How to be Parisian Wherever You Are is silly and fun and a bit of a joke. The glamour and mystery of Parisians has been dissected to death, and glamour only works when there’s mystery. This book repackages the style and attitude of Parisians as something not to be taken too seriously – and that’s the best bit. I enjoyed it.
What’s it about?
Trust Me, I’m Lying is written by a PR guy (who used to work for American Apparel, amongst others) to describe how he used blogs and everyone’s need to be first with the news to manipulate stories. It was written a few years ago, and I feel like there’s more skepticism out there now; and even Gawker has moved away from its bonus to writers based on their page views.
Why should you read it?
Because, even though some bits of it are slightly outdated, there’s still a lot there about how the world of online news works. Blogs with big audiences watch smaller news sources for stories, and it’s unclear to me how much fact-checking is going on. I do think audiences are more discriminating – but maybe that’s just wishful thinking. If you are trying to get started in marketing, I wouldn’t suggest the shock tactics he uses, but reaching out to smaller blogs and basically writing the story for them? It’s not a bad way to begin.
What’s it about?
Far from the Tree is, to summarize, about parenting difficult/different children. The author posits a construction. Vertical identity is the culture you get from your parents; horizontal identity is the culture you get from the world around you. But what happens when your child has a drastically different horizontal identity? Each chapter looks at family units who are dealing with a radically different horizontal identity: deaf children born to hearing parents; autistic children; prodigies; children who choose lives of crime; there are more. It’s a sympathetic look at how parents and children navigate figuring out who they are as individuals and who they are in relation to each other and the outside world.
Why should you read it?
It is long (700 pages). You should read Far from the Tree if you have children or want children. It’s not going to give you parenting tips, unless you want to be hammered over the head with “your child needs to feel safe and secure and loved so DO THAT” and “find meaning in your parenting to be happy.” These are lessons so global as to be almost useless. But it does help you understand differences in the world – all the examples about Deaf culture or how the world treats transgendered kids illustrate that everyone does have the same basic needs: to be loved and accepted. (I did skip most of the chapter on kids conceived in rape. I couldn’t deal with 50-60 pages continually recounting women at their most vulnerable.)
Overall, a thorough book that’s worth your time.
What’s it about?
The Man in the Rockefeller Suit is a true crime novel about a German man who didn’t like who he was. So he pretended to be a series of other people, including a man called Clark Rockefeller. He implied that he was an illegitimate Rockefeller cousin, deceived a many, and conned a lot of others out of their money. He was caught when he tried to kidnap his daughter (after he lost custody of her in a divorce).
Why should you read it?
Because it’s a fascinating story, to think that someone could get away with impersonating American royalty for more than a decade without getting caught. It’s a news-y account – Walter Kirn also has a book about Clark Rockefeller, but his is more memoir-ish. This is a report of who Clark Rockefeller was and how he spent his adult life. I’m surprised that I hadn’t heard about him before reading this book, honestly. It seems like it would be right up American’s true-crime alley. It’s a good, light read.
What’s it about?
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is two stories, really. One story is the history of cell cultures and how medicine uses them to research disease. The other story is about Henrietta Lacks’ family. Her cells revolutionized medical research, yet her family continues to be downtrodden and not compensated. They didn’t even know her cells had been taken for many years. It shows how institutionalized racism was (and is?) still in the US, and how that exists side by side with science.
Why should you read it?
Aside from the fact that everyone else already has? Because it’s an interesting story, particularly in conjunction with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ article on The Case for Reparations. The law around who owns your cells that have been taken for medical samples was non-existent for a long time. It’s still very, very young. It’s not just Henrietta Lacks and her family. There are other cases involving other people. Should they be compensated for the cells that would not exist without their bodies? Legally and ethically, it’s interesting. Would it be justice to start compensating the Lacks family? The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks both teaches you science and raises ethical questions. It’s worth your time.
What’s it about?
Junkyard Planet is about the global scrap trade. It’s an industry I knew nothing about before I read the book; now I feel like I have an at least rudimentary grasp of it. Scrapyards are amazing places. My favorite story to repeat is about car recycling: before 1958, there was no effective way to recycle a car – they were left to rot or they were burnt. In 1958 a machine to shred cars – thus making their metal available to sell – was invented. In 2007, the backlog of all the abandoned cars in the US was finally finished. America got caught up. The industry is largely in China these days; it can cost less to ship a container of recycled metal to China from LA than to ship a train car full of it to the East Coast.
