Nathan has
388 books
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| # | cover | title | author | isbn | isbn13 | asin | num pages | avg rating | num ratings | date pub | date pub (ed.) | rating | my rating | review | notes | recommender | comments | votes | read count | date started | date read |
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date purchased | owned | purchase location | condition | format | ||
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0061673455
| 9780061673450
| 3.39
| 283
| Apr 01, 2011
| Apr 05, 2011
|
I defy you to read the first chapter and not want to read the entire book. Orr says we approach poetry the wrong way, like we have to understand it al...more
I defy you to read the first chapter and not want to read the entire book. Orr says we approach poetry the wrong way, like we have to understand it all and wring the meaning from it with grim purpose. Instead, he proposes that we approach poetry as though it were Belgium: don't expect to understand everything, realise they do things differently here, but admire the sights and enjoy the occasional glimpse of insight you do get. The rest of the book is a run through the choices poets make, the squabbles they have amongst themselves, and why they matter (or not) for the reader. Orr is opinionated, he's our tour guide through the Europe of Modern Poetry, and he's happy to hustle us past great sights and suggest we notice various features (tiny willy, detail in the eyes, how heavy it must be to carry that bronze all that way, don't worry nobody else knows what this means either). It's fun but does requires some investment of mental effort. Then again, you've picked up a book subtitled "A Guide to Modern Poetry". Of course you're going to have to think.(less) | Notes are private!
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| May 04, 2013
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May 14, 2013
| Hardcover
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0140439447
| 9780140439441
| 3.91
| 75,166
| 1850
| Dec 28, 2004
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Dickens. What can I say that hasn't been said ten thousand times before? Brilliant, wordy, more quirky characters than Steve Buscemi's CV, and simulta...more
Dickens. What can I say that hasn't been said ten thousand times before? Brilliant, wordy, more quirky characters than Steve Buscemi's CV, and simultaneously capable of indulging in the most dribbly sentimentality for which the Victorian era was known AND shining a judgemental and very modern eye on many of the social injustices of the day. His characters are both deep and shallow: each one is brilliantly drawn, and he deserves every drop of praise he's received for his characterisation, but they don't have complex emotional lives--they exist to gawp and gape and pratfall and connive and blush and bluster, not as real people but as animate props for his protagonist (himself rather devoid of much emotion). To be fair, the protag's lack of emotion is part of the great writing. Copperfield endures much abuse as a child, much hardship and injustice, and the writing of this time of his life is so much more powerful because Dickens doesn't let the narrator describe the injustice ... instead, we feel it. Indeed, sometimes the narrator innocently puts a positive interpretation on something a reader knows to be negative, and the effect is mighty strong. I was never so in awe of Dickens' writing as in those passages. And the characters: sniveling and calculating Uriah Heap ("ever so umble"), prolix and penurious Mr Micawber ("Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."), the lovely Aunt (who was the most resonant and excellent character in the entire novel), even Mr Dick (soft in the head but not useless by any means). The plot was adequate, the pacing slow, but the characters shine like polished gems (even the irritating, by which I mean the simpering idiot child Dora). Sadly, however, I found myself wishing I'd picked up the Reader's Digest edition. The blither and the waffle and the self-indulgent prattle of even his most lovable characters eventually drove me to frustration, and I couldn't wait for the damn story to end. I think it will be a while before I touch another Dickens ... I haven't the patience for too much more of this self-abuse, no matter how beautiful the whip.(less) | Notes are private!
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| May 13, 2013
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May 14, 2013
| Paperback
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1936365766
| 9781936365760
| 3.80
| 294
| Apr 10, 2012
| Apr 03, 2012
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Wins, made of wins. The essay appreciating Werner Herzog left me colder than cold, but every other one was a winner. His writing style is beautiful an...more
Wins, made of wins. The essay appreciating Werner Herzog left me colder than cold, but every other one was a winner. His writing style is beautiful and his sense of humour sharp. Standouts: Unflowered Aloes (about the contingency of literary success); "Grief and the Outsider" (deconstructing a poser literary collective's "manifesto"); "Euphorias of Perrier" (slashing the lazy travel writing of Robert D. Kaplan); and "Great and Terrible Truths" (about David Foster Wallace and suicide). Interestingly, the book works from deep hard literature to contemporary screen. The last few essays look at Chuck Lorre (the sitcom master behind "Two and a Half Men" and "Big Bang Theory" among many others); an excruciatingly awful (yet obliviously so) movie called "The Room"; and a voice actress who is famous in videogame circles. They were just as interesting, just as well-written, yet without the Serious and Weighty subject matter of the early essays.(less) | Notes are private!
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1
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| May 04, 2013
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May 03, 2013
| Paperback
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3.50
| 2
| Jan 01, 2011
| 2011
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For what it is ("Celebrating 35 Years of McDonald's in New Zealand"), it's good. A relatively quick run through the history, from the entrepreneurial...more
For what it is ("Celebrating 35 Years of McDonald's in New Zealand"), it's good. A relatively quick run through the history, from the entrepreneurial brothers with the idea of starting the first McDonald's franchise in the mid-70s to current day. Three interesting take-aways: I'd lost track of how much New Zealand's attitude to capitalism has changed in the last forty years. The New Zealand economy of the mid-70s was not geared to overseas investment. It was tightly regulated and the labour force compulsorily unionised. Import licensing was a powerful protectionist bulwark against the establishment of any company that needed to bring in goods manufactured abroad. Rosalie Hawes, hired to be the first secretary for McDonald’s, was immediately thrown into the struggle to find the equipment for the restaurants before the opening day scheduled for 7th June 1976. ‘So I’d spend my days ringing around companies in Auckland to ask if they had any spare import licences for wallpaper, uniforms, anything that was going. I had to find the licence to cover what we were bringing in. It was very challenging – and it was fun, I guess. I was constantly ringing up members of Parliament and getting their assistance.’ Second point: The original founder, Wally, was too tight: he was funding McDonald's NZ on the back of his discount supermarket chain ShopRite. It eventually went under, and McD's used that as leverage to buy him out. Without him, it expanded faster and better. The two subsequent heads of McD's NZ (Lloydd and Dunn) were good enough to shine internationally. They'd been with McD's NZ for ages. Final point: the death curve of NZ business. Bloody near EVERY supplier mentioned, the ones that were all the local nous that McD's helped to build, the factories and warehouse and processing plants and ovens ... they're now owned by foreign companies whose job is to run that type of McD's supplier in various companies. Paralleling that, McD's reduced the size of the NZ management (which had produced some good locals, who went on to shine internationally) so it's basically a pimple on the side of Australia. AND, icing on the cake, they're consolidating franchisees: they stack rank the franchises in profitability and offer the low-profit stores to the high-profit franchisees. This consolidation surely makes it harder for new entrants (particularly as it can be $5.5M and a year without income to start your own McD's franchise). Gone from "plucky Kiwi success story" to remote-controlled exploitation in just 35 years! I did enjoy the glimpses at McD's obsession with the basics, and their amazing training process. A fun quick read if you're able to read between the hagiographic lines and pull out the details that interest you.(less) | Notes are private!
