part 2

As promised, I'm providing small reviews of five more books that you may enjoy. However, despite my lengthy justification for it, I'm scrapping my efforts to describe the mood or style of each book after giving the genre. The descriptions weren't really all that useful, now that I look back on them.

6. The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman (Current events, Globalization): There are an awful lot of uninformed generalizations readily proferred in many lay discussions about globalization, outsourcing, computers, and the internet in relation to the economy. Friedman's voluminous work provides a comprehensive, but accessible, explanation of the development and operation of the leveled playing field of 21st century business. Although Friedman's commentary on the current and future merits of this hyper-connected world may not be unassailable, he certainly gives structure to all of the disconnected talk about closing American factories, Indian Dell Help-Line Operators, and the powers of workflow software. Case studies are the main way Friedman presents sometimes complex, abstract concepts of business; some of my favorites were: the development of Apache open-source software, Indian telemarketers, and a start-up data entry business in Cambodia. According to an MBA friend of mine, Friedman's work is required reading for most upper-level business classes. So if nothing else, you'll feel kinda sorta smart reading it.



7. Shake Hands with the Devil by General Romeo Dallaire (Non-fiction): I decided to pick up this book after watching a film by the same name which followed General Dallaire on his return to Rwanda, 10 years after the genocide. While the film is primarily an examination of Dallaire and Rwanda after the genocide, the book is a detailed, day-by-day account of the operations of the U.N. prior to and throughout the genocide. A Canadian commander, Dallaire was in charge of the UNAMIR peacekeeping force, which, unfortunately, failed in its mission due to the inefficiency of the U.N. and apathy of the international community. The book is difficult to read, not because of graphic accounts of genocide--Dallaire mercifully spares us from numerous descriptions of atrocities--but because of the infuriating truth that the mass slaughter could have been prevented. The complacency, and even complicity, of Western nations was criminal.

8. Blink by Malcolm Gladwell (Social Science): By systematically studying intuition, Gladwell manages to incorporate modern and postmodern ideals into his examination of the human ability to know certain things quite confidently with very little information. In some situations, Gladwell proposes, more and more information only confuses the initial and correct suggestion of our instinct. Intuition enables us to make necessarily rapid decisions in everything from war to marriage to art--a few arenas in which he finds case studies. But in other situations, subconscious bias influences intuition in a manner that is destructive and even dangerous. Through understanding the dynamics of our instinct, Gladwell believes that societies and individuals can appropriately impede or release the power of intuition for personal and social betterment.

9. Piece of Cake by Cupcake Brown (Autobiography): There are plenty of autobiographies out there whose authors experienced pasts filled with dysfunction, addiction, and crime. I'm not sure that Cupcake Brown has produced the best of the bunch, but her story is surely one of the most dramatic and fascinating to read. (And, as far as I know, Oprah hasn't called her onto the carpet for any false details either.) Severely abused as a child in a foster care home and on the streets, Cupcake began drinking, using drugs, and prostituting herself before her
12th birthday. Of course, it only got worse from there. Her intelligence and tenacity eventually enabled her to become sober and successful, but most true stories about people with backgrounds like hers--I wish there were no such thing as a background like hers--don't have such pleasant endings.


10. Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh (Sociology, Social Science): The only reason I decided to pick up a book with such a sensational title was because, well, Stephen Levitt mentioned Venkatesh in his excellent book, Freakonomics (also something you should consider picking up). As a graduate student of sociology at University of Chicago, Venkatesh naively wandered into a dangerous housing project on the South side to survey poor young black men. He had an extended run-in with gang members upon his arrival, but he repeatedly returned to the community and ended up befriending one of the gang's leaders. I found that the most interesting story in the book was not the naive grad. student in the ghetto, but rather the organizational structure of the gang and of life in the Robert Taylor community. Though certainly unpredictable, Venkatesh reveals that survival in the projects is not random, but determined by an alternative infrastructure and code of behavior, rather than the normative systems of mainstream culture.