frightening, evocative, but not very sympathetic

A good friend recommended this strongly, and it won the 2008 Booker Prize, so I gave it a try. The Booker committee said “Balram’s journey from darkness of village life to the light of entrepreneurial success is utterly amoral, brilliantly irreverent, deeply endearing and altogether unforgettable.”  I agree with 1, 2, maybe 4, and 3 if you take off the “deeply” and even then only reluctantly.

The protagonist – Balram – is some kind of entrepreneur who is writing letters to the premier of China to tell him about the true India. Balram tells of his rise from poor village boy to tea shop worker to … well, I won’t give too much away. But Balram does not allow himself to be bound by traditional norms of morality around, say, killing. And other stuff. The power in the novel is demonstrating how poverty can breed an amorality that is chaotic and frightening. But I only came to find the protagonist sympathetic towards the very end, up until which I merely found him offputting (and scary). I don’t think, if I were to turn back time, that I would read it again.

Note on content: I don’t remember reading a book with more f-words. There is violence. There is significant sex talk. This is a dark world of crushing poverty and desperation.

a rollicking ride through Washington lobbying, spin-meisters, kidnapping, corporate intrigue, despite a little floundering towards the end

I read this in about 24 hours (which is fast for me). Nick Naylor is the chief spokesman for the tobacco lobby. His boss wants him out, but after an impressive showing on Oprah, he becomes the darling of the lobby’s chairman of the board. He gets kidnapped and tortured by antismoking advocates. Corporate intrigue takes place.

This was a very fun, witty ride. Naylor is sympathetic, and he has a genuine friendship with her fellow Merchants of Death, the chief spokesman for firearms and the spokeswoman for alcohol. The satire of Hollywood, of the lobbying industry, of Washington spin, is all fun. A man next to me at baggage claim said, as I laughed out loud, That must be a great book! You haven’t put it down! He was right.

In the last quarter of the book, it starts to get even a little crazy for my generous suspension of disbelief, but I still couldn’t stop reading, and the ending is satisfying (even with a several-years-later epilogue;* it’s like watching 9-to-5 with Lily Tomlin all over again).

Note on content: Some language, some sexual content, some violence. Less language or violence (and a little more sex) than Gun, with Occasional Music (but not as good as that one either). Less of everything than the White Tiger.

* To include the several-years-late epilogue or not to? I remember finishing the Grapes of Wrath and DYING to know what happened to Joads down the road. Harry Potter has it. 9-to-5 (the film) had it. Thank You For Smoking has it. Lots of movies based on real life have it (Remember the Titans, Stand and Deliver, etc.). Gun, with Occasional Music sort of had it, but in a particularly creative way. I get the feeling that the best books don’t do it, but not everyone is aiming to be (or needs to be) the best book…

The crime of fiction is worse than the crime of the flesh. After all, the crime of the flesh can be accidental, the fruit of a momentary passion, whereas no one has ever heard of an unpremeditated crime of fiction.

[from Luis Fernando Veríssimo, O Clube dos Anjos (The Club of Angels), p14; my own bad translation]

]]> http://tukopamoja.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/fictional-crime-worse-than-real-crime/feed/ 0 tukopamoja http://tukopamoja.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/the-book-lovers-book-that-describes-itself/ http://tukopamoja.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/the-book-lovers-book-that-describes-itself/#comments Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:45:57 +0000 tukopamoja http://tukopamoja.wordpress.com/?p=809 ]]>

I hadn’t necessarily expected to read every word of the Lowell biography, but … it’s one of those books you thrust on your partner with an incredulous cry of “This is me!” [Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree, p16-17]

That is exactly how I feel about many passages in this journal of Hornby’s own reading, and I’ve only read the first ten pages!  (I’ve read several Hornby books and haven’t been disappointed: About a Boy, How to Be Good, A Long Way Down. Good was the least good, but even that had value.)

On my last trip to Rio I started E. L. Doctorow’s City of God. After all, that’s the name of one of the most well known slums in Rio (and a book and movie that take place therein). Doctorow is talking about a different city though: New York. After reading ten of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot novels over the last year, this narrative struck me:

While I was at it, I bought half a dozen used paperback detective novels. To learn the trade … I just read the…things when I’m dpressed. The paperback detective he speaks to me. His rod and his gaff they comfort me. [p8]

Those last two sentence are classic Hercule Poirot sentence construction.  (Kind of like Yoda’s but also … different.)

