Review: The Monk of Mokha

The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Eggers tells another story of a normal guy facing long odds trying to do the right thing. I kept having flashbacks listening to this audiobook, and I realized I was constantly being reminded of Eggers’ book “Zeitoun”. Some of the anecdotes about an earnest individual being rousted by chaotic authority sounded very similar. In both books, the subject prevails in comparison to those around him. As I wrote in my review in “Zeitoun”, this non-fiction hero-making book has the feel of an advertisement for the subject, and in this case, Mokhtar’s coffee company does offer the book in a package with his coffee.

Despite my concerns about why this was written, I did enjoy the story to some extent. I love a good “new entrepreneur against the odds” story, and this fits the bill. You follow Mokhtar as he comes up with the idea, researches it, learns sales, lives a messy life, but figures it out, bit by bit. The culmination of the story in a chaotic attempt to leave Yemen for a coffee convention in Portland was a little too long. I was left wanting more on what happened after the realization of Mokhtar’s big break, but the book left that out, making me wonder if the story was over. You are not left with the feeling that Mokhtar has built a sustainable company. Hopefully, Eggers addresses this in future editions.


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Review: Lincoln's Last Trial: The Murder Case That Propelled Him to the Presidency: The Murder Case That Propelled Him to the Presidency

Lincoln's Last Trial: The Murder Case That Propelled Him to the Presidency: The Murder Case That Propelled Him to the Presidency by Dan Abrams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

You can see how this book was put together. The author did a prodigious amount of research to put this together. He had a good place to start. The trial in focus was one of the first in downstate Illinois that had a trial transcript. It wasn’t complete in our sense of modern court transcripts – the closing arguments weren’t captured – but the trial, with teams of lawyers on both sides, was captured in detail. The authors then researched the people involved in the trial, from the judge to the witnesses to the court crier, if I heard that right (sounded like a court bailiff to me). The author researched to a deep level. We learn that the crier used a different, somewhat unique call to order for court. We learn of some of the other travelers in town that could have met up with the principals in the story. We learn about the times – a townsman suggests a visitor tour Springfield’s top tourist attraction, the town stables, from where the Donner party departed. And you get Lincoln, a towering presence in the book, in the trial and in the many anecdotes that are included to give life to the story.

The author took this research and created a story that included the trial, but also included background and tangential anecdotes, all added to the story. It becomes a whole story, but with a few odd tangential bits that added to the flavor but detracted from the flow. You end up with a very readable book, cinematic in description. Lincoln really stands out. As presented, his character would make an excellent lawyer in a legal drama on TV. -smart and pithy. You get these interesting characters, but you also get the legal dual. At one point, you see Lincoln’s side pulls recent relevant case law, then you see the opposition finding older case law to cite. Quite a bit of the story turns on the ability of Lincoln to think ahead of his opponents and to use what we would now call “persuasion techniques” to sway the judge and jury.

I listened to this audiobook, and found it very easy to listen to and to follow. But given this was a history book with plenty of conjectured events and conversations, I would have appreciated the paper version if it had plentiful footnotes to call out those conjectures from the record. Given the base story and how the author made it interesting, I look forward to more by this author.


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Review: Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal about the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing

Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal about the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing by Ben Blatt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I work in software, with systems created to manage electronic content and to handle eDiscovery and searches. One of the capabilities of these kinds of systems is the ability to make content available for analysis through analytics. I’ve seen users of these system do some interesting things in evaluating their content to, for example, find relationships between emails, but I hadn’t seen many good uses of text analytics for researching regular, old documents. That’s what this book does. There are dozens of examples described analyzing mostly books, comparing, for instance, uses of different words over time, and comparing different authors in word usage. The first example, analysis of the Federalist papers to determine the original author based on word usage, was a great introduction to how this kind of analysis can impact our understanding of history. Many of the other examples didn’t aim quite so high, providing ways to compare authors to others, or compare an author’s early work to their later work. There were also examples comparing the size of an author’s name on book covers compared to their co-writers or compared to their own books as the author became more popular. Along the way, you learn that Danielle Steele and James Patterson’s writing stands out for, to me, unexpected reasons. I found this an interesting book if you are interested in books and authors.

