Posts Tagged ‘book reviews’

The picture above depicts how vehicular traffic is regulated on the road heading into China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region: plastic “dummy” cops standing sentinel adorning the soft-shoulder, meant to resemble the genuine article to deter traffic violators, wanton drunken driving, and reckless acts behind the wheel across the wide, flat expanses of the barren steppes of the wind-battered Mongolian plain.

Well, yesterday afternoon I finished off native-Missourian Peter Hessler’s third installment in his “angels abroad” China series, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory, and I’m giving the book a very tall two thumbs up. This is 424pp of lean and mean non-fiction prosaic gold which you’re going to regret not reading. Did I mention you should go out and snag a copy today?

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I’m happy I listen to people when they strongly suggest titles to read. In the case of Lawrence L. Allen’s Chocolate Fortunes: The Battle for the Hearts, Minds, and Wallets of China’s Consumers, this was a particularly sweet suggestion and many thanks to Dan Harris of Harris & Moure Law, the perennial award-winning blogmeister and commentator at China Law Blog, or as we Generation Xers like to call it, CLB.

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If you haven’t picked up your copy of Seth Godin’s latest primer, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable yet, you might want to have a run on over to your local bookstore.

With strong recommendations from both Chris Brogan and Todd Sattersten, my hardcover arrived in the mail on Friday, and by Saturday evening I’d polished it off.

So here’s the nutshell: The world’s changed forever. Social media networks and the deepening financial crisis have destroyed the former secure economic foundations of the corporate world and remaining a mere silent cog in the big wheel, biding your time behind the scenes isn’t cutting it anymore.

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I’m almost done reading Scott Kirsner’s Fans, Friends & Followers: Building An Audience and A Creative Career in the Digital Age based on a majorly strong thumbs-up from Jon Reiss, author of Think Outside the Box Office. Both books complement each other well, even despite their mild overlap, and I’ve been particularly enjoying how Scott’s book is structured along Po Bronson lines, essentially a series of comprehensive vignettes showing a representative sampling of people who embody the DIY/social media/take no prisoners message Kirsner is conveying to his loyal audience.

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The good people over at 800-CEO-READ just RSSed their 67th issue of Change This, an initiative which is all about the “big hairy business idea.” According to the editors of the program, the objective of Change This is to disseminate potential “game changing” ideas which don’t necessarily have a commercial bent to them, but which may have at some certain stage once the idea gains a considerable amount of traction. The various ideas promulgated by Change This – and there are dozens of them at this stage — are intended to get you zooming about your current best business practices and about some inspirational new mantras that have the capacity to fundamentally alter the way you do business or interact with your colleagues. The idea is to jettison the heavy, useless old, and warmly welcome the new.

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…well, you can go ahead and fill in the blanks.

But that would seem to be the prognosis of an excellent new book called The Cleanest Race, penned by B.R. Myers, a title I’d written about extensively yesterday which garnered a considerable amount of feedback from my readers (thanks to all who emailed in, especially on Facebook)

Myers’ premise in a nutshell is thus: we here in cushy West are astonishingly  ignorant of the North Korean menace, and our present political engagements and strategies vis-a-vis the hermit kingdom — whereby the US and its allies demand unfettered access to the DPRK’s nuclear facilities and the immediate, unconditional dismantling of its overall WMD program — runs counter to the ruling philosophy of North Korea’s “Dear Leader,” Mr. Kim Jong Il (ain’t he cute? Some South Koreans certainly think so).

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The cleanest purest race.

Yes, that is indeed how the North Koreans think about themselves, and a staggering number of South Koreans, as well, if the occasional foreigner-bashing newspaper article is anything to go by. You’ll have to read B.R. Myers latest book on the topic, The Cleanest Race, to know what I’m talking about though (but don’t fret, it’s a thin read and full of pictures to break up the action for the time-pressed).

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Dan Senor and Saul Singer recently co-authored their latest title about the history of the Israeli hi-tech and venture capital scenes entitled Start-Up Nation.

There were takeaways aplenty in his read. For instance, did you know that Israel is the second-leading listed country on the NASDAQ, outranking OECD powerhouses like Canada, India, China, South Korea, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand combined? Or how about this: Israel filed nearly 7,500 patent applications in the decade 1990-2000. There is no other nation, save for the United States, which comes anywhere near these numbers. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s hard to articulate what overcame me for the better part of yesterday, but I just couldn’t put down LA Times Beijing bureau chief Barbara Demick’s latest North Korea (DPRK) tell-all, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.

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