BookStalking

Small Business Management: an Entrepreneurial Emphasis, by Longenecker, Moore, Petty, Palich

This is the textbook for the ENTR 335 class. I am somewhat disappointed by it because I was hoping for something a little more detailed, but this book seems to focus more on relentless boosterism and extolling the glories of owning or starting your own business. I was taking that part as a given, and wanted more gritty details. The appendixes offer that, but they are a brief part of the book.
I haven’t yet had a chance to go through the cd yet, or the video courses that the publisher offers on their site (http://www.intelecom.org) so I don’t know whether they “add value” to the text. The book is organized with a lot of textblocks, sidebars, simple graphics, and anecdotal stories. It is bright and colorful, and there are no heavy blocks of text.

Is it worth buying? Well, it’s a required text. More on that later.

The Sum Up: This book wishes really badly that it was on the web. It wants to be new media so badly.

Microsoft Office 2007: Second Custom Edition: cs101 introduction to computer applications, by various authors

This text is a collection of chapters and sections from other textbooks on MS Office, published specifically for the University. I was supremely unimpressed by this book, but perhaps that is because I am not the target audience for the book. The book is a collection of descriptions of tasks, interspersed with small vignettes of why you’d like to do those tasks.
Like most computer application books, it is boring and ill-suited to the task. This is the kind of thing that small videos and tutorial programs are so superior to text that I expect this to be a soon-to-be extinct market.
I purchased the last version of the book, not because it was required, but because it was bundled with software that was. If I had been able to skip the book, I would have.

The Sum Up: boring, ignorable, and ultimately useless.

Textbooks are big racket these days. They are large, pretty books, with a small audience, that often is forced to purchase them. The used market is often artificially constrained. This is not a recipe for low prices. I am looking forward to the developments by the Wikimedia project for developing open source textbooks.
Advances in art history, french, and algebra are progressing slowly enough, I dare say, that new editions of text books aren’t required every year. Establishing a stable corpus of academic literature will be the culmination of a dream attempted by Diderot so many years ago, and I think it is attainable quite soon. Subjects that DO have substantial changes year to year will only benefit from online distribution.
I predict that in less than 10 years, E-textbooks will become common. It will be a superior model, and with luck, it won’t be locked up in horrible DRM or “Bundles” or subscriptions. Free and open textbooks will be a good thing for students.

The current model doesn’t serve students very well, and I doubt that publishers actually make much money off them. The sooner professors adopt an open-source model for text books, the better for academia.

An interesting, but only mildly so, account of an attempt by a school board to put Intelligent Design on the science curriculum. 

I liked this one. But then, I’ve always been a sucker for idealistic over-the-top pessimistic policy wonk fiction. The main character, Cassandra Devine, modestly proposes on her blog that baby boomers be given hefty tax incentives to “gracefully transition” at age 65. Intended as an outrageous proposal to spur debate about the awesome bankruptcy of social security, and the concommital pressures placed on Generation Whatever, Cassandra finds herself swept up in political debate at the highest levels.

I couldn’t help envisioning a friend of mine in Cassandra’s place. I have no recollection of what she is described as (No wait, I do recall that is is blonde and beautiful) but I picture her instead as my buddy LK, also a young and impossibly competent member of our military spin forces. I’ll have to see what she thinks of the book, as she knows what it is like to have generals and senators bat for you.

This is the first of Buckley’s books that I have read, though I did see and enjoy “Thank you for smoking.”  I haven’t done too much research into the premise of the book, because while enjoy a good delving into the world of governmental accounting as much as anyone, I must confess a certain fearfulness at what I might find. It is all too easy to envision the 30% payroll tax hike on under 30′s enacted. But rather than assaulting the gated communities of the wealthy boomers, I expect that the actual members of my generation would shrug and say “Whatever.”

This is a collection of short fiction by David Drake. Perhaps it was just me, but I found some of them more accessible than others.  I had a hard time following nearly all of the “bug” style stories that featured any sort of monster creatures. I just couldn’t picture them.