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| Apr 19, 2013
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Apr 19, 2013
| Paperback
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1576752933
| 9781576752937
| 3.80
| 75
| Aug 2004
| Sep 09, 2004
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Our thinking is built from assumed oppositions: emotional vs rational, personal vs professional, individual vs corporate. I've been chewing up a lot o...more
Our thinking is built from assumed oppositions: emotional vs rational, personal vs professional, individual vs corporate. I've been chewing up a lot of books talking about building business that other people can run, and their model is the restaurant industry: minimum wage employees have to deliver consistent and excellent experiences for customers. Consequently the view of business is very impersonal: the people are interchangeable units and the business is the enduring structure built around them. A corporation is, literally, a body and the people inside it are subordinate to the larger entity's emergent wishes. Within that mindset, a process should not depend on the unique properties of the person doing it. I mean, given a basic functioning human you should be able to drop them into the job and they function. They might need specialist knowledge, but they shouldn't have to be a specific type of person--if you need people to be greeted with a smile, that's something that the person in the job does rather than a job that requires only happy people. Adam Kahane's book, on the other hand, is personal. He takes us through his history as an economist and scenario planner at Shell, finally into his work on conflict resolution after the scenario planning for South Africa led to significant breakthroughs. We see how much of what he's done and become is about himself: not just his skills, but also his approach and attitudes and insights. And that the system he's built, a way of getting people to sit down in safety and understand each other's positions and the consequences of their actions, is built on changing people. They don't occupy roles and rigid structures, this is about changing *them* and the people you get and what you do with them matters. It's fascinating, well written, and thought-provoking. I'd love to be a part of one of his workshops. The first brainstorming exercise produced thirty stories. The team combined these and narrowed them down to nine for further work, and set up four subteams to flesh out the scenarios along social, political, economic, and international dimensions. [...] They first addressed the nine scenarios in more depth and then narrowed the field to four that they thought, given the current situation in the country, were the most plausible and important. After that workshop, the team went back to their own organizations and networks to test these four scenarios. At a third workshop, in March 1992, the participants reviewed and refined the write-ups of the final scenarios and agreed how they would be published and disseminated. [...] How he thinks of problems: My key insight was that South Africans had discovered an exceptionally effective way to solve tough problems. I proved this to myself with the painstaking logic of an ex-physicist. I knew that problems are tough because they are complex, and that there are three types of complexity: dynamic, generative, and social. On violence: Gorka Espiau, an Elkarri staff member, explained to me the interaction between violence and nondialogue: "If I know that you, my opponent, would approve of my being killed, that you do not have a basic respect for human life, then how can I have an open, human dialogue with you? And yet without such a dialogue, how can we end the violence? We have to start with a political dialogue to reach an agreement to stop the killing. Then we can have the human dialogue that we need to resolve the deeper underlying conflict." On talking: This pattern of not talking and not listening is a symptom of being stuck. Whether or not the actors are on speaking terms, they are not on listening terms. Like the Basque parliamentarians (and many parliamentarians elsewhere), they have made up their minds before their opponents speak. Even if they are silent and pretending to listen, they are really only "reloading," rehearsing their rebuttals. They are in fact listening only to themselves, to the tapes they play over and over in their heads about why they are right and others are wrong. My partner Otto Scharmer calls the kind of talking that takes place in these situations "downloading" because the speaker is reproducing an old file without alteration. The actors sometimes fight openly and violently, and sometimes cover their differences with politeness, skirting sensitive subjects in order to keep the peace. Either way, they are stunted, unable to express who they are in new ways and unable to take in what others are telling them. If they can change this pattern and start to talk and listen, they blossom. On dictators: I went to Paraguay to work with forty-five of the country's most open-minded and public-spirited politicians, activists, businesspeople, generals, judges, journalists, intellectuals, peasants, and students. They had agreed to talk together, but I was puzzled by how slowly our work progressed. Most of them seemed to be exceptionally suspicious, cynical, and pessimistic, and hesitant about speaking openly. They deferred to me even on questions for which I had no good answers. Conversations went in circles; understandings came unraveled; commitments were not kept. On Politeness: Politeness is a way of not talking. When we are being polite, we say what we think we should say: "How are you?" "I'm fine." We do not say what we are really thinking because we are afraid of a social rupture: "How are you?" "I'm terrible." When we talk politely, we are following the party line, trying to fit in and so keep the social system whole and unchanged, even though the whole may be diseased or counterfeit. Talking only about concepts is one way of being polite. Usually we are not even aware that we are following rules of politeness, but when we first enter a system with an unfamiliar set of rules--as when I entered PG&E and Shell--we notice them. Facilitation: I started working with a brilliant South African consultant named Louis van der Merwe. He taught me that the job of a facilitator is to help the participants speak up, listen up, and bring all of their personal resources to the work at hand. Our job is not to direct or control the participants. He also taught me that even though we were remaining neutral with respect to the substance of the participants' work, our process was not neutral: it embodied values of openness, inclusion, and collaboration. Suggestions: How can you get started? Here are ten suggestions: 1. Pay attention to your state of being and to how you are talking and listening. Notice your own assumptions, reactions, contractions, anxieties, prejudices, and projections. 2. Speak up. Notice and say what you are thinking, feeling, and wanting. 3. Remember that you don't know the truth about anything. When you think that you are absolutely certain about the way things are, add "in my opinion" to your sentence. Don't take yourself too seriously. 4. Engage with and listen to others who have a stake in the system. Seek out people who have different, even opposing, perspectives from yours. Stretch beyond your comfort zone. 5. Reflect on your own role in the system. Examine how what you are doing or not doing is contributing to things being the way they are. 6. Listen with empathy. Look at the system through the eyes of the other. Imagine yourself in the shoes of the other. 7. Listen to what is being said not just by yourself and others but through all of you. Listen to what is emerging in the system as a whole. Listen with your heart. Speak from your heart. 8. Stop talking. Camp out beside the questions and let answers come to you. 9. Relax and be fully present. Open up your mind and heart and will. Open yourself up to being touched and transformed. 10. Try out these suggestions and notice what happens. Sense what shifts in your relationships with others, with yourself, and with the world. Keep on practicing.(less) | Notes are private!
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| Apr 03, 2013
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Apr 02, 2013
| Hardcover
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B007NJPRRM
| 4.00
| 790
| Sep 01, 2012
| Sep 27, 2012
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It always feels like failure to abandon a book, no matter how much I rationalise it to myself. What's even worse with The Fractal Prince is that I lov...more
It always feels like failure to abandon a book, no matter how much I rationalise it to myself. What's even worse with The Fractal Prince is that I loved the original, and was looking forward to the sequel. What happened? I don't know, but I couldn't get past page 10: the words weren't sticking, I couldn't tell you what was happening or why I should care. This is undoubtedly to do with me (distracted, busy, unable to give it the attention it deserves), rather than the story. Apologies to Rajaniemi for bouncing off his art.(less)
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| Apr 03, 2013
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Apr 02, 2013
| Kindle Edition
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0385349947
| 9780385349949
| 4.00
| 6,752
| Mar 11, 2013
| Mar 11, 2013
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Apparently there was some kerfuffle in the press about this. I blissfully sailed into the book largely unaware of the noise, and utterly enjoyed it. I...more
Apparently there was some kerfuffle in the press about this. I blissfully sailed into the book largely unaware of the noise, and utterly enjoyed it. It rang true with the stories i hear from women I work with, and where it overlapped with my personal experience there was never a "huh, wha?" moment. I've already used some of the things i read, and have pushed it into the hands of several women. Buy it, read it, share it. It's excellent. And, if you're a man, there's plenty for you. Take this thought-provoking line: Until women have supportive employers and colleagues as well as partners who share family responsibilities, they don’t have real choice. And until men are fully respected for contributing inside the home, they don’t have real choice either. I grapple with "ought" problems a lot. Like, I "ought" to be doing more, to be more, to have accomplished more. But then I look at what I've got, and I'm living a great life with an amazing woman and two brilliant and well-adjusted kids. Holy shit, no drugs, no health problems, sunshine, no war, no plague, .... my life is full of blessings, yet there's an oppressive voice pushing me to do more. Why is that voice not valuing these things? Why is it that we give knighthoods and New Years Honours to people who are titans of industry or selfless philanthropists or accomplished creatives ... but not to excellent mums and dads? Why's that shit, which ultimately I believe is the ONLY reason we're here on earth, so consistently undervalued (affecting both men, who aren't rewarded with esteem for doing it, and women, who are often expected to do it and still not rewarded with esteem). (less) | Notes are private!
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| Mar 30, 2013
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Mar 30, 2013
| Hardcover
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0805090037
| 9780805090031
| 4.28
| 13,942
| 2012
| May 08, 2012
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I know from past experience on awards committees that often it's as much a reflection of compromise as merit. I can't help but feel the Booker for thi...more
I know from past experience on awards committees that often it's as much a reflection of compromise as merit. I can't help but feel the Booker for this book falls into the former category. To be sure, there's plenty of writing in Mantel's writing and her adaptation and insight into history--it does feel "real", whatever that's supposed to mean!--but her style is repetitive (I will be doing shots when I hear "he, Cromwell" in the third book) and excessive. Perhaps it's meant to be that way: why criticise a flowing gown for not being tight jeans when a gown is not a pair of jeans? But, for this book far more so than its predecessor, the style was visible and laid on a tad too thick. But it won't stop me buying the third book as soon as it's out ...(less) | Notes are private!
