Review: Rent Collector

Rent Collector by Camron Wright
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I chose to read “The Rent Collector” because from the description it reminded me of Katherine Boo’s “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” which I enjoyed quite a lot. Both books follow people living in and working in garbage in Asian countries. Both books illustrate the kindness and industry of the poor, and both show that people can behave meanly as well. Boo’s book is considered non-fiction, though it read like a fiction book. “The Rent Collector” is fiction, but based on a documentary. So the books seem very related on the surface. In terms of writing style and intent, “The Rent Collector” felt a more saccharine story, along the lines of a Mitch Albom or Nicholas Sparks book. It felt more popular and American, for example the characters repeatedly say that they live in a “dump”. That seems too judgmental and American a word for these people to describe their homes. There were also observations, such as a passage about wearing Western t-shirts, that seemed like something an American writer would notice, but the characters wouldn’t have noticed. You could see “The Rent Collector” becoming a Hallmark movie. Bad things happen, but there is a little growth in the characters. It felt like a story, whereas BtBF felt like a lesson wrapped in a story, a good kind of sermon. This sounds over the top, but in perspective, reading BtBF changed me, while reading “The Rent Collector” provided me some entertainment.

Another aspect of this book that was interesting is the author’s back story. The author describes in an afterward how he came to write the book. His son created a documentary on people who lived in a dump in Cambodia. The author took stills from the documentary, which followed specific people around in the dump, and built his fictional story on these photos. He included a selection of the photos in the back of the book, with the character names and descriptions that he came up with. Talk about art imitating life. Given the real-world basis for the story, I feel I learned a little while reading a story of another culture.


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Review: Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties

Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties by Elijah Wald
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this story of Dylan’s folk concert surprise. Wald opens with a tease of the event to be fully described later – Dylan rocking. The author then dives into the history behind the event, with extensive bios of Dylan and Pete Seeger, name dropping dozens of others in the folk firmament in the late 50s and early 60s. Wald covers the business aspects, including concert promoting, as well as the music aspects. I found the variety of perspectives really helped set the stage for what was to follow – the night at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 when Dylan broke the code and played rock and roll, backed by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. In the frantic description of the concert, perhaps it was Dylan backing Butterfield. Nevertheless, things changed for Dylan and for folk music, as the prince moved on to conquer larger fields. I most enjoyed the stories of concert promoting, especially from the folk music collective, which isn’t a subject I’ve read a lot about. I also enjoyed a story I have read before, Dylan becoming Dylan. Here, there seems to be more direct quotes from sources including film. This has more of a feeling of immediacy than other Dylan-focused books I’ve read. I also enjoyed the descriptions of the focus of the book, the concert. There is a lot of back-stage intrigue, yet what exactly happened is not recorded. Wald weaves a narrative, explaining where he’s making conjectures and what he’s basing them on. This was nice work making a readable story of a confusing event where new paths in popular music were set.

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Review: My Years with General Motors

My Years with General Motors by Alfred P. Sloan Jr.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I read “My Years at General Motors” when I was in college, roughly 32 years ago. My interest at the time was in reading a piece of business history, and I find I still recall a number of topics covered in the book. I can’t say that for many books I read so many decades back. I think that what struck me was that Sloan and his managers really changed how things worked, and organized the automotive industry in a way I see many companies trying to organize their industries today. As I think about it, I realize that what made this book resonate with me all those years ago was that I recognized so many of the business and technical innovations that Sloan described, innovations that really created the world I lived in by being embedded in every organization I interacted with, from schools and colleges to Kmart to the Boy Scouts. I learned of customer segmentation from Sloan’s division of cars by class of the customer they aimed at, Chevy for the masses and Caddy for the upper class, with Olds, Buick, etc. falling in the middle, and with defined target customers. That business move lasted decades and drove changes, usually replication, across the industry. I also remember learning about technical innovation – the good and the bad. Sloan described some of the innovations that GM came up with, including, if I recall correctly, leaded gasoline. Some innovation is right for the times but wrong for other times. Other innovations included allowing car buyers to buy on credit, and building a massive organizational structure with staff departments and hierarchy and span of control optimized to the company’s needs. I also learned of Detroit, and of Dayton, GM hotbed of research. This book made me think highly of Dayton, and when I visited there for a job interview soon after I read Sloan’s book I felt I understood the city a bit better.

I’ve read other reviews that point out that Sloan’s book could be quite dry, with long company memos recorded. Thankfully, the years have allowed me to forget those kinds of difficulties in reading. While I do remember this was a challenge to read through, my interest was kept high by reading of the growth of modern big business from an early master. Impactful.


