My former and occasionally current colleague, friend and partner in highly vocal discussions (we were once asked to pipe down by an intimidated colleague who thought we would go for each other’s throats, when we both thought we only had a friendly exchange of views) Tony DiRomualdo has snuck off to become a columnist at the Wisconsin Technology Network. Tony’s articles reflects his deepfelt passion for giving people a fair deal in a world that is increasingly globalized and outsourced – without denying the economic benefits of sensibly done outsourcing. A much better argument than a lot of the populistic protectionism that seems to dominate politics these days – this middle ground is what we need if we are to make sense of globalization and offshoring, rather than make wars about it.
Tony is also a gourmet (responsible for a number of travel allowance discussions at our former place of work) – and he does talks, too….. Make sure dinner is included, and you might learn something, and not just about the food.

After reading about Malcolm Gladwell, the author of The tipping point (a great explanation of network externalities), in Dan Bricklin’s blog, I discovered that he had a website with an archive of his articles in the New Yorker. Well worth a visit – great stuff on the myth of talent management (or, rather, why what worked for McKinsey did not work for Enron or, for that matter, for Swissair), on recognizing whether people are lying based on their facial microexpressions – and why SUVs are a bad thing because people think they are much safer than they are. Excellent writing, as with most things in the New Yorker, highly recommended.

John Grisham (2001): A Painted House. New York: Dell.
Interesting portrait of life in the early 1950s in a cotton-farming community in Arkansas, as told through an increasingly precocious 7 year old boy. One gets the feeling that Grisham wanted to write To Kill a Mockingbird but couldn’t quite stop being a thriller writer – consequently, a lot happens (love, birth, violence, wheather, natural disasters) in this area where nothing really happens. Still, I liked it a lot – the writing is exceptional, especially the slightly tongue-in-cheek descriptions of how news spread through the small farming community and the touching concern of the family with with their son who is in away in the Korean war. Recommended.

James Spencer (2003), The Pilots, New York: Berkley Books.
This was a fast read – a sort of naïvistic Catch-22 written by someone who has read a lot of Hemingway – but I liked it. The author claims to be a WWII bomber pilot who has written a novel – more of a series of short stories with a linked set of participants, again like Hemingway – based on his remembrances. The main protagonist is a fighter ace, batting it out with Japanese Zero pilots and seeing the gruesome details of a war that, at least in the beginning, can seem noble and distant.
I was a bit surprised to see this novel panned on Amazon.com, but people looking for the more traditional, technical and heroic type of war novel, with much detail on weapons and history, will be a bit disappointed. The fairly modern language and style detracts a little from the authenticity – you sometimes wonder whether the author really was a pilot or merely a student of one. But the personalities come out through the sketches and the author mercifully avoids clear-cut endings – such as whether the ambitious flight captain taking chances to become the top ace really is evil or merely confused. Excellent last chapter on how people deal with their experiences back in civilian life, when the young pilots come home to the GI bill and the occasional question about their experiences. Recommended.

Donna Leon (2003) Uniform Justice, New York: Penguin
This is the third book in a series about the Italian police commissario Brunetti, trying to solve a case of either suicide or murder in a military school for the elitistic (or, rather, fascistic) offspring of the top brass. An honest politician (and if the political landscape of Italy is anything like it is described in this book, that is a very rare catch indeed) is under threat from people whom his investigations into military procurement practices may uncover.
The whole thing is rather formulaic, from the politicised boss, the psychologist wife, and the computer-wizard female assistant who can dig up anything by accessing, legally or not, various computer registers. The book is set in Venice, and I was a little surprised at how the police uses gondolas or their own launch to move about – but I have never been there, so I can’t vouch for the authenticity. This is Sjöwall & Wahlöö set in Italy, a bit repetitious, in fact. Not sure I’ll bother reading any more from this series.