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| Mar 30, 2013
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159420229X
| 9781594202292
| 3.79
| 19,854
| Jan 01, 2011
| Mar 03, 2011
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AWESOME! I'd always wondered how those clever buggers managed to remember the order of cards in four shuffled decks. I have a crappo memory: I forget...more
AWESOME! I'd always wondered how those clever buggers managed to remember the order of cards in four shuffled decks. I have a crappo memory: I forget names and faces, and I prefer to only have one thing to do at a time. I'm notorious in our house for starting something and then leaving it, forgetting the stove is on or the washing machine is filling. This book traces the memory wizards who show off their prodigious memories at contests. It gives a glimpse of that curious life, the odd folks who do it and the rather dull systems they use to get it done. Turns out, the Greeks nailed it: create a vivid map of places, store images of the things (or images that remind you of the things, or images that are in a code which spell out the thing), and then walk through the house when you want to remember them. The ability to do this gets better with practice, so pretty much anyone can do it. The hard work is in the practice. It takes a long time and you've got to want to get better. I'm not to the point of wanting to enter the contests myself (as the author did), but I did take heart from the central message: memory of specific things will get better with exercise. So I'm trying harder with names, and seem to be having some success. Damned if I can figure out my queue, though: we have a stove element covered in molten plastic from last week to show that I'm still as dimwitted there as ever. Foer writes well, the book is a quick and easy read, and the insights into the personalities and techniques are good. Unlike many "REMEMBER EVERYTHING! NOW!" books, this one teaches you the shape of the system but the book is about more than memory palaces and mnemonic systems. It's about the curious world of competitions and the curious people who compete in them, as much as it's about the author's personal journey to learn these techniques. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Mar 30, 2013
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Mar 30, 2013
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0273750216
| 9780273750215
| 4.15
| 13
| Jun 20, 2011
| Jun 30, 2011
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Do *not* be put off by "MBA" in the title. Ignore that. Some of the best lessons I've had were given to me by older and wiser folks, relating their own...more Do *not* be put off by "MBA" in the title. Ignore that. Some of the best lessons I've had were given to me by older and wiser folks, relating their own tales and experiences. Some of the worst I've had have been lectures about frameworks and hierarchies of thought divorced from action. Owen's excellent book has the feel of a wise advisor, without repeating the pap and blather of the zillion other books on the market. It's brief, readable, and always practical. For example, here is Owen on something as simple as getting up in the morning: Here are three ways of getting up in the morning. I have tried all three. Take your pick. Hells yes! Or on reading for business vs reading for pleasure: I thought I knew how to read, until I came across Andrew. We were all sitting in the old-fashioned partners’ office. We thought we were all pretty bright, except for Andrew. If we shone as brightly as a hundred-watt bulb, he was a solitary, spluttering candle. But much to our annoyance, all the staff reckoned that Andrew was brighter than the rest of us. And some important vocabulary extensions: Don’t worry about the jargon: at least we all recognize it when we hear it. The really nasty language in business consists of normal words with abnormal meanings. Here are 12 which should put you on high alert He talks about the art of the good meeting, building your career (assuming you're on a corporate ladder and want to play the game), even on how to manage normal people vs how to manage MBAs ("Top MBA graduates can be very high maintenance but very high performance. The trick is to maximize the performance and minimize the maintenance. If there is such a thing as a typical top MBA graduate then he or she will: Have very high expectations and ambition; Have a big but fragile ego; Be a natural over-achiever; Be naive about handling people, at least early on in their career.") Some other random highlights: The goal of strategy is very simple: you have to find a source of unfair competition which results in making excess profits. Regulators and competitors should hate you for this, but without it, you fail. Every firm needs to make “excess” profits somewhere to stay alive: this profit sanctuary will help to pay for all the projects that go wrong, for investments that take time to mature, and to offset the impact of competition, customers, taxpayers, and staff who always seem to want more and give less.(less) | Notes are private!
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| Mar 30, 2013
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1409114082
| 9781409114086
| 4.30
| 96
| Aug 18, 2011
| Aug 18, 2011
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See my review of "Killer of Men". Still enjoyable, manages to differentiate from the first in the series (against all odds!).
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| Mar 30, 2013
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1409114112
| 9781409114116
| 4.17
| 48
| Sep 13, 2012
| Sep 13, 2012
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See my review of "Killer of Men". Good, by this time the protagonist is very different from his earlier incarnation. But I won't be seeking more in th...more
See my review of "Killer of Men". Good, by this time the protagonist is very different from his earlier incarnation. But I won't be seeking more in the series unless there's another very long dry summer week spent on a beach with nothing to do. I feel like I've travelled as far as I need to with Arimnestos of Plataea.(less)
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| Mar 30, 2013
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Mar 30, 2013
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0752898582
| 9780752898582
| 4.12
| 191
| Jan 01, 2010
| Jan 08, 2010
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FUN. Rough-and-tumble bumpkin from Plataea learns to master his body, the sword and shield, and eventually his mind. This is book one in the series, a...more
FUN. Rough-and-tumble bumpkin from Plataea learns to master his body, the sword and shield, and eventually his mind. This is book one in the series, and I loved it. The author's a recreator, an enthusiastic amateur historian who sails the Aegean in replica craft and fights with home-made recreations of weaponry. Whether because of this or a natural talent, the story comes alive in a simple but vivid way that other historical novels often fail. At its heart the protagonist is a likable (sometimes foolish, never evil) chap who deserves his successes and lets us feel his losses. This is book one of the three in the series that I read. The author manages, as the protagonist grows up, to make him older and wiser. He's a clueless teen, an impetuous twenty-something, but by his thirties he's slowing down and learning not to repeat the mistakes of his youth. This is GREAT because the protagonist of the later books is, blessedly, not identical to the protagonist of the earlier books. The conceit is that the protagonist fought at, was central to, and his life was shaped by, the major Greek/Persian wars of antiquity: the battle of Marathon and subsequent set-tos. It was a fun way to get a sense of the history, more fun than (say) the dusty textbooks I have on my shelf ...(less) | Notes are private!
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| Mar 30, 2013
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1905940831
| 9781905940837
| 3.13
| 38
| Jan 01, 2008
| 2008
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Tedious and uninspiring. Some of the best bits were the quotes: "Our brains deal exclusively with special-case experiences. --Buckminster Fuller, "Oper...more Tedious and uninspiring. Some of the best bits were the quotes: "Our brains deal exclusively with special-case experiences. --Buckminster Fuller, "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, 1963." Some notes: Porter's Five Forces: On the whole, not worth bothering with. Point 46: start a blog. The only time I want to know about personal brands is when someone's running at me with a piece of red-hot metal.(less) | Notes are private!
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097860783X
| 9780978607838
| 3.60
| 10
| Oct 01, 2008
| Oct 01, 2008
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This is the book I wish I'd read before I met a prospective client, who was CEO of his large organization, and blew it. The VITO of the title is the C...more
This is the book I wish I'd read before I met a prospective client, who was CEO of his large organization, and blew it. The VITO of the title is the CEO of the org, or equivalent senior executive with purchasing power and management clout. "Very Important Top Officer" is the conceit behind VITO. The book tells you how this person thinks and operates. Naturally, of course, you must wade through the exhortations of the charismatic preacher style of writing that is common in this genre. It's rather like being yelled at in a lecture, which isn't surprising as I'm sure there are workshops and seminars you can sign up for where, indeed, you can be bellowed encouragingly at. Perhaps this won't be so useful for you: as with all books, this came at a particular time in my growth. My notes, with varying degrees of comprehensibility, follow: Do this for hard and soft value: (THE MEASURABLE BENEFIT TO MY VIP CUSTOMER WAS THAT WE...) (AND WE DELIVERED THIS BY MEANS OF A UNIQUE PROCESS THAT ALLOWED THEM TO...) The emphasis on preparation was what particularly put me to shame from this book. The hardest part of moving from product to sales is that the emphasis is on the customer, and you should know as much as possible about them before you start talking to them. Prepare so you can talk about them and how they'll be better off after buying from you ... I need this tattooed in my eyelids. (less) | Notes are private!
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128364584X
| 9781283645843
| 2.00
| 1
| Sep 13, 2012
| Sep 13, 2012
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This book began life as a matrix: seven facts about business life that take on new significance as you move through the five levels of business maturi...more
This book began life as a matrix: seven facts about business life that take on new significance as you move through the five levels of business maturity. Facts are things like "if you don't control it, you don't own it", and "the marketplace is a war zone". Levels go from "ownership and opportunity" through "from survival to success" up to "moving on when it's time to go". All good so far. But a matrix is not a book. A book is a linear beast, the grandchild of scrolls read from top to bottom. So the author had a choice: structure the book around the five levels, you so identify where you're at and then read about where you go next; or structure the book around the seven facts. The author chose the latter, but to be honest neither choice was great. This kind of deconstruction of topic makes for a difficult book to write. And, alas, a difficult book to read. Lots of good content and advice, but the structure makes it almost impossible to read. You're basically going from idea to retirement seven times, and the repetition and brain-shifting mean this book doesn't work even though there's some good information in it.(less) | Notes are private!