I imagine that Ringo is pretty upset that there is a scifi authors workin group that helps the us government plan how to fight future wars. He is probably muttering sullenly to himself in his underground bunker as he polishes whatever firearm is his weapon of choice. Anyway, Ringo is probably a bad choice for a policy advisor since he could easily be replaced by a magic 8-ball that had choices such as “Nuke them Now”, “Pre-emptive assault”, or “Research Lasers”. Who knows, maybe they already have one. (based off the Heinlien model that has the additional choice to “study more calculus”.

I get irked by books where the main character’ guesses, hunches, or impulsive decisions are never wrong. Like Fox Mulder. Man, he’d come up with the wildest guesses ever, and he’d be right every single time. Every single character in this book is like that. “Hey, Mars looks different.” “It’s probably alien probes self-replicating with the aim of destroying America.” Yup, they are!

Also, when faced with a global disaster, I hope that China, Russia, and maybe the rest of the world get to participate. Heck, maybe there could be a summit or something. In this book, the rest of the world does nothing. Well, they bravely nuke themselves so we don’t have to, after losing to the probes. I know we’re awesome and all, but if there is a country on Earth right now that could mount a last ditch defense with minimal use of metal, my votes for the country that doesn’t blow the budget on aircraft carriers. Seriously, the rest of the world may not exist as far as this book is concerned.

I did like the “Ret Ball” device used through the story. It was a good way to break up the otherwise unrelieved earnestness of the main story-lines. Using it more often would have made it irritating, so it was the right thing to do.

More things I thought were crazy:

-Six-plus foot black guy. Huge. Dangerous. Who nicknames him “The Gazelle?”

-Not one, but TWO brilliant research students working at Hooters. Their role is to serve beer and bounce, and sometimes think. Not as much as men though. That wouldn’t be right.

-Forgetting the rest or the world, what is America doing when the economy is nationalized and state of global emergency declared? I mean, aside from the armed forces and the rocket scientists? Everyone seems pretty calm about the destruction of the planet. No riots. No looting. No complaining.

The fight scenes are good, as they should be, since they comprise most of the book. Ringo’s global politics are terrible. His small unit tactics are pretty good.  The climactic fire-fight is exciting, full of lasers, experimental machine guns, and infinite waves of alien probes. It would be a good movie ending. Very “Independence Day”.

I would have liked a bit more closure. So we fought off some of the infinite probes on Earth. They still own Mars, and a bunch of Jupiter’s Moons. What are we gonna do about that? Also, where did they come from? What are they doing? Do we have any future plans? Perhaps this will be addressed in a future book.

The Sum up:

The plot is ludicrous, but the action scenes make up for it. It would be a decent movie or videogame plot. Not bad.

An economics book for the hippies in your life. McKibben provides economic reasons why we should all shop at farmers markets, hook up the solar cells, and enjoy the polar icecaps for a few minutes before climate change evaporates them. 

There were some interesting facts in the book, such as a fleshed out version of the “cash = happiness” trope. (True for 10,000 dollars per person, less true for more than that.)

I think I read an excerpt from this book a year or so ago, when he did the “year of eating locally.”  I found that to be the most engaging part of the book, and I hope he does a follow up on that exclusively.

The axe he has to grind is a pretty big one- My former roommate JC would have hated this book. Central to his argument is that for much of history and most of the world, “More” = “Better”. But this is not true for most of Americans now. “More” stuff/space/food is typically what we do not need, but most people still pursue it anyways. The (heretical to JC) notion that infinite and indefinite economic growth is not what we need now is an intriguing premise for an economics book, and it would be nice if more of the book was focused on running those numbers.

I’d like to see more number in general in the book, especially with regards to policy. I’d like to see forecasts, and projections, both domestically and internationally. There is a small amount of hand-waving over what changing our growth policies would do, and I think that shouldn’t be glossed over.

To sum up:

Not bad. Of course, my reading it is preaching to the choir, but I would like to see other’s reactions to it.

Here are one line summaries of some of the other books I have read this month:

Appetite for Profit by Michele Simon

Didactic and boring. I didn’t finish it. Sure, she’s got great points, but her style is preaching to the choir and uninteresting to the rest of the world.

