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July 05
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Richard MacManus
gave  to:
Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America (Hardcover)
by
Julia Angwin
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my rating:
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read in July, 2009
Richard said:
"Very good history and overview of MySpace. Particularly strong on the pre-history, when the MySpace founders were busy scrapping a living from email and pop-up spam and porn. The founders almost accidentally stumbled on a winner with social networkin...more
Very good history and overview of MySpace. Particularly strong on the pre-history, when the MySpace founders were busy scrapping a living from email and pop-up spam and porn. The founders almost accidentally stumbled on a winner with social networking, which was eventually acquired by News Corp. The book fell away a bit near the end, where I was counting pages till the finish. But definitely worth reading if you're interested in Internet culture.(less)
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July 03
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Richard MacManus
gave to:
Shaping Things (Mediaworks Pamphlets)
by
Bruce Sterling
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my rating:
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read in July, 2009
Richard said:
"Very thought-provoking. Futuristic theory.
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May 31
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Richard MacManus
gave to:
Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time (Hardcover)
by
Rob Sheffield
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my rating:
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May 10
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Richard MacManus
gave  to:
Love in the Time of Cholera (Paperback)
by
Gabriel García Márquez
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my rating:
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April 05
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Richard MacManus
gave to:
On the Road (Paperback)
by
Jack Kerouac
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my rating:
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read in April, 2009
Richard said:
"Finally read this.
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February 06
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Richard MacManus
gave to:
Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton : an Autobiography (Paperback)
by
J.G. Ballard
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my rating:
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read in February, 2009
Richard said:
"JG Ballard is one of my favorite fiction writers. I read Crash and several of his other highly imaginative works when I was younger. Crash is my favorite, a controversial concept novel about sexual fantasies mixed with car crashes. Ballard explains t...more
JG Ballard is one of my favorite fiction writers. I read Crash and several of his other highly imaginative works when I was younger. Crash is my favorite, a controversial concept novel about sexual fantasies mixed with car crashes. Ballard explains the genesis of that book in one brief chapter. But the bulk of Miracles of Life is his description of growing up in Shanghai, including 2.5 years in an internment camp with other British expatriates in the early 1940s, when Japan had invaded China. He also describes how he went from studying medicine to becoming a writer, and his family life.
Overall the book has some lovely reminiscences by Ballard and we find out why he came to write highly original and intense novels in the 60s and 70s. He described his approach as being science fiction, but focusing on "inner space" - he wrote that "I would interiorise science fiction, looking for the pathology that underlay the consumer society, the TV landscape and the nuclear arms race, a vast untouched continent of fictional possibility".
As I said, one of my fave fiction writers. Recommend this book for fans.(less)
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January 24
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Richard MacManus
gave to:
The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch (Hardcover)
by
Michael Wolff
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my rating:
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read in January, 2009
Richard said:
"I enjoyed this book and it was certainly the best bio I've read of Rupert Murdoch (there aren't too many of them and the last one I tried was a hatchet job based around some weird political conspiracy theory, which I abandoned less than halfway throu...more
I enjoyed this book and it was certainly the best bio I've read of Rupert Murdoch (there aren't too many of them and the last one I tried was a hatchet job based around some weird political conspiracy theory, which I abandoned less than halfway through). So comparatively speaking, this bio was well researched and relatively objective.
The author, Michael Wolff, nevertheless couldn't help inserting any number of his own literary theories and spins on Murdoch's story - which were in some places cutting analysis, other places seemed like guesswork, and still other places were literary pretension. However, there were enough interesting facts and analysis overall to make it on the whole a valid approach.
Murdoch's bio wasn't told chronologically, and we kept being returned to the book's central plotline - Murdoch's ultimately successful bid to buy Wall St Journal from the Bancroft family. While that plotline was undoubtedly fascinating and central to figuring out Murdoch - basically he's an old school but morally ambivalent journalist who wanted to buy WSJ precisely because the journalistic ivy league (represented by WSJ and NYT) hates him - in the end the story became tiresome and mired in the kind of back and forth minutiae that the Bancrofts themselves probably engaged in when deciding whether to sell to Murdoch. It was a real struggle for me to finish the book, because frankly I found myself not particularly caring about the inside deal-making details relating to WSJ.
Overall, Murdoch is indeed a fascinating character, and as the book concluded it is very rare to find such a large company so dominated by the will and obsessions of one person. I've always seen Murdoch as a journalist at heart, because he knows a good story and knows what it takes to get it. He's a dangerous businessman too of course, and tabloid journalism has often been the way his companies operate. I'm not suggesting it's necessarily good journalism, but it's certainly been effective for him and the way he operates has influenced the media landscape a lot. I don't fashion myself after Murdoch much, but I do admire his single-minded determination and willingness to do things the establishment won't.(less)
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December 20, 2008
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Richard MacManus
gave to:
Wild Boy: My Life in Duran Duran (Hardcover)
by
Andy Taylor
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my rating:
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read in December, 2008
Richard said:
"Duran Duran was my favorite band in my boyhood. They got famous around 1981-82, when I was about 10 years old. At that time in my school there were 3 pop bands you could choose from, and you generally chose just one of them: Duran Duran, Spandau Ball...more
Duran Duran was my favorite band in my boyhood. They got famous around 1981-82, when I was about 10 years old. At that time in my school there were 3 pop bands you could choose from, and you generally chose just one of them: Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Culture Club. I always thought Spandau were naff, to use a good british term. Culture Club were naff with some catchy tunes. But Duran Duran were awesome, to my 10-11 year old mind. They kind of rocked - in a pop way - and they were a bit arty. They dressed cool, they looked cool, and heck they sounded cool to my young ears. Their videos were of course fantastic and the album cover for Rio is one of the best ever, by any band. They had brilliant tunes: Rio, Girls on Film, The Reflex, Blue Moon on Monday, View to a kill, etc. I used to make top 10 lists for music back then, not to dissimilar I guess to the top 10s I write for ReadWriteWeb nowadays! Anyway Duran Duran were always sitting at number 1 or nearby on my music charts, I think they even got number 1 for the entire year once or twice.
I do recall when I was about 11 having some friendly rivalry with Spandau fans, who hated DD. I had the approval though of a U2 fan, who didn't really like any of the 3 pop bands mentioned above - but he thought DD were the least lame, compared to U2 (remembering that this was U2's serious political preening period, with Boy and War albums).
So Andy Taylor's book. It was a great read, very interesting for me considering I was such a big fan back in my teenybopper days. I was quite surprised to learn that the band was pretty much dysfunctional after about 1983-4, when Andy fell out with Nick and Simon, John Taylor had his troubles with drugs and too many girlfriends(!!), Roger Taylor quit, then Andy quit. The band got back together in the 00's and had a couple of periods of successful touring - made a load of money etc. But they released a couple of bad albums too.
Duran Duran will always be the quintessential early 80s pop band for me, and I was never really interested in them after about 1985 - when a) I'd grown up and moved onto INXS etc and later Guns n'Rose; and b) Duran Duran had imploded.
Good memories, good book.(less)
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December 19, 2008
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Richard MacManus
added:
Business Stripped Bare (Hardcover)
by
Richard Branson
bookshelves:
started-but-not-finished
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my rating:
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November 30, 2008
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Richard MacManus
gave  to:
Screw It, Let's Do It (Expanded Edition): 14 Lessons on Making It to the Top While Having Fun & Staying Green
by
Richard Branson
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my rating:
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GoodReads 2.0 - UI and Design Refreshment
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— last activity 6 days ago, 03:55PM