Why should you read it?
It’s fascinating. Junkyard Planet was much more engrossing than I thought it was going to be. It hits the recycle loop of reduce, reuse, recycle. Where does all the stuff go? How does recycling help reduce mining and drilling and logging? What can be recycled? But he also explains that reduce, reuse, recycle is a list of ordered terms. If you want to go green, reducing your consumption is more important than reusing what you have, and then recycling. Recycling alone can’t save the world.
May I suggest that you read the WSJ’s business-focused review of Junkyard Planet? I try to keep these short; they have lots more space.
What’s it about?
The Loudest Voice in the Room is about Roger Ailes and Fox News. It’s a biography of a man born into circumstances – hemophilia that turned him into a risk-taker, a mildly abusive father – that combined with his interest in television (and men like the Coors heir who wanted to fund overtly conservative news channels) made Fox News almost a fait accompli. As far as I know, it’s unique in that it’s not written from either a liberal or conservative viewpoint. The book is most interesting when it’s talking about Ailes early life and career. I put it down once it started concentrating on Fox News because I cared way less about that. Ailes is fascinating. Fox News isn’t.
Why should you read it?
I’m not sure you should. It feels like it’s about twice as long as it needs to be; unless you really, really care about the news industry you’ll likely be bored.
What’s it about?
Hatching Twitter is an oral history of Twitter. It’s more interesting than you might think. I knew it’d grown out of Odeo (an early podcasting company, killed when iTunes launched), but I hadn’t realized that so many of its early employees were, in fact, anarchists. Nor did I know how much of that ethos made it into its corporate culture – the aversion to making money, insisting that twitter is first and foremost about communication, its management’s disorganization, and, of course, why the fail whale was so prominent for awhile. This is the story of how Twitter started and how it’s grown up.
Why should you read it?
Look, most books about specific businesses or business people are gossip. This one’s no different – but it’s really, really GOOD gossip. There really is betrayal and friendship and money, and I’m sure there’d’ve been more sex if there had been more than one female early employee. In some ways, Twitter comes across as close to the platonic ideal of a Silicon Valley start-up: moving fast, trying to change the world, dominated by big egos. (Jack Dorsey does not come off well.) If you want to know how the Silicon Valley tech/internet industry works, it’s not a bad primer.
What’s it about?
The previous Freakonomics books were both kind of the same: they told stories of surprising findings about society by looking at a problem differently. The first book was responsible for pointing out that swimming pools were more dangerous than guns, that legalizing abortions in the 1970s lead to a crime drop in the 1990s, and how sumo wrestlers cheat. How to Think Like a Freak sets out to teach you to get at underlying issues in your own life, by asking the right questions, by thinking more creatively, by saying “I don’t know,” by getting rid of preconceptions, and by getting yourself better feedback mechanisms.
Why should you read it?
Well, I don’t know. Maybe you shouldn’t. But for me, it inspired me to change a project that I’ve been working on already, specifically, to take on a series small improvements rather than fix everything all at once. It reinforced the idea that I should be admitting that there are aspects I don’t know about. I have grandiose ideas about how to change things, but grandiose will almost certainly fail. How can I make small changes that will hopefully add up to a larger change? I like that it had an immediate, practical impact on my life. How to Think Like a Freak might do something similar for you.
What’s it about?
The Gods of Olympus shows how the ancient Greek Olympians are portrayed throughout Western history, from archaic Greece (~800 bce) to the Renaissance (1500 ce), with many stops in between. It talks about historical realities (Augustus was portrayed as Apollo, Antony was Bacchus, to his detriment as the two were warring for control of the Roman Empire), and how the Olympians as characters changed and stayed the same.
Why should you read it?
It turns out that the history of the Olympians is a useful proxy for a history of Western civilization. As different cultures become ascendent, they tend to adopt the gods and portray them as their own. The Romans’ gods transformed from civic deities into cults of personality after they conquered the Greeks. The gods became personifications of nature during the Renaissance. I’ve never read another book quite like this one – there are plenty of stories about the Olympians, but not another book that traces their characters through history and reflecting that back on the culture. It was interesting.