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Review: The Dark Worlds of H.P. Lovecraft, Vol 3

The Dark Worlds of H.P. Lovecraft, Vol 3 by H.P. Lovecraft
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Another collection of 4 Lovecraft horror tales. All creepy. Much of the credit goes to the narrator, who at times struck me as a fellow with a chest wound having a hard time putting much air into his deep and croaking voice, drawing you closer and closer…. The longest story, “Herbert West: Re-Animator”, must have been written for serialization. It consists of 5 short chapters, and each chapter begins with some repeating of earlier bits. The subject of this one is reanimating corpses. The other, shorter stories cover different topics, gruesomely described, but not as gruesome as the previous books in this series. Some racial “insensitivity” in evidence here. Lovecraft would not have won any PC awards.

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Review: Read This Before Our Next Meeting: How We Can Get More Done

Read This Before Our Next Meeting: How We Can Get More Done by Al Pittampalli
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A short manifesto deriding many types of meetings, and providing rules to apply to limit meetings to just the good kind. What is the good kind? Ones were decisions were already arrived at, where documentation has been passed along beforehand and studied beforehand, where there’s an agenda and a belief that the meeting will keep to the agenda, and where there are no extras or what I would call “professional meeting attendees without portfolio.” The author distinguishes types of meetings, and he focuses on ones that end with assigned action plans. There is also some discussion of informational meeting, social meetings, and brainstorming sessions, as well as conversations about meeting topics. Fortunately, in my current work I’ve been involved in very few of the meetings the author describes here, so I won’t be able to enact the advice given, but it’ll remind myself if I get back to those kinds of meetings. The best of the book is that it is short and high energy. Or at least high opinion. I’ve heard the concepts before, but they are put together in an entertaining way here. You can gather the author’s basic concepts by reading some of the more detailed book reviews.

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Review: Trajectory: 7 Career Strategies to Take You from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

Trajectory: 7 Career Strategies to Take You from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be by David L. Van Rooy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I listened to Trajectory and found the book felt very familiar. To the good, the advice I had heard before and I already believed it to be true. To the not-so-good, because of the familiar advice and the examples the author used, this felt like a decades-old career self-help book. I listened to the audiobook, so I was not always “in the moment” as the book played, but early on I noticed examples and stories that I would consider typical “guy” themes – professional men’s sports analogies, examples of the military, and the like. I tried to notice the topics of examples and analogies point forward, and the ones I did recall were about men’s careers. I certainly could have missed a number of other examples while I was driving, but from what I recall I was left with a belief that the book catered to men and men’s careers. By itself this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and I see women reviewers on Goodreads and Amazon didn’t call this out. But this is what made the book feel like something out of the 70s or 80s to me. For career advice, certainly not bad, and I thought well organized and sized right for the topics and advice given. But not very unique.

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Review: If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?: My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating

If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?: My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating by Alan Alda
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In this book on science communications, Alan Alda tells a story of how he noticed that he was becoming more empathetic with people when he first tried to name their emotional state to himself, silently, while interacting with them. He mentions this to a researcher, who runs with the idea and creates a study. Alda tells of the study, his participation in it, and the results, which were positive, but were also extended by the researcher beyond Alda’s original intent. Then Alda does a funny thing, he relates how others have recommended “his way” of becoming more empathetic. To me, Alda is being a bit self-centered. But you can get away with that if you are entertaining. And in this book, Alda is. Taking a cue from his research, he keeps the topics covered to a small number. At first, he relates communication with improv acting, and his stories about this, including relating interviews with scientists, discussing research, and dropping personal stories, many related to his hosting of the Scientific America TV series, that entertain while building Alda’s science-cred. (Or at least his pop-sci-cred.) A major enabler of improved communications with improv is empathy with your audience, so Alda spends most of the rest of the book talking about how to increase your empathy. The last third hit on a number of topics, including the basics of storytelling. It doesn’t feel like a self-help book, but in the end it is, with plenty of interesting digressions. And if you liked Alda in Scientific American Frontiers, you’ll like this book. He uses the same kind of story introduction and flow that he used in the TV show. It reads very familiarly. Alda does the audiobook version, and that lends even more to the TV show vibe. Although this was a book limited in what it wants to accomplish, it accomplished its mission with aplomb. I feel I learned a few things I’ll be trying for bettering my communications. This would be a great book for a new teacher, with plenty of examples and anecdotes about education for all ages.

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