clock … watching time, the only true currency

This business book was a freebie, and I got little more than what I paid for it. Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing just isn’t new stuff after a decade-plus of different people (notably Seth Godin) telling us how marketing is changing. I suppose the lessons and anecdotes presented [...]

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Deflating the myth of rational choice, Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide runs through the research about decision-making and decisions, and comes out with the perhaps refreshing news that we go with our gut feelings most of the time. Depending on the type of decision we’re making, that emotional tilt may be helpful — or even [...]

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I read the excerpt of Grant Wahl’s article in Sports Illustrated first. After that appetizer, I was grateful to my brother for providing the full book of The Beckham Experiment. Not much to add here, so many months after the fact, except that I’m amazed the Galaxy played so well this season, with Beckham and [...]

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The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson lay around the house for years before I read it this summer. The subtitle “Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America” underlines the book’s strength and weakness. Larson is telling two stories, and I found his weaving a bit crude and forced. The [...]

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Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande displays the same quiet curiosity and caring that carry his writing in the New Yorker. When health care stays top of mind, it’s pleasant and reassuring to have some honesty about the ways we can improve and which problems really are hard for us to solve. [...]

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Sitting on the shelf at a quiet moment this summer, Assembling California by John McPhee beckoned once again. (My first read was before I started clock.) McPhee’s quiet, steady gaze at a topic feeds a similar curiosity in the reader, even about topics previously unconsidered. This story is how California arrived at its current physical [...]

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With the title The Secret Pulse of Time: Making Sense of Life’s Scarcest Commodity, Stefan Klein echoes my own thoughts about the years/months/weeks/days/hours/minutes/seconds skipping or struggling by. Klein is a science journalist who’s found success in taking on big topics with catchy titles. I haven’t read The Science of Happiness or All by Chance, but [...]

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At the same time I found a volume of three lectures by Wallace Stegner, I picked up American Places. Originally published in 1981, this collection from Wallace Stegner and his son Page Stegner was re-released in 2006. I enjoyed these essays several weeks ago. Father and son share an ethos that quietly, insistently urges a [...]

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Dreaming in Code covers three years of software development, without bearing witness to a final release. That’s really the whole story: software is hard, unpredictable, and never finished. The book, by Scott Rosenberg, aspires to match Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine, the classic record of a technology team overcoming the hurdles of [...]

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History gets written to react to the present. So when Juan Cole, a professor at Michigan wanted a new way to comment on the Middle East (beyond his blog), he wrote a book. Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East chronicles the French attack and occupation in 1799-1800. Napoleon was smart enough to scoot back to [...]

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