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| Mar 30, 2013
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Mar 29, 2013
| ebook
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1591843979
| 9781591843979
| 4.09
| 114
| Apr 28, 2011
| Apr 28, 2011
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This easy-to-read book covers roughly the same ground as "The e-Myth" but has a bit more detail that made it more useful to me as I build process and...more
This easy-to-read book covers roughly the same ground as "The e-Myth" but has a bit more detail that made it more useful to me as I build process and turn my work into something that can live without me. I'm naturally cynical of these just so stories, but I like to have an arsenal of stories from which I can pick a technique to use at any point in time. Here are the tips from the book, which is structured as "guru helps novice to get shit together and build business sustainably": 1. Don’t generalize; specialize. If you focus on doing one thing well and hire specialists in that area, the quality of your work will improve and you will stand out among your competitors.(less) | Notes are private!
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0749444339
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| 3.48
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| Oct 01, 2005
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It's kinda interesting to read about failures for a change: generally there's a massive survivor bias to the analysis of business strategy and tactics...more
It's kinda interesting to read about failures for a change: generally there's a massive survivor bias to the analysis of business strategy and tactics. Looking at who died on their way to the podium is also instructive, though I found I wearied of relentless failure after a while. Nonetheless, a few interesting factoids along the way: Domino’s was the first company to offer home-delivered pizza and remains the leader in that particular market. Coca-Cola, the world’s top five most popular and financially successful brand, was the first in the cola category. As you would expect with a brand that has built its name through uniformity, McDonald’s is heavily centralized. Most branding and marketing decisions need to go through the company’s headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois. The recipe for the Arch Deluxe itself came from the Oak Brook kitchen. This contrasts with McDonald’s major product successes such as the Big Mac, the Hot Apple Pie, the Egg McMuffin and the Filet o’ Fish, which were all invented in operators’ kitchens out in the field [emphasis mine] (whereas other flops such as the McLean burger and McPizza were also conjured up at the Oak Brook headquarters).(less) | Notes are private!
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| May 31, 2012
| May 31, 2012
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A large part of the Computer Science culture was defining ourselves in opposition to suits, sales weasels, and associated corporate "overhead". As I'v...more
A large part of the Computer Science culture was defining ourselves in opposition to suits, sales weasels, and associated corporate "overhead". As I've attempted different things over my life, I've learned to appreciate those other areas. One world I've never had much to do with, though, is the traditional world of the advertising agency. This book, interviews with notable advertising executives about the industry and their work, was an excellent introduction to the mindset and structure of the advertising industry. Of particular interest to me was the industry structure. As the introduction (which reflects on the changes in the industry from first edition to this second edition) says: Holding companies rule the industry. Avid watches of Mad Men know that the Sterling Cooper agency was bought by a holding company in the third season. Ownership limited the decisions the leadership could make. Ultimately, the limitations imposed by the holding company spurred the major players to launch out on their own. Once upon a time, agencies were truly run from the vision of their leadership. Today, four holding companies (the Interpublic Group of Companies, the Omnicom Group, the Publicis Groupe, and WPP) control much of the global industry. Holding companies set corporate strategy, direct collaborative relationships among agencies within the corporation, and dictate operational and fiscal management of their agencies. The other lesson was the obsession on awards. Again, from the introduction: Awards are still important. There are many awards sought after in the industry, such as Cannes Lions, One Sow Pencils, Clios, Addys, and Effies. The interviewees and their agencies hold many of these awards. Mike Hughes discusses the role awards can play in driving the work of creatives, and Susan Creadle explains in her interview how her team uses Leo Burnett's HumanKind scale to evaluate and judge the quality and potential of their ideas. Though awards aren't the only measure of an idea's success, they are critical to recognizing the value and influence of ideas. They are important to agencies as recruitment tools for both top talent and new clients. Some choice quotes. [Raih] I’ll tell you something my uncle taught me. I was home for Thanksgiving or something a couple of years ago. I asked him, “How do you decide what to take on or what to tackle?” I am going to butcher this relatively slick piece of advice he gave me, but I will do my best. He basically said, “Think about a bull’s-eye. In the center of that bull’s-eye is where you bill out at a high hourly level.” Not to make it all about dollars and cents, but basically what he was saying is that as a founder, I am the center of this bull’s-eye. I need to spend as much time in that bull’s-eye to further the company’s interests. The further I get out in those concentric circles, the less I am serving the best interest of the company. That is something that I took to heart. I try to stay in that bull’s-eye as much as possible while not becoming detached from the front line.(less) | Notes are private!
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0132980932
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| Mar 22, 2010
| Apr 17, 2012
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Arguments aren’t mathematical proofs, governed by the rules of logic alone. Arguments follow patterns that are dictated by emotions, by cognitive bias...more
Arguments aren’t mathematical proofs, governed by the rules of logic alone. Arguments follow patterns that are dictated by emotions, by cognitive biases, and by habits. This excellent book briefly and clearly lays out the rules of arguments, and gives you the tools to identify and bypass the traps. An example: Herring has a few questions for you to consider before you even enter an argument: Could there be a productive outcome from this argument? I know you know this stuff. There shouldn’t be anything novel in the book. But laying it all out in one place and connecting the pieces together make for a useful and powerful tool. The section on Burden of Proof was the bit that stuck in my mind, now I’m chairing our school board. I wonder how I'm skewing the discussion simply by how I frame it. Burden of proof. This is a really important issue in arguing, but many people don’t appreciate its significance. Consider a chair of a meeting who says this: (less) | Notes are private!
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| Oct 21, 2011
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This is, as the subtitle promises, a book of essays. Consequently there’s no central theme: essayists explore the future of the book from the vantage...more
This is, as the subtitle promises, a book of essays. Consequently there’s no central theme: essayists explore the future of the book from the vantage point of their own piece of the publishing industry. I found the most value in the overall rather than the specific essays. “It is time to see publishing as a whole—newspapers, magazines, and books—as part of a disrupted continuum. Digital makes convergence not only possible—it has made convergence inevitable. Marketers have become publishers, publishers are marketing arms, and new entrants are a bit of both. Customers have become alternately competitors, partners, and suppliers.” The book was least interesting to me when it talked about XML and metadata, which is (of course) the delight of being an outside observer rather than a participant in the industry. I consider my life a success so long as I never have to read, write, or care about XML ever again. I enjoyed the tripartite framing of containers (historically we filled a book with information), content (that information), and context (normally provided by third parties). Leary’s opening essay sets the tone for the book, exploring the challenges of context-first: keeping the context with the content so we can fit into any container. Help help, I’m being XMLed! Nice story: To illustrate that point, I want to bring you to perhaps the most hierarchical, inaccessible, closed environment I know of: an American public high school. In particular, I’d like to take you to Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, where our youngest son, Charlie, is a student. The school opened in 1927, and it has not changed much since then. (less) | Notes are private!
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0385512058
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| 3.70
| 6,656
| Feb 22, 2005
| Feb 22, 2005
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Although it comes as a surprise to people when I say so, I still struggle with Networking (the in-kind face-to-face kind, not the cables or Facebook k...more
Although it comes as a surprise to people when I say so, I still struggle with Networking (the in-kind face-to-face kind, not the cables or Facebook kind). To do my job, however, I need to master that skill. This book was one of the “learn a superpower” books from a Metafilter thread, and the promise of unraveling networking was too much for me to turn away. The good news is that the book delivers the goods. Ferrazzi is a master networker, one of those glad-handing ever-present Americans whose glib smoothness does seem like a superpower. He reveals his attitudes and skills, the practices that keep him connecting and reconnecting. In those revelations, I recognized a lot of what I already do, and much for me to improve. In short: pay it forward by connecting people without expectation of reciprocity or calculation of who owes whom. Do people favours and you’re building goodwill before you need to call it in. If you’re unwilling to ask people for things, practice until you can do it easily because the best way to use that goodwill is to know what you want and then to ask for it. I’m nervous about quoting too much, but I found the early chapters very useful in putting into words some of the exhortations I’d been driving myself with. For example: “Ultimately, everyone has to ask himself or herself how they’re going to fail. We all do, you know, so let’s get that out of the way. The choice isn’t between success and failure; it’s between choosing risk and striving for greatness, or risking nothing and being certain of mediocrity.” That ties in nicely with a sentiment I heard attributed to eminent NZ scientist Paul Callaghan: that once should always be optimistic even in failure because the alternative is pessimism where your sole reward will be the consolation of having been right! Of particular interest, though, were the things I hadn’t thought about but which make sense: don’t schmooze (want to talk but have nothing to say), never complain, don’t rely on gossip. And then there’s the bits that put into concrete form the things I felt I’d been lacking: his description of how he prepares for a conference or other encounter was both intimidating in his comprehensiveness, but also made perfect sense when I considered some of the opportunities that I had bounced off. There’s nothing worse than knowing the room is full of people who COULD help you, but you don’t know enough to join and contribute something to a conversation in order to get into a position where they CAN help you. The title comes from the dinner parties that Ferrazzi throws: he uses them, in quite a systematic fashion, to build and strengthen his network. Living, as we do, in the boonies, I want to adapt what he describes rather than adopt it. But this chapter was also quite interesting in how he structures them, how he can do them on a low budget, and how he thinks about value to participants. (That’s a hobby-horse of mine: events have to provide value to participants, not merely extract that value for the organizer) The later chapters on blogging and personal brand wasn’t so valuable to me, perhaps I’ll return to it later. For now, though, I have more than enough homework. A friend said, “you have to read business books, but you don’t have to read them all.” This one’s worth the effort if you feel like you aren’t meeting or making enough useful contacts, or getting value from the ones you have. (less) | Notes are private!