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Review: The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present

The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present by Eric R. Kandel
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Interesting book starting with a review of “the scene” in Vienna prior to WWI, describing the art scene and Freud and his research. After this overview, the book turns into a somewhat pop-science review of brain science and psychology. It concludes using the learnings of the Viennese to illustrate the science, and to further discuss creativity. I found the first part, the history, quite unexpected and interesting. The author described how artists discovered new ways to present their art using new thinking about human perception. These perceptual cues are then described from the perspective of brain science and psychology. Quite deep. There have been quite a few books that covered the science that this book covered in the past year, and it seems I’ve read more than a handful. This came across as a deeper technical discussion than those pop-science books, and it had a unique angle of relating it to art and early psychology. It was still quite readable.

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Review: Habeas Data: Privacy vs. the Rise of Surveillance Tech

Habeas Data: Privacy vs. the Rise of Surveillance Tech by Cyrus Farivar
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I found this a fascinating and well-written book. I work in IT dealing with eDiscovery, records management, and archiving. I have an interest in how the laws on privacy impacts the electronic traces we leave behind in the world, often hidden in the corporate repositories I work with. And, I have some history reading mysteries and watching Perry Mason, so there’s an interest in the law. “Habeas Data” provides details on the issues I face at work, and does it in an approachable style, a mix of “Perry Mason” and Malcolm Gladwell. The author discusses a number of legal cases in the history of privacy and surveillance in the US. Some I had heard of, some not, but all are told as stories. Also, because the issues in privacy are being caused by the indelible march of technology, the author describes the technology of the time of each case, and also reflects on how that technology has changed since the original case. The oldest cases covered are a few decades old, the newest just a year or two – relatively fresh out of the headlines (think 2016 elections). It seems that a big issue, perhaps the biggest issue enabled by this march of technology is the incredible volumes of information we now routinely carry. Court decisions that allowed, say, search of the photos in the pockets of a suspect back in the 50s now don’t (or may not) allow search of photos in an iPhone in the pocket of a suspect, in part because there’s just too many photos for a person to consider searchable, and too much of their life enclosed in that piece of metal, plastic, and glass. While the increasing issues of privacy are troubling, “Habeas Data” provides the background to understand how changes in technology have driven changes and new definitions in law. If you have an interest in the topic of the legal aspects of privacy and surveillance in our modern world (from the American perspective), this is an excellent book.

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Review: Stories for Work: The Essential Guide to Business Storytelling

Stories for Work: The Essential Guide to Business Storytelling by Gabrielle Dolan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"These days, employees want fewer facts and less information, and more emotion and meaningful connection."

Ah, the post-fact world...This seems very true in my experience, for many employees, at least for employers that don’t have a history of not telling the whole story. And that is just one target audience (employees, especially those in a corporate change program or being “indoctrinated” with company vision and values) Dolan describes in “Stories for Work”. Dolan teaches how to find personal stories, how to tell those stories, and how to use them for presentations, sales, coaching, job interviews, and basic getting-to-know you conversations, in addition to the change and vision uses previously mentioned. Dolan’s suggestions are relatively concise and useful. There is more ink used on examples than on the procedures she’s recommending, and the examples are useful and interesting to show the format of stories and the emotional content. Key learning: make ‘em short – stories should be two minutes or less. I was concerned that this would be one of those books by consultants that are just an advertisement to sell her services, but this appears to be useful without hiring Dolan. Note that she really wants you to hire her, as most of the examples are from former students of her classes or from her consulting clients. And she includes many mentions of her consultancy throughout the book. Despite the advertising, I found the content useful and interesting, and I would consider reading another book by Dolan.

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Review: The Feather Merchants: A Novel

The Feather Merchants: A Novel by Max Shulman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

For me, Max Shulman’s “The Feather Merchants” was a trip to the past. But not the past you’d expect, given this is a satire about a WWII soldier on leave. The trip to the past for me was back to my own younger days reading National Lampoon magazine in the late 70s or early 80s. This book has the style of writing I recall from some of the Lampoon stories, and it could easily fit into the magazine. Typical of some of those stories, “The Feather Merchants” include dozens of goofy, made up names, a far-fetched story line, and a bit of a sudden ending. For this kind of heavy satire, I find less is more – I’d rather read a short story than a short novel. But this was interestingly written, and I thought worth the effort. As I’m a Dobie Gillis fan, I’ll be reading more by Shulman. Note not PC for this era, but pretty common for its time.

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