the oil business and global energy economy eventually. Breakthrough batteries might be the pathway, or breakthrough biofuels, or cheaper, more efficient solar technology, or some combination of those technologies, or perhaps something unimagined in the present. Not anytime soon, however. For two decades and probably much longer, Tillerson’s Management Committee concluded . . . [that] ExxonMobil could feel secure about its investments in oil and gas.”

Like Daniel Yergin in his excellent recent book, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, Steve Coll debunks the notion of Peak Oil, quoting ExxonMobil executives on the significant evidence against it. However, what both authors underplay is that the large new deposits of oil and natural gas the companies are adding to their reserves, seemingly by the day, tend to require more expensive and environmentally more damaging methods of extraction. Peak Oil may not be a reality, but we’re surely in for years of increasing costs, both financial and environment, to extract fossil fuels unless the leadership of the world’s major countries manage to cap and then reduce carbon emissions.

Unfortunately, there seems little likelihood of that. ExxonMobil’s own strategic plan projects rising sales of petroleum and natural gas at least until 2030 — by which point the total load of carbon in the atmosphere will be so great that the world’s coastal cities will all be likely to drown in rising water by the end of the century. (Name a big city: odds are 4 to 1 that it’s vulnerable to flooding from rising seas.)

Private Empire showcases Coll’s exhaustive research on ExxonMobil in its 704 pages. The book is structured chronologically, focusing on the period from 1989 t0 2011. Along the way, Coll constructs detailed scenarios that reveal the issues confronting the company in a number of countries where it sources oil or gas (or mightily tries to do so): Chad, Venezuela, Equatorial Guinea, Russia, Iraq, and Qatar, among others, making clear that “ExxonMobil’s interests were global, not national.” Though the book is subtitled ExxonMobil and American Power, Coll makes clear that the corporation is anything but an expression of American power. In fact, he details the sometimes fractious relationship the company had even with the oil-friendly Administration of George W. Bush, despite Lee Raymond’s friendship with Vice President Dick Cheney.

Private Empire is a modern-day testimony to the even-handedness of “objective journalism.” Coll almost never reveals his personal feelings about the company and its misdeeds. In fact, the book will probably be read by some as an apologia for ExxonMobil. It’s not: the author is just too good at ferretting out the facts. On balance, it’s entirely clear why so many people hate ExxonMobil with such fervor.

Steve Coll is one of America’s most outstanding journalists. He’s won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his reporting on the SEC, the other for his 2005 book Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. Since 2007 he has worked as President and CEO of a Washington think tank, the New America Foundation, having previously served as a staff writer for The New Yorker and as an editor of The Washington Post.  

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