This is almost enough – in and of itself – to make me want to read this book:

The studies in this book … [have] been featured multiple times on 20/20, the BBC, and other network TV shows, and they’ve been bantered about by Rush Limbaugh and berated by Dr. Laura.

[from Brian Wansink's Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think]

]]> http://tukopamoja.wordpress.com/2009/11/14/dr-lauras-animosity-is-another-mans-praise/feed/ 1 tukopamoja http://tukopamoja.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/my-and-the-pros-reviews-of-outliers-by-malcolm-gladwell-read-by-the-author/ http://tukopamoja.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/my-and-the-pros-reviews-of-outliers-by-malcolm-gladwell-read-by-the-author/#comments Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:34:22 +0000 tukopamoja http://tukopamoja.wordpress.com/?p=798 ]]>

My thoughts:  some very interesting tidbits, but the least compelling of Gladwell’s oeuvre

I thoroughly enjoyed Gladwell’s previous two books (The Tipping Point and Blink), and I found neither convincing in its central thesis. Gladwell has a flare for making psychology and social psychology research easily digestible and interweaving it with case studies to provide a satisfying mix that is inherently interesting, high entertainment value, and insightful into how we behave. That said, in neither of the previous books did I find that this tapestry of experiments and case studies really convinced me of the central thesis.

The thesis of this newer book is that people who are exceptionally successful – outliers – are a product of their environments much more than they are individually exceptional. First, Gladwell keeps knocking down a straw man that no one really believes anyway. I think we all know that environment matters a lot, and Gladwell never really accounts for the individual elements. Yes, the Beattles got 10,000 hours to practice in Hamburg, but were there other bands that played in Hamburg every year but didn’t go big? Yes, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were born at a special time and had a special set of privileges, but what about Bill Gates’s friends in his same high school computer club? What computer empire did they create? In other words, the individual element which Gladwell seems so excited to downplay still has to play a major role; or at least, Gladwell hasn’t convinced me that it doesn’t.

The most interesting part of the book deals with air plane crashes because it goes back to Gladwell’s successful formula: a mix of social science research (in this case, on cross-cultural hierarchy something something) and case studies – of major plane crashes.

Gladwell still tells a good story, but this one is much less convincing than his previous work.  I listened to the unabridged audiobook, and Gladwell narrates well.  At the end of the audiobook, there is an interview with Gladwell which really belongs at the beginning; it gives an intro to the book that is totally superfluous after having read it.

Note on content: There might be a swear word or two in here; and in the epilogue there is one description of slave treatment which is not pretty (but is historical), but otherwise this is innocuous sailing.

The pros’ clips are below the fold…

New York Times: “Outliers,” Mr. Gladwell’s latest book, employs this same recipe, but does so in such a clumsy manner that it italicizes the weaknesses of his methodology. The book, which purports to explain the real reason some people — like Bill Gates and the Beatles — are successful, is peppy, brightly written and provocative in a buzzy sort of way. It is also glib, poorly reasoned and thoroughly unconvincing.

New York Times Book Review: “Outliers” has much in common with Gladwell’s earlier work. It is a pleasure to read and leaves you mulling over its inventive theories for days afterward. It also, unfortunately, avoids grappling in a few instances with research that casts doubt on those theories. (Gladwell argues that relatively older children excel not only at hockey but also in the classroom. The research on this issue, however, is decidedly mixed.) This is a particular shame, because it would be a delight to watch someone of his intellect and clarity make sense of seemingly conflicting claims. … For all these similarities, though, “Outliers” represents a new kind of book for Gladwell. “The Tipping Point” and “Blink,” his second book, were a mixture of social psychology, marketing and even a bit of self-help. “Outliers” is far more political. It is almost a manifesto.

Guardian: The trouble with the book is that Gladwell is ultimately engaged in a long argument with nobody but himself. Throughout, he defines his position against a floating, ubiquitous, omnipotent ‘we’; a Greek chorus of predictable opposition and received opinion. ‘There is something profoundly wrong with the way we look at success,’ he writes. ‘We cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don’t matter at all.’ And so he goes on. … However, it’s still fun to follow Gladwell on his meandering intellectual journeys, even if the conclusions he arrives at here are so obviously self-evident as to be banal. Even when he is not at his best he is worth taking seriously. He has a lucid, aphoristic style. His case studies are well chosen, such as when he writes about the birth dates of elite ice hockey players and discovers a pattern: most are born in the first three months of the year. His range is wide, and he writes as well in Outliers about sport as he does about corporate law firms in New York or aviation. Little is beneath his notice.