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1400069750
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| 3.85
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| Jan 08, 2013
| Jan 15, 2013
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What a difficult challenge one sets oneself, when one creates something about the very medium in which one is working. To give a lecture on public spe...more
What a difficult challenge one sets oneself, when one creates something about the very medium in which one is working. To give a lecture on public speaking is to invite criticism. So too to write about non-fiction. And how much bigger the target one becomes when one already has a name, such as that of Tracey Kidder whose reputation was established by the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Soul of a New Machine". So yeah, this shit better be good. And it is. Holy crap, Kidder can write. And not just write prettily, but with a gentle elegance like a Shaker cabinet. Everything in its place, nothing for ostentation, and in support of something deeper and glorious. Because while you might note "gosh, that was well said", it's the good THINKING that'll leave you admiring this book. How much of the author should one insert? Where's the line between fiction and "reshaping"? What makes the essay form special, yet so difficult? To read "Good Prose" is to see through the eyes of the author and editor as they make the thousands of decisions, large and small, which shape and create the eventual piece. The topics are brought home with references to popular nonfiction pieces from several different decades, and by the exploration of Kidder's own creative process. Kidder's had a long and close relationship with his editor (and co-author on this book), Richard Todd. Their history is slowly revealed, topic by topic, as the book unfolds and it's this relationship that left me thinking the most about the book after I'd returned it to the shelf. Alcohol, dependency, intrusion, compassion ... a lot of uncommon and unprofessional ingredients but outputs that are also uncommon yet highly professional. Kidder, the young pup crashing thoughtlessly into the elder tweedy editor ... a familiar enough story, yet it's revealed near the end that Todd is only 5 years older than Kidder! The story of their relationship, the meat of the editorial chapter, is intriguing, disturbing, and incomplete, and ultimately forms the lingering aftertaste of this fine piece of work.(less) | Notes are private!
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0062069039
| 9780062069030
| 4.15
| 273
| Jan 01, 2012
| Jan 03, 2012
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The Louvin Brothers are famous musicians from the time when country music begat bluegrass music and the Grand Ole Opry reigned, shortly before Elvis k...more
The Louvin Brothers are famous musicians from the time when country music begat bluegrass music and the Grand Ole Opry reigned, shortly before Elvis killed it. They had a classic family: father was a cotton farmer, beat them hard, they used music as an escape. One brother (Ira) was the drinker, Charlie (the author) was the one who had it (and held it) together. The book is the story of their childhood, their early career, the take-off, Ira's self-destruction, and (only cursorily) Charlie's later second-wind career. It's written like a folktale, so clearly 'as told by' ... brilliant! Some highlights: When you were dealing with Papa, you were dealing with something inevitable. You couldn’t escape him anymore than you could escape winter weather or a hard wind. You could try to hide behind something for a little while, but sooner or later you always had to step out and face it. Then Mama began to cook supper. Lord, she could cook. She ran the house, just as Papa ran the outside work. He didn’t tell her how to cook a meal, and she didn’t tell him how much wood to chop so that we could get through the winter. It was a good setup. I don’t actually recall but one or two loud conversations, where it was obvious even to a kid that they wasn’t agreeing on something. Through them, I came to believe even then that if you take care of your corner of life, you’ll find a partner that will take care of theirs, and then you’ll have a long and happy togetherness. Otherwise, you’ll fight all the time. Like I said, that’s the saddest song I’ve ever sung. It’s supposed to be a true song, too. And I believe it. Back when I was boy, if a girl got pregnant, she never did return home. Not pregnant and single. She just wasn’t welcome. Sometimes we’d notice one of these girls missing, and being children, we’d ask, “Where’s Mary?” The grown-ups would always have the same answer, “She’s off to college.” Even as kids we knew better. These people were just like us, so poor they did good to get a kid through grade school, let alone college. So if they said they sent one to college, it’s a sure bet she wasn’t never coming back, not unless she had a husband. And then only after many years. “Ain’t nobody ever died of being bashful,” Papa said. “Tell you what, boys, if you’re that nervous, crawl under the bed here where we can’t see you, and do your singing there.” So Ira and I crawled under the bed, and from there we sang “Mary of the Wild Moor” with our tails together, facing opposite directions. We must’ve done a good job, too, because the room was pretty much dead silent when we finished. No giggling or chuckling at all. Still, we didn’t give Papa a chance to ask for another one. We slid down to the end of the bed, and then ran like hell out the front door. We were screwed after that, though. Once Papa’d figured out that trick for us, we had to sing from under the bed pretty much anytime anybody stopped by the house. And if we went any place, he expected us to sing at the drop of a hat. Just walking down the road, Papa’d pop his fingers and say, “Do ’em one,” and that’s the way it was. We’d do at least one song, even if that’s all we had time for. Papa saw to it. Lord, we hated him for making us sing like that. But as always with Papa, there was probably more to it than what we saw. He worked in ways you couldn’t always figure out at first, and as much as we got pissed off at having to sing, he trained all the bashfulness right out of us. By making us sing those songs for folks, he forced us to learn how to perform. And we began to understand that we could entertain folks. That first song was electric. The whole church filled with the music of our voices. This was the first time I was really expected to sing along, but I joined in as easily as if I’d been doing it a hundred years. The human voice, that’s what they’re talking about when they say Sacred Harp, and there’s nothing like it in the world. You can’t really record it, either. Since everybody sings, it’s awful hard to get a microphone positioned so you can mix all of them. But it does your soul good to hear it. “Come on, Charlie,” said Ira. And as scared as I was, I looked up at him. He was smiling down at me, confident and tall. And that was the thing about Ira, as much as he could convince me to do something I knew I shouldn’t do, like chop down that damn persimmon tree, he could always help me on the path to something that needed doing. There was two sides to his gift for convincing, as there was two sides to everything with him. That was another of Ira’s gifts. You could play him a piece of music and he could take it down to its parts, pull out what he needed, and use it. He could do it with people, too. That’s why he was so good with women, even at an early age. He wasn’t ever as good-looking as he thought he was, but he could see right into them. Unfortunately, it wasn’t always a gift for the rest of us. As surely as he could pinpoint something he could take advantage of, he could spot a weakness. And if he wanted to, he could take your flesh down to the bone with it. Sure enough, from then on after he saw that girl, there’d come a time when we were singing together that he’d slip into one of those high parts and then come back down, just like she did. He built it right into our act. In a way, our entire career was built on doing unorthodox things like that, things no sensible person might do, and we learned a lot of them from Sacred Harp. Sometimes the tenor and the melody would work together, and I would go down as Ira went up, and we would end up in the same place, only he would be twice as high as I would be, and we got so many compliments on it that we started using it fairly regular. It baffled a lot of people, too, how we could change parts without nudging or winking at each other. He’d take the high lead and I’d do the low harmony under it, and he knew exactly when my part would get too high for me just like I knew when his would get too low for him, and we could change in the middle of a word. Part of the reason we could do that was that we’d learned to have a good ear for other peoples’ voices when we sang Sacred Harp. But the other part is that we were brothers. There’s no one that knows your weaknesses like a brother. I knew Ira’s, and, as he proved time and time again in our career, he surely knew mine. Anyway, we worked the whole rest of that season from sunup until sundown. We worked until it was too dark to work, and then stumbled down to the house and rinsed our bloody hands down with rubbing alcohol, so they’d be ready to use again the next day. Because at the end of every day, Papa would show each of us that tally and say, “You’ll do that every day, or you’ll get your ass whipped.” So who was the dumb one? It sure wasn’t Papa. But being worked liked that, meeting Papa’s tallies, set us on the path of music just as much as our love of singing did. For Ira especially. One night, while climbing into bed, bone-tired after another day of picking, he said to me, “We ain’t got no choice, Charlie. You know that.” “No choice about what, Ira?” I said. I already had the blanket up to my chin and I could hardly keep my eyes open. “No choice about whether or not we make it as singers.” His voice sounded choked up, and I looked over at him. He was older than me, almost full grown, but he looked like he might just bust out in tears. “I can’t do this