Review: The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience by Carmine Gallo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you are expecting to learn how to create Powerpoints using Steve Jobs' methods for presentation, you're probably going to not be happy. Jobs' wasn't known for his Powerpoints, and many of his best speeches used very few slides with no bullet points. Instead, Jobs used images, usually pictures, or simple text, like a word or number, to represent the topic. This book is about the presentations he gave, but also about the process behind his presentations, the efforts to create messages that started early in a product's life cycle, the constant practice, the checking of the venue before the presentation, the props, the pacing, and more. You do learn a lot about how Jobs did presentations. But you also learn that his methods consumed a lot of time that a normal employee might not be allowed to spend, and it required control over the marketing message, the venue, other presenters, etc. that only a CEO could pull off. You learn that most of Jobs' method is not replicable by normal employees. Sure, there are useful hints here and there, but overall, this is more of an appreciation of Jobs than a how-to book. Strangely for this kind of book, there are also sections that are purely motivational. It is as if the author determined that his readers would predominately be amateur presenters that would never approach the major league skills exhibited by Jobs, so he resorted to a motivational message. No matter, I found the detailed review of some of Jobs' big presentations, breaking down the messages, dissecting the length of different parts, and other insight into Jobs' process to be very interesting. I'll never be known as a presenter, but I can appreciate Job's level of expertise and professionalism in his work.

I listened to the audiobook version of this book. While you might think that a book on presentations would benefit with a lot of pictures of slides, speakers, and venues, this is not one of those kinds of books. The descriptions are so well done that you don't need to see pictures, and you don't miss them. An unexpected very good job on audio.

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Review: Completeness

Completeness by Itamar Moses
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I find myself in the middle of a streak of books about algorithms, but this was the first play and first love story in that streak. Interesting in being about grad students in science, and their interactions revolving around how the computer science guy and bio girl could learn something about their work from the other's studies. Cute, and makes me wish I had continued in college for the chances at discovery, on many levels. On audio, the recording included a lengthy discussion of the play by a scientist who explained some of the more technical topics that were part of the plot. I found the descriptions and discussion very interesting.

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Review: The Red Car

The Red Car by Marcy Dermansky
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"The Red Car" feels kind of whimsical, very much like a Murakami novel. Helping me make that comparison is the multiple mentions of Murakami by the characters in this novel, and a character that reminds the reader of Murakami near the end of the book. By the time I got to that point, I had the feeling that the author was trying too hard -- the twists got too odd and were followed for too long. I found this interesting, and fun in a way, but I think I prefer the Murakami.

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Review: The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster's Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture

The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster's Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture by Joshua Kendall
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

You learn a lot of detail of Webster’s life in this biography. Much of what you learn isn’t flattering to the dictionary scion. He comes across as a fellow who thinks he should always be the center of attention, and acts increasingly bizarrely when he feels he isn’t getting his due. He is obsessed with a series of things in his life, from his books, magazines, and newspapers, initially aimed at literature-loving colonists, later becoming news and political organs. Webster seems like the kind of person that you occasionally run into at parties, introduced by someone who quickly disappears, leaving you to figure out what you have. Personality-wise, he was kind of a loner post-revolutionary (war) Steve Jobs-type, who great thing was, in the end, language, specifically American English. He doesn’t appear to be the kind of person I personally would want as a friend.

You do learn a lot in this book about Webster’s times. The story of his Speller was quite interesting, involving burgeoning copyright laws and national publishing contracts which show that Webster could be a suave businessman on occasion. It just didn’t happen regularly, as he squanders his law career to be a publisher. With a large family, his need for money drove him, but not to the safest and most lucrative path. He was a culture warrior, 200 years ago. Interesting book of an interesting time with a not-so-likeable character.


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Review: Dick Francis's Bloodline

Dick Francis's Bloodline by Felix Francis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I enjoy the way Dick Francis would include some details of the horse life, perhaps how a jockey spends his off day, or how an artist making horse trophies blows glass. He always mixed two or three of these kinds of deep dives together to build a plot. In this Felix Francis extension of the Francis franchise, we get detail on television race commentators. A lot of detail. I figured out how the crime would be solved based on the first scene, even before there was a crime. So this wasn’t one of the better ones in the series. Much of the book dragged with repetition. I will say that beyond the stretching of the story through repetition and the occasional plot oddity, this showed some signs of good storytelling. Some of that was seeing plot points familiar from early books in the series, but some was interesting writing. I look forward to reading more by Felix as he learns his new craft.

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Review: Once Upon an Algorithm: How Stories Explain Computing

Once Upon an Algorithm: How Stories Explain Computing by Martin Erwig
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A couple of years ago I read a similar book, Christian’s “Algorithms To Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions”. It overlapped with this book by about 40% in terms of what was covered – search algorithms being a major common topic. The difference is that Christian’s book was focused on applying algorithms to personal decisions and Erwig’s book was focused on teaching computer science terminology. Both used stories to do this – Christian uses anecdotes, where Erwig uses comparisons to movies and books. I found Christian’s book entertaining and memorable. I didn’t enjoy Erwig’s as much. The examples he used were mostly not uniquely appropriate. For instance, he uses Sherlock Holmes to explain some search algorithms, but this seemed not the best example to me. Then with recursion he uses the movie “Groundhogs Day”. This seems quite obvious. (I will say that I appreciated his listings of different movies/books that had repeating days and the different “rules of science” those replays had – I have noticed that and have written about that as well.) The book starts with an example from Hansel and Gretel of using shiny stones to find their way back home, and drilled down to how Hansel made each individual decision on how to proceed. I was surprised that the author had so few different examples illustrating the computer science and math concepts. I’d say about half of the book was very basic computer science lecture without comparison to a particular story, and half was using one of those three stories to help illustrate a concept. Personally, as someone who has taken many computer science classes, the concepts were not new to me, and the book didn’t seem that helpful for learning new concepts. The terminology was still difficult covered as completely as the author has done here. I expect this book was aimed at the textbook market for the Computer Science version of the “Physics for Poets” classes at university. It would be interesting to test its effectiveness compared to more traditional textbooks.

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Review: 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation

40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation by James Carville
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This one has some age on it, and the years haven’t treated this book well. I was greatly disappointed. I was expecting, given the title and description, that this would be a cogent book about changes in politics driven by statistical analysis. Kind of like Zogby’s “The Way We’ll Be” with better stories. Something that hints at a major, long lived review of trends that would have implications for decades. And given the author, I expected some good stories, but knew to expect some tilt to the left. This ends up being primarily a diatribe against the Bush White House. Mixed in to the ranting are some statistical forecasts based on, primarily, two data points. Kinda hard to predict with two data points – so this is no science. And most of the diatribe revolves around name calling. The author leads with name calling, and it precedes any attempt at forecast. It became obvious that this is a textbook case of “preaching to the choir”.

I did finish the book. Carville ends the book with his story of surviving the hurricane in New Orleans and his temporary move to Dallas in its aftermath. This last chapter was well reported and with a little less of the bluster of the bulk of the book. That chapter was informative, mostly as an example of the post-Katrina living conditions of displaced New Orleans residents. Overall, though, the book is not something I’d recommend.


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