Entertainment Weekly: A couple of best-selling books (The Tipping Point, Blink) and a forest’s worth of must-read New Yorker articles into his career, Malcolm Gladwell has turned himself into the literary world’s Mr. Wizard. … Expertly versed in not only science but business and psychology, Gladwell is a poufy-haired showman with a knack for explaining anything to everybody, from dog whispering and fads to disposable diapers and snap judgments. His books in particular — written in a noticeably more populist, teacherly voice than his New Yorker articles — are rigged to blow open the heads of even the dimmest of general readers. And his latest, the explosively entertaining Outliers, might be his best and most useful work yet. … There are both brilliant yarns and life lessons here: Outliers is riveting science, self-help, and entertainment, all in one book.

Business Week: 4 out of 5 stars.  The Good: Another ‘Aha!’ book from the best-selling writer, Malcolm Gladwell.  The Bad: One wonders: Did he leave out evidence that contradicts his thesis about success?  The Bottom Line: Challenging common assumptions, Outliers will have readers pondering their own destinies.

The Independent: Time and again, Gladwell writes against a cornball caricature of can-do Americanism. This pure voluntarist dogma figures as a straw man he never tires of knocking down. Not only has no European ever credited it, but I doubt if any of the 67 million US voters who chose Obama has either. “Outliers are those who have been given opportunities,” he repeats, “and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them”.

Christian Science Monitor:  Thought-provoking, entertaining, and irresistibly debatable, “Outliers” offers lively stories about an unexpected range of exceptional people – Korean airline pilots, New York litigators, immigrant garment workers, Asian math whizzes, low-achievers with high IQs, and, for good measure, Gladwell’s Jamaican grandmother.  Overall, it’s another winner from this agile social observer.

Marginal Revolution (the economics blog), links to a few other published reviews

A couple of months ago I posted a review of this fabulous Brazilian novel, Borges and the Eternal Orangutans.   I hadn’t read it in English and so couldn’t vouch for the translation, but today I stumbled on a collection of reviews of the English translation and they are glowing!

I’ll pass on two quotes:

“Luis Fernando Verissimo’s Borges and the Eternal Orangutans is a perfect novel. I’ll say it again: This book is a perfect novel. (…) The reader will mourn because the novel is so short, and it’s only the second by Verissimo to be translated into English” – Thomas McGonigle, The Los Angeles Times

“In the end, Verissimo’s pleasure in his own absurd intertextual universe is infectious: the two-way-mirror trickery of his conclusion is as satisfying as it is utterly predictable. As Borges wrote of Poe: “we might think that his plots are so weak that they are almost transparent”. Luis Fernando Verissimo’s is decidedly threadbare; but he knows, with his heroes, that a predictable detective story is not necessarily an imperfect one.” – Brian Dillon, Times Literary Supplement

More at The Complete Review

It has to be a rule, I think, that when a family member gives you his new book, you stop what you’re doing and read it.  Having a brother-in-law for a writer could have turned out really, really badly. … He could have written books that I hated, or found impossible to get through.  (Imagine if your brother-in-law wrote Finnegan’s Wake, and you were really busy at work.  Or you weren’t really a big reader.) [from Nick Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree, p18]

I’ve been working my way through my brother-in-law’s book for a while now, slowly but most surely.  “Nature is a solemn fact, a glorious reality, which ought to move us to higher thought and true nobility” (Clarence King, quoted in The Humboldt Current, p194).

Suggestions from The Common Reader:

A. Gregor Samsa’s sister from The Metamorphosis. What was her name again? Ah, yes, Grete. Thank you internet. I don’t really know what that would look like, but I think it’d be brilliant.

…

C. You could be A Film Adaptation of Your Favorite Book. So: shorter, dumber, but also sexier, with more kicks to the face, more explosions, and maybe a happier ending. (Don’t take the “more explosions” bit too literally, eh?)

Hat tip to Bookslut