for the rest of my life.” “I know, Ira,” I said. And I did. I probably didn’t understand how much his back hurt from having to stoop over to keep up with the picking. Nor did I know what it felt like to be the oldest, to take Papa’s beatings the way he did. But I knew what he meant. That having a music career didn’t mean the Opry or riding around in a fancy automobile anymore. It meant not picking cotton for the rest of our lives. It meant survival. “Charlie,” he said. “You’re gonna have to learn to play the guitar.” Well, I would have rather somebody pissed down my leg than told me something like that. “I don’t want to,” I said, hanging my head. “It’s necessary, Charlie,” he said. “The Blue Sky Boys got a mandolin and a guitar, the Monroe Brothers got a mandolin and a guitar, the Delmore Brothers got a tenor guitar and a regular guitar. I’m gonna take up the mandolin, and I need you to take up the guitar.” He was right. There was no getting around it. Every duet had what you’d call a lead instrument and a rhythm instrument. And since there was only the two of us, it wasn’t too hard to figure out who was talented enough to play the lead instrument. It didn’t hurt us, but it convinced us that working in a woolen mill wasn’t what we wanted to do for the rest of our lives. And maybe it helped us understand that working for Papa wasn’t really any worse than working for anybody else. If you’re killing yourself to make somebody else money, there ain’t no future in it. I’ll never forget this one pool hall. It was run by this crook who’d pay us to clear beer bottles off the tables in between songs. Only instead of throwing the beer bottles away, he’d have us take all the half-full beers over to this special cooler, where he would fill them up with other half-full beers and twist a new cap on them. Then when some guy got tipsy enough where he couldn’t tell one beer from another, this guy would sell him one of the old beers. Hell, he’d fill up more than a hundred and fifty bottles of beer a night that way. You wouldn’t believe how many half-full beers people will walk off and leave. We’d clear tables like that for an hour, and then get up and play some music. You can weather any storm if you believe that it’s gonna be better on down the road. We missed out on a lot of sleep, but that was part of the business. Besides, they had pills for it. Some of the boys back then, they took them even if they never got close to the steering wheel, just to get high, but I used ’em to drive. I had to. Ira couldn’t hardly drive at all because of his back and, sometimes, the beer. I used to be able to get them that were called Old Yellers, and one of them would carry me five hundred miles to do a show and five hundred miles back without sleep. Other people would take one starting out and then two more to make it there, and then three to get back home, but I never could take that many. My body’s too timid. I couldn’t handle ’em all. We were always racing the clock, pulling up just as the show was about to start. We’d pile out of the cars, and the first thing I’d say to the show’s organizer was, “You got a creek around here?” “Right down there,” they’d say, and point me at it. So I’d step down to the creek, and it’d be running just as clear and cold as could be, and I’d pour that water up on my face, then take my handkerchief and dry off, and say, “All right, let’s go.” He always insisted that if you want to be a star, then the first thing you have to do is look like a fucking star. If you look like a star and you act like a star, then you stand a chance. But if you look like a bum and call yourself a star, they’re only gonna call you by the first name. You’re just gonna be a bum. The good times with Eddie couldn’t last forever. Nothing does. Around 1949, Ira and I were starting to figure Memphis was getting played out. It was just like every town before. We’d done every venue that was big enough to hold a show two or three times over, and that’s just about all people will put up with from you. They won’t come to see the same program over and over. I never could understand the drinking. Not with Hank, and not with Ira, either. Whiskey don’t cure nothing. You might forget what you’re trying to forget tonight, but when you wake up tomorrow, it’ll be back. And so will your headache and hangover. It’ll just multiply on you, and eventually whiskey won’t do any good at all for what you’re trying to use it for. Whether it be to forget or to have a good time, there’ll come a day when it’ll require more than you can drink, more than anybody can drink. And that will be your complete downfall. That’s what happened to Hank. It got to where the whiskey couldn’t do him any good, so he had to move on to something stronger. If I was looking at someone else with the career path we had, I’d have probably told them to let it go at that point. I don’t know how long you should keep trying if you don’t seem to be making any progress. There comes a time when you just have to say, “I’ve given it my best and it wasn’t good enough.” But we never could do that. We’ve had some others in Nashville that you never saw totally straight, that’s for sure. George Jones was probably the worst. I worked a show with him once and we were standing back in the wings waiting to go on. He was acting a little peculiar, so I asked, “You been drinking, George?” “Naw,” he said. “I been working on my drinking problem.” “How’s that?” By way of an answer, he reached in his coat pocket, pulled out a handful of cocaine, and buried his nose in it, snorting. Then, when he’d fixed up that side of his nose, he went after the other. A lot of times I’d come home, and the first thing she’d do is tell me that she’d told one or another of them that I would whip his ass. But I never did have much stomach for that. I’d say, “Hey, I didn’t come home to beat the kids. I come home to enjoy them.” Teddy and Doyle of the Wilburn Brothers didn’t get along. And the Delmore Brothers didn’t get along, either. It seemed like in every duet, there’d be one of them that was a drinker. In the Delmore Brothers, it was Rabon, and in the Wilburn Brothers, it was Doyle. You’d think two brothers from the same family would be something alike. But it never worked out that way. It’d get him trouble now and then, too. Once we were working a dance in Buzzard Roost, Texas, and some guy came over and asked Ira, “Buddy, would you do me a great favor?” He was a big old boy, as tall as Ira, but about twice as broad. “If I can, I will,” Ira said. “My wife really wants to dance with you,” the guy said. “She does?” Ira said. “Which one is she?” “That’s her right there,” the guy said, pointing. And she was a real beauty. Had to be the prettiest woman in Buzzard Roost, anyway. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea,” Ira said, but he was still looking at her, ogling her, really, and I could already tell how this was gonna end. “Aw, there’s nothing to it,” the guy said. “Just do me a favor and dance with her for one song.” Well, Ira got out there and started to dance with her. And as the song wore on, they kept moving a little closer together. Right up until that guy walked out on the dance floor, grabbed Ira’s shoulder, and just knocked the shit out of him. Laid him out on the floor. “What the hell’s wrong with you, man?” I said. “You talked him into it.” “I asked him to dance with her,” the guy said. “Not fuck her on the dance floor.” It’s not very cool when you go to enough funerals to eradicate an entire family, an entire generation. It’s the worst feeling in the world, if you want the truth. Old age is different from anything you’ll ever encounter in your life. Your head will lie to you, your heart will lie to you, and your pecker will lie to you. You’ll see something sitting there that you used to handle with one hand, just pick it up and sling it, and your head will tell you, “Are you kidding, man? You’ve lifted twice that much.” Then you’ll grab ahold of it and find out that it’s more than you can handle. Those golden years they talk about, they’re bullshit.(less) | Notes are private!
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159240104X
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| 3.51
| 101
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| Mar 03, 2005
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Translations of amusing things, about as far from useful as it's possible to be. From driving: Big car, little dick to s...more Translations of amusing things, about as far from useful as it's possible to be. From driving: Big car, little dick to sport: Athletes who complain about their pay end up in an urn to science: The theory of evolution is baloney. Everyone knows the whole universe came out of Saturn’s nostrils There's even something for Hollywood: Make the mother the father, change the cat to a dog, and lose the kid with cancer A good gag gift.(less) | Notes are private!
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0062009494
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| 3.93
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| Sep 13, 2012
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0061994936
| 9780061994937
| 3.36
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| May 15, 2012
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An excellent glimpse into the people, buildings, and subculture of Internet network engineering. The author works hard, and at times succeeds, but I f...more
An excellent glimpse into the people, buildings, and subculture of Internet network engineering. The author works hard, and at times succeeds, but I felt he wasn't able to make the topic interesting for the duration of the entire book. I gave up in the last quarter, feeling I had wrung all from the book that I could reasonably expect to do. The Internet, Cyberspace, this virtual bodyless place which transcends countries ... is very much a thing built from physical objects which reside in, and connect, countries. He looks at data centers, switches, and international cables, discussing the odd mix of political, commercial, personal, and accidental relationships which make them possible. Everyone should read the first half.(less) | Notes are private!