Rodale Book of Composting, revised edition, edited by Martin and Gershuny

Intriguingly donated to the library by the “Monongalia County Solid Waste Authority”. Chock full of 1970′s knowledge. Which is ok, since composting hasn’t really changed since, a billion years ago. I think most of the web references steal from this book.

The Green Trap, by Ben Bova

Disappointing. I started it about 3 times, before I managed to make it through. The subject is timely, but just not my style. Fans of Grisham will like it much more. Probably a fine example of the thriller genre. Just not for me.

A tale of suburban gardening, full of drama amidst the weeds. It’s not until the final chapter does the titular tomato appear. The book is structured as loose anecdotes on a theme, ranging from pests, to garden layout, to “Christopher Walken, gardener.”  The overall impression is that Alexander spends a lot of time in his garden, perhaps to his own detriment. What, indeed, does someone do with 2000 square feet of garden? That’s bigger than my house!

The book is decent enough, and captures the niche “writing about my gardening lifestyle” market that is so lucrative these days. But high drama it isn’t.  

The sum up:

Meh. A little divorced from most of the American experience. The author is well off, and the things he has to worry about seem either silly, or creations of his own causing. Meh.

This book wants to be a fairy tale in the style of the Brother’s Grim, or perhaps the more modern style of Wrede’s “Dragon” series. Unfortunately, it is a little too sacharine to be authentic, and the story is ultimately unsatisfying.

This story might be best for parents to read to toddlers or those who can’t handle complex characters. Which is odd, because the nonlinear nature of the story means that those readers may be easily confused by the back-and-forth style, in which four central characters interact loosely in different time lines.

Anybody past the fourth grade is going to be disappointed by the ending, which is altogether too pat and nice. It’s conflict resolution of the “Why don’t we all just get along” sort, and in this book, everyone genially does. 

I was initially pleased with the characterizations, because Dicamillo avoids making any stereotypical “bad guys” for the reader to hate. It’s best to have villains with understandable motives, who act reasonably in the pursuit of their goals. But a mexican standoff climax where everyone agrees to go home and have a nice cup of soup is more of an anticlimax.

For the most part, children want some gruesome in their stories- witness the success of the Lemony Snickett  books, or the “Goosebumps” series. Heck, even the bowdlerized versions of the Grim Fairy Tales are pretty vicious.

I’m going against the crowd here, because this book won a Newberry, and has about 4.5 stars on Amazon. Most people who didn’t like it are against the child abuse that is perpetuated on a character. I think that if the suffering lead to something more, then it would contribute to the story. Unfortunately, it is glossed over and ignored in the conclusion.

To sum up:

I’d like a second version of this story better- One aimed for older kids. If you are mature enough to follow the multiple threads of this story, then you are mature enough to get an ending that doesn’t patronize.

This is really much more of a “my-wife” book. She likes true stories, typically where everyone dies at the end, especially if it is about gender roles. Man, she’s gonna love this one.

Nafisi writes in a confessional style of her experiences as a teacher of literature in Iran, during the revolution. She describes in an increasingly despairing tone the changes in the society she lives in and finally leaves. She leaves her university as political pressure descend upon it, creating an atmosphere she finds untenable.  Unable to restrain herself, she begins teaching a select group of her former students in her home.

The western authors that the small group studies become increasingly divorced and relevant to their lives as religious hard liners enact sweeping social changes. Each of the women is marked by these changes, and they resent it bitterly as they become marginalized in their own country, homes and even bodies.

It is an act of bravery and rebellion to study the literature they love, and it provides a source of sisterhood and even inspiration for them. What does Nabakov’s “Lolita” mean to a society that lowers the marriageable age to nine? What does Austen’s stories of love and passion mean to girls who grow up with a fear expressing such emotions even in the most private of settings?

Nafisi’s evocative history of a time that was not so long ago should remind us that the freedoms known to our grandparents should not be taken for granted.

The sum up:

I didn’t necessarily like it, but I respected it. My wife will probably love it.