Bill Bryson (2003). A Short History of Nearly Everything. New York, Broadway Books.
Any fan of Bill Bryson (and how can you be anything else after having read all his books) will see that he is, behind all his middle-aged-and-comically-disillusioned image, a closet academic. His books tend to pose as simple-minded reflections on travel and language, but he is betrayed (especially in In a sunburned country and his two books on the English language (Mother Tongue and Made in America) by his precise descriptions of history and natural science, and his careful references.
A Short History of Nearly Everything is the best popular science book I have read so far – and this is a popular book. As a child, I got as a gift a picture book on nuclear physics called Our Friend the Atom, which despite what I later realized was a rather simplistic (it was put together by Disney) in its view of the consequences of atomic energy, had the inestimable quality of making science interesting. Bryson’s latest has the ability to do the same, but to adults – managing to make us fascinated about science and nature without for an instant succumbing to naïve “science marches on” clichés.
The book aims to give an overview of natural science, organized in six parts: Lost in the cosmos (about space and how our models of it have developed), The size of the earth (the development of our understanding of the physical aspects of the earth and the solar system); A new age dawns (Einstein, atoms, subatomic particles, quantum theory); Dangerous planet (a delightful diversion into naturalistic paranoia, explaining the many ways in which the Earth is vulnerable – volcanoes, asteroids, and earthquakes, to name a few); Life itself (the main part of the book, explaining life as a system from the atmosphere to the cell and eventually to DNA) and finally The road to us (human evolution – including paleontology, which turns out to be based to a surprising degree on conjecture.)
Throughout everything, Bryson describes not just the various theories, but also the people who developed them, using his trademark powers of one-line characterization (Iowa is “stratigraphically uneventful”, for instance) to show that science, at a certain level, is as much a competition of opinion as a rational search for truth (and boy, does this make it more interesting!)
The references and explanations are, as far as I can tell, impeccable. My only quirk was that I was little surprised to see Bryson subscribe what I thought was an urban myth, the one about how glass is a kind of liquid, as evidenced by the oft-told story about antique window panes being thicker at the bottom. Physics aside, I always thought that the thicker-at-bottom phenomenon, if it indeed is true, could more plausibly be explained by ancient glassmakers not being able to produce flat glass, and window makers consistently putting the thickest side at the bottom (which is what I would have done, anyway). Bryson is also a little bit wide-eyed when it comes to some of the “dangers” of natural disasters such as the possible explosion of the Yellowstone caldera, but I ascribe that more to a fascination with possible dangers than to lack of scientific truth in storytelling. (Nevertheless, anyone can become a bit thoughtful after those chapters – the trouble is, who should you bequeath your possessions to when there is no one left?)
This is a book I would give to any young person wondering about science and any adult who feels that Discovery Channel is becoming a bit repetitive. Highly recommended. Just what is needed to make people interested in science and nature again.

Last week, when botanizing for something to while away the time flying home, I came across Dale Carnegie‘s How to win friends and influence people. Halfway remembering a comment by a professor of organizational psycology about this actually being a good book, I bought it.
It is, at least, an interesting book, both in itself and in the place it occupies. It is, as far as I know, the first really modern self-help book, and the Carnegie Institute (or whatever its name is) is still around, preaching the principles of Carnegie to all and sundry. The book’s message is deceptively simple: You can win friends and influence people by listening to them and behaving nicely – and the easiest way to do that is to actually mean it.
Despite the cheesiness, I like this book, mostly because the author writes very straightforward and without conceit. He does not try to cloak his argument in mysticism or displaced science. Instead, he sets up a principle for each chapter, then piles on the stories of famous people or course alumni who successfully or unsuccessfully have tried to apply it. No metaphors, no frameworks, just stories. Simple. In principle.

This one was the disappointment of the year (but then again, it’s only March). I bought Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code at Dublin airport at the recommendation of several friends. This is a NYT #1 bestseller, and I was looking forward to a complex and learned thriller with cryptography and history figuring prominently – kind of a combination of Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon and Unberto Eco’s Name of the Rose, maybe with intertwingled fact and fiction like Shakespeare in Love.

That was not to be. The book is a clunker, and once you start noticing it there is no way back.

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