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| Nov 03, 2012
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Nov 03, 2012
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0765329085
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| 3.64
| 1,895
| Oct 02, 2012
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Cory Doctorow is maturing as a writer: discuss. Very well, I will. Most of Cory's novels are novels of ideas: it's the one about Makers, or the one abo...more Cory Doctorow is maturing as a writer: discuss. Very well, I will. Most of Cory's novels are novels of ideas: it's the one about Makers, or the one about DHS overreach, or the one about reputation systems, or ... you get the picture. This book is no different, as you can point to the handful of BoingBoing hashtags that he's drawn from: HADOPI and the copyright culture wars, dumpster diving, remix, crypto for dissident security. Unlike many of Cory's novels, though, I like the protagonist of Pirate Cinema. Trent is a young goober, but he knows it and acknowledges the mistakes he makes. Unlike many (inferior) novels, Trent doesn't do stupid things simply to further the plot. In short: Cory has a well-plotted contemporary story with characters that work. My only gripe is that he violates Chekov's dictum too many times: things happen in the novel which are never touched upon again. He teaches us things like bumping locks and megaphone style singing, but they don't reappear in the story. I'm a huge fan of order and reverberation: that things are returned to, knowledge proves useful in different circumstances, things we are told or learn come back to help or hinder later on. I'm not sure I should hold my breath for this to change, though: part of Cory's style is the flood of minutiae that make the world come alive. Unlike a thriller, where stock plots are daubed with a few details from settings and characters and it's possible to make every fact useful, Cory's books are decorated with detail like a Victorian parlour of prose. Good book, though. An enjoyable quick read, and one I'm glad that I read.(less) | Notes are private!
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Nov 03, 2012
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0385520174
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| 3.85
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| Jan 01, 2008
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I've been reading the last few months, but struggling to find something worth saying about the books I've read. This excellent book, however, moved me...more
I've been reading the last few months, but struggling to find something worth saying about the books I've read. This excellent book, however, moved me to words. It's an account of the highly mobile and mostly-female workforce in China, the 16-18 year olds who leave the farms in the countryside and flood into factory cities like Dongguan and Shenzhen in southern China. The author tells the stories of several girls, as well as her own investigations into her family history, and the results paint a fascinating picture of the social changes, and constants, over the last seventy years of China. The real heroes are the girls. Brave, focused on self-improvement, constantly hunting for new opportunities, and creating this new social identity in a space which hadn't existed before in the same way. Their stories are by turns fascinating and frustrating, inspirational and banal. They're living a hypermodern life: job seeking, self-improvement, upwardly mobile, but with everything exaggerated and accelerated. They rise quickly, fall fast, experience orders of magnitude of income change that we can't dream of, change careers, search for marriageable men, and so much more, while optimistic and opportunistic. I've been curious about China's Great Leap Forward for a while now, and Chang's exploration of these new women of the Pearl Delta and of her own family history both serve to help make sense of what happened and how it's currently dealt with (or not). The necessary subjugation of self to society in small farming communities, the ferocious turning on intellectuals, the decision to show the shape of history but blur its details, it's all part of a repeating pattern and structure which the novelty of today's factory girls is poured into. New material, same mould. Passages which stood out for me: My assumptions had come from studies of Chinese migrant workers done in the mid-1990s; almost a decade later, this world had utterly changed, but things were happening too quickly to be written down. (on the relationship between locals in political power, and the migrants): We already disliked each other. In the middle of the interview, I looked over at the assistant and he stared blankly back at me. The young woman next to him had fallen asleep. The phrase mutual contempt popped into my mind. The interview was useful: Without seeing for myself, I never would have believed how completely the government ignored the migrants. Another high-speed negotiating tactic was to offer to take a passenger partway to his destination for a smaller fare; drivers were such short-term thinkers that they would rather earn less money but get paid sooner. Chinese history museums are troubled places. Ancient civilization was great, or so the official narrative went, but it was feudal and backward. Modern China was ravaged by foreigners, but the Chinese people were heroic in humiliation and defeat. China stood up in 1949 when the Communists came to power, but there were other years since—1957, 1966, and 1989 in particular—that went prominently unmentioned. Everything that was jumbled and incoherent and better left unsaid must be smoothed into a rational pattern, because the purpose of history from the time of Confucius has been to transmit moral lessons to later generations. In the seventh century, the emperors of the Tang Dynasty ordered court historians to compose a chronicle of the previous reign. Every dynasty since has written the history of the preceding one, slanting or omitting facts to bolster the ruling regime; since 1949, the Communist Party has done the same, presenting modern history as a heroic struggle to resist the will of foreign powers. But here in Dongguan, the past contained a startlingly different lesson: History was openness, markets, and foreign investment. History began with a handbag factory, and schoolchildren must be indoctrinated in the merits of good infrastructure. The museum guide urged the children to be “civilized spectators,” and the third- and fourth-graders filed into History in ragged lines. Soon the huge lobby was deserted, and I was left alone to ponder the unlikelihood of a Chinese history museum that did not make a single mention of Mao Zedong. THE STORIES OF MIGRANT WOMEN shared certain features. The arrival in the city was blurry and confused and often involved being tricked in some way. Young women often said they had gone out alone, though in fact they usually traveled with others; they just felt alone. They quickly forgot the names of factories, but certain dates were branded in their minds, like the day they left home or quit a bad factory forever. What a factory actually made was never important; what mattered was the hardship or opportunity that came with working there. The turning point in a migrant’s fortunes always came when she challenged her boss. At the moment she risked everything, she emerged from the crowd and forced the world to see her as an individual. Women make up more than one-third of China’s migrants. They tend to be younger than their male counterparts and more likely to be single; they travel farther from home and they stay out longer. They are more motivated to improve themselves and more likely to value migration for its life-changing possibilities. In one survey, men cited higher income as the chief purpose of leaving home, while women aspired to “more experience in life.” Unlike men, women had no home to go back to. According to Chinese tradition, a son was expected to return to his parents’ house with his wife after he married; a son would forever have a home in the village where he was born. Daughters, once grown, would never return home to live—until they married, they didn’t belong anywhere. To some extent, this deep-rooted sexism worked in women’s favor. Many rural parents wanted a grown son to stay close to home, perhaps delivering goods or selling vegetables in the towns near the village. Young men with such uninspiring prospects might simply hun—drift—doing odd jobs, smoking and drinking and gambling away their meager earnings. Young women—less treasured, less coddled—could go far from home and make their own plans. Precisely because they mattered less, they were freer to do what they wanted. But it was a precarious advantage. If migration liberated young women from the village, it also dropped them in a no-man’s-land. Most girls in the countryside were married by their early twenties, and a migrant woman who postponed marriage risked closing off that possibility for good. The gender imbalance in Dongguan, where 70 percent of the workforce was said to be female, worked against finding a high-quality mate. And social mobility complicated the search for a husband. Women who had moved up from the assembly line disdained the men back in the village, but city men looked down on them in turn. Migrants called this gaobucheng, dibujiu—unfit for a higher position but unwilling to take a lower one. The network-sales model was ideally suited to a Chinese society in which traditional morality had broken down and only the harshest rules—trust no one, make money fast—still applied. “If I only go to school, come out and do migrant work for a few years, then go home, marry and have children,” Min said, “I might as well not have lived this whole life.” The migrants I knew spent a great deal of time managing their phones—changing numbers constantly to take advantage of cheaper calling plans, and switching phone cards when crossing to another city to save on roaming fees. That was the short-term mentality of Dongguan: Save a few pennies, even if it meant losing touch with some people for good. Migrant workers are a major reason the Chinese mobile-phone market is the world’s largest, yet the industry has mixed feelings about them. Migrants were behind the market’s poor economics, one friend in the telecommunications industry told me; they supposedly drove down prices because they were willing to pay for only the cheapest services. Popular culture also felt their negative impact: The quality of Chinese pop music had deteriorated in recent years, I was also told, because migrants chose the least sophisticated songs for the ring tones of their phones. Newer migrants have looser ties to their villages. Their trips home are no longer dictated by the farming calendar or even by the timing of traditional holidays like the lunar new year. Instead, younger migrants come and go according to their personal schedules of switching jobs or obtaining leaves, and these are often tied to the demands of the production cycle. It is the seasons of the factory, rather than the fields, that define