The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Book Reviews

My book reviews. Fiction, non-fiction and mainly business literature. These are all excellent books, ’cause I never review the books I don’t like.

  • Book review: Quicksilver

    Well then, reading Neal Stephensons newest book Quicksilver took me a little longer than expected but then it is 900 pages long. It’s set in the 1600’s amid scientists (called natural philosophers at the time), alchymists, kings, nobles and vagabonds. The cast of characters is enormous and contains both real and fictional people. People like Isaac Newton, Leibnitz, Louis XIV and William of Orange mix with names familiar to readers of Cryptonomicon: Waterhouse’s, Comstock’s, Shaftoe’s and especially Enoch Root.

    The book seems extremely well researched, and certainly all I know about that period and its science and politics seemed to fit it. The book is divided into three books, and my favourite is definitely the middle part where the main characters are Jack Shaftoe (half-cocked jack, the king of vagabonds) and Eliza whom he rescues from a turkish harem. This part has a tremendous drive and energy.

    The other two thirds of the book are driven mainly by the amusing and highly detailed descriptions of the political and scientific developments of that age, inventions ranging from calculus to stock markets. The book is enormously complex, and being the kinf od reader I am, I’m sure I missed many of the more subtle points it has to offer. I hope to pick them up when I re-read the book at some point.

    UPDATE:
    I have now re-read Quicksilver, and completely changed my mind about the book. The book is excellent, I just didn’t get it the first time around. As with many truly rewarding works, you may not get it at first, but when you do, it’s that much more rewarding.

    This book is not a single page too long! It IS complex, but that’s why it’s good. Read it!

  • Book review: Hey Nostradamus!

    I discovered Douglas Coupland what seems like many years ago (but was in fact in 1997) when I read Generation X, and he remains one of my favourite authors. His style has since been steadily moving away from the hyper-realistic stories of Shampoo planet and Generation X to a more surrealist, subjective and poetic style which is also evident in his latest book Hey Nostradamus.

    What it’s about? Good question. There’s a shooting at a high school, much like the one at Columbine, and this has consequences for many people, whose intersecting stories are told in the books four separate passages. The mood of the book is detached, somber and haunting but still moving and while the book offers very few answers it certainly poses many good questions. It is an elegant piece of fiction which I recommend highly.

  • Book review: All hat and no cattle

    This book is the story of Chris Turner, and her work to bring change, learning and empowerment into Xerox. It’s a highly entertaining book, right from this first line: “My family never did hold much with organized religion. The fact is, we ended up in Texas because my great-grandfather roughed up a priest in Arkansas. Seems the good father didn’t want to bury a nonbaptized child the Catholic cemetery, and my great-granddaddy took offense at such malarkey… Given this background you’ll understand how I came by my habits of challenging rules and dogma. Questioning the status quo is something I have done all my life.”

    And reading these “tales of a corporate outlaw” you’re left with little doubt that the status quo needs to be questioned. And here’s a tip: When you read the book, imagine it in a thick southern drawl – that makes it even better.
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  • Book review: Corporate Kindergarten

    What is the value of play in the corporate world, and how could we go about introducing more of it? These are the main questions that Jesper Bove-Nielsen examines in his book Corporate Kindergarten.

    This book falls somewhere between manifest, business book and academic book. It has the depth and reach of a good business book, but it clearly has a message, namely that playing is a good thing, and has tremendous value to offer the business world. The book is in danish, so non-danes will have to wait for a translation.
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  • Book review: Impro for storytellers

    Keith Johnstone is the inventor of theatresports and in Impro for Storytellers, he writes about the importance of stories in improvisational theatre. He argues, that without interesting storylines impro simply degenerates into a loose collection of gags and becomes a lot less interesting.

    The funny thing is that I bought this book thinking it was about storytelling, when its focus is actually on impro theatre, but I still enjoyed reading it and I learned a lot from it.
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  • Book review: Bird by bird

    I’ve just added Anne Lamott to my “List of People I’d Really Like To Meet”. Having just read her book Bird by bird: Some instructions on writing and life, I think she’s a nice person, interesting to be around and very wise.

    The book contains many, many tips for the aspiring writer. Not on the technical stuff, like how to put the words together or how to sell your finished book to a publisher, but more on how to live as a writer. She makes the excellent point, that a writer’s main ambition should not be to be published but to write, since that is what a writer does most of the time.
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  • Book review: Learned optimism

    Of course I’ve been reading while I was on holidays, and it fit very well that I was reading about optimism. Martin Seligman has long researched optimism and positive psychology, and Learned Optimism is the popular summary of his work.

    But why be optimistic? Shouldn’t you just be a realist? Well, here are a few good reasons for being an optimist:
    * Optimists lead better lives
    * Optimists live longer
    * Optimists are healthier
    * Optimists do better at work and in school
    * Optimists have fewer depressions
    * Optimists have more friends and better social lives

    And did you know that:
    * The most optimistic candidate has won nine out of ten american presidential elections from 1948 to 1984
    * The most optimistic sports teams outperform the pessimistic ones
    * An insurance company that started hiring based on optimism rather than skill got much better salesmen out of it
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  • Book review: Cryptonomicon

    Okay, here’s a novel in which the central themes are cryptology (making and breaking codes), nerds and world war II. Sounds boring, huh? But Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson is an amazing work and it’s 900 pages do not contain a single boring passage.

    The story is amazingly complex and has as many as five parallel tales set either during world war ii or today. Nerds, marines, scientists and one very strange priest from a mysterious order, all involved in plots and counter-plots that span more than 50 years.
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  • Book review: Open Space Technology

    If you want to read about open Space Technology, this book is the only place to start. Harrison Owen who came up with the concept, explains the practicalities and the history of Open Space meetings in his usual clear, engaging and entertaining way.

    Open Space meetings are characterized by their ability to consistently create the right background for incredible achievements. They are amazingly efficient and they also create enthusiasm, stimulate the open exchange of ideas and avert most conflicts. To me, Open Space is the meeting form that most acknowledges us as independent, self-reliant humans capable of taking responsility for ourselves and others.
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  • Book review: Smart mobs

    Stuff’s changing all around us. New technologies are changing the way we work, interact and even how we conduct our courtship rituals. From I-mode services in Japan to the hitech millieu of Scandinavia to president-toppling demonstrations in Manilla to cyborgs in the US who want to merge body and machine. And much of this change goes unnoticed or is rapidly integrated in our lives and taken for granted.

    Imagine a group of people united in some cause. The cause can be anything from celebrity spotting in New York to anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle. Now imagine the same group of people always connected to the net, to each other, always able to monitor opponents and competitors. That’s a smart mob. And trying to predict how people will act and interact when wireless networks, constant internet access, camera video phones etc. become widespread is the aim of this book, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold.
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