migrant life now. Migrants increasingly look and act like city people. Migrant magazines launched in the 1990s have folded or are struggling to find readers now. Songs about the migrant experience are no longer heard in the factory cities of the south; the workers on the assembly line now listen to the same pop tunes as urban teenagers. THE TRADITIONAL CHINESE calendar divides the year into twenty-four segments and gives farming instructions for every two-week interval. The year begins with lichun, the start of spring on February 4 or 5 and the time for spring sowing. The calendar dictates when to plant melons, beans, coarse cereals, beets, and grapes and when to harvest rice, wheat, apples, potatoes, radishes, and cabbage. It predicts heat and heavy rains. It sets the proper time to protect crops from the wind, to kill pests and collect manure, to weed and to irrigate, to fix fences for livestock and to welcome in the new year. The calendar was standardized during the Former Han Dynasty—with regional variations, it has governed the rhythms of life on the farm for two thousand years. The girls at Yue Yuen know nothing of the farming cycle. When they go home, their parents don’t usually want them to work; if they help out in the fields, they suffer sunburns and blisters from the unfamiliar labor. One migrant worker described to me a typical day at home: She kept farmers’ hours with the rest of the family but spent most of her day watching television. Management introduced Lean Manufacturing to increase efficiency and reduce waste at Yue Yuen. Workers say that while they work shorter hours now, the time on the line is more stressful; tasks are parceled out precisely and there is almost no downtime. Assembly lines have been restructured into small teams so workers can switch tasks every few days, whereas before they might have done the same thing for a month at a time. This makes production more flexible, but it is exhausting for the workers. Also in the name of efficiency, living arrangements have been reshuffled so workers live with their assembly-line colleagues rather than with their friends. The parents of migrants had terrible instincts. At every stage, they gave bad advice; they specialized in outdated knowledge and conservatism born out of fear. Some initially forbade their children, especially their daughters, from going out at all. But once a migrant got to the city, the parental message shifted dramatically: Send home money, the more the better. Some parents pressured their daughters to marry, though only someone from their home province—which seemed as unreasonable as telling a person living in New York to date only natives of Ohio. On the job front, their advice was invariably bad: They warned against jumping factories, which was usually the best way to get ahead. Migrants learned quickly how to deal with their parents: They disobeyed, they fought, and they lied. They kept their distance; Chunming did not go home during her first three years in the city. The girls were matter-of-fact about such transgressions. “They don’t know how things are outside, so I do something first, and then I tell them about it,” Min said. A new life began the day they arrived in the city, and they would do what they needed to protect it. The past did not matter, and the present was everything. Family was a trap that would pull you backward if you weren’t careful. Chang attends a class for self-improvement: In the weeks to come, other rules would pile up fast. When pouring tea, the cup should be 70 percent full. Purple eye shadow suits all Asian women. In pursuing success, knowledge contributes 30 percent and interpersonal relations 70 percent. Hold the receiver in your left hand and dial the number with your right. When smiling, the mouth should be opened so that teeth don’t show, the lips flattened with the corners of the mouth slightly upturned. During the noon rest hour, do not lie horizontally on the chair or desk. No action was so elementary that it didn’t require instructions; the class sometimes felt like a crash course for Martians trying to pass as human beings. The heroes from history never varied. Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong led the pack, with Hitler a distant third. He was valued for his eloquence; the Nazi leader was a wonderful speaker. Etiquette, not History. But I noticed something: The students did not fall asleep. They did not look bored. No one ever left to use the bathroom during the two-hour class; they were afraid they might miss something. All their lives, these young women had been taught by teachers and textbooks that struggled to make sense of the modern world. They knew by heart the incoherent mush of rules, self-help, and Confucian exhortation. They took only what they needed, grasping the principal lesson long before I did: If you look and act like someone of a higher class, you will become that person. Dongguan learning took place in humble settings. Classrooms were bare and dim and plagued by power cuts, and computers so grimy and ancient they looked like archaeological finds. The students were poor and spottily educated, and even their teachers apologized for their heavy rural accents. Almost none of the instructors had a proper degree; many, like Teacher Deng, trailed a string of failed businesses behind them. But for all that, they were revolutionary. In the regular Chinese school system, students did not speak in class; often they did not even take notes until the teacher told them to. They studied a set curriculum determined by a government committee. Teachers pitted students against one another to make them study harder, and the entire system revolved around tests—a test to get into a good middle school, then a good high school, and finally a good college, or any college at all. Like the imperial civil service exam, the educational system was designed to reward the few: Every year, the equivalent of only 11 percent of the freshman-age population entered college. Students who fell off that track were channeled into vocational schools to learn employable skills like machine tool operation and auto repair, but the curriculum was generally so outdated that the schools functioned more like holding pens for the students until they went out to work. China is trying to reform its education system. Some teachers have embraced “quality education,” which emphasizes student creativity and initiative over rote learning. To that end, richer and more progressive schools have introduced electives such as art and music. Making higher education more accessible is another goal: In recent years, the government has sharply expanded college enrollment. But education remains one of the most conservative areas of Chinese society, burdened by hidebound teachers and administrators, political constraints, and a historical obsession with test scores. The commercial schools in Dongguan belonged to another world. Unburdened by history, they were free to teach what they wanted. They focused unabashedly on practical skills; teachers used material from the Internet or from their own experiences working in factories or companies. They did not pit students against one another and they didn’t give out grades. Since every student was there to improve her own job prospects, class rank was irrelevant. They ignored writing—the cornerstone of traditional scholarship—in favor of public speaking. Knowing how to speak would help the students win a better job, obtain a lower price quote, or sell more of whatever they ended up selling. “We are all in the sales business,” the White-Collar teachers reminded their students again and again. “What are we selling? We are selling ourselves.” I later learned, not from Teacher Deng but from his students, that the Zhitong school sold fake diplomas. Each one was a small book with a shrink-wrapped plastic cover, like the cheap photo albums some of the girls carried around with them. A counterfeit degree from a vocational college cost sixty yuan—around $7.50—while one from a vocational high school was half that. Formal education was not valued in Dongguan, but until then I had not realized how little it was worth. I asked him what he thought about the other success studies books sold in China. He hadn’t read a single one. “All the books in China just take their ideas from the outside,” he said. “China really has no original ideas.” Chunming got a job as a reporter at the China Inspection and Quarantine Times. The newspaper was run by the government agency in charge of import and export inspections, and the nature of her work would have been unrecognizable to any conventional practitioner of journalism. Chunming would decide to write an article about a company; her chosen subject, fearing trouble getting its goods through customs, would pay the paper for positive coverage. The price for good press was determined on a sliding scale, in the same way that advertising rates are set. Two thousand yuan bought a brief mention, while a full-length feature might cost fifty thousand yuan. This was journalism as extortion, and Chunming worked on commission and did well. Maybe it’s impossible to write the history of a small place in China, because everyone with talent or ambition goes out. I had met this type of person—every reporter in China has. He was the protester, the petitioner, the person so focused on righting a wrong that the effort consumed his life and cast him into a separate universe where he lived alone. “This is an economic era,” Zhang Hong’s son had told him, “and the Party cares only about business. Your problem is political. If you’re looking to the Party for an answer, you will never get it.” In 1978, the Communist Party set up commissions to review and rehabilitate hundreds of thousands of victims from two decades of political campaigns. In the Party’s judgment, the Anti-Rightist movement had been “unnecessarily broad,” with many people “mistakenly” labeled Rightists. This followed the piecemeal approach to history laid out by Deng Xiaoping, allowing the reversal of individual verdicts without addressing whether the movement itself had been wrong. But the numbers said otherwise. Across China, more than half a million people had been named Rightists—all but ninety-six, it was eventually decided, had been labeled by mistake. And, finally, insight into drivers: Driver’s licenses were another racket: Aspiring drivers had to take fifty hours of classes at government-affiliated schools, but on test day they still had to bribe their examiners. “In each car there are four people taking the test,” a factory executive explained to me, “and if one person doesn’t give money, all four may fail.” It was far easier to buy a fake license, as Chunming had done years ago. She had taken a few lessons since—“I know how to drive forward”—and she figured that one day she would learn the rest of what she needed to know. “Driving is not hard,” she informed me. “The key is not to get angry at other people.”(less) | Notes are private!
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Nov 03, 2012
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unknown
| 3.36
| 274
| 2010
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