** Masters of Management by Adrian Wooldridge

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World – for Better and for Worse is an exhaustively researched book not so much about the business gurus of its subtitle but about management theories in general. If you’ve ever snickered at the back of the room while company executives blabber on about re-engineering and synergies and war for talent, this may be the book for you. I must say I found it strangely cold and unengaging in its encyclopedic approach — and I got annoyed by the comments about the childcare needs of women, as if children did not have fathers, too (and mothers did not spend years of their lives without young children to care for).  Still, the book is full of interesting summaries and insights, for instance that most entrepreneurs do not offer world-changing products, but rather a new twist on existing products, often based on process improvements.

 

Toxicology by Jessica Hagedorn

Another adventure in drugged-out New Yorkers and another failure… Toxicology honestly advertises the topic right in the title, and it’s an equal opportunity parade of drugs of all types, for all ages and marital statuses. Inane dialogs and detailed descriptions of minute actions don’t help.

* Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi

Mr. Fox is a devilishly clever book that wraps a novel into another, or rather multiple novels into the story of its author and his muse, and it left me absolutely cold. Admiring the craft, perhaps, but at best indifferent to all the protagonists, at worst actively annoyed of the complicated packaging that ultimately reveals trite and unbelievable tales.

*** Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo

If you are interested in the causes (and remedies!) for poverty, you will want to read Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, in which the authors suggest that we need to put the assumptions about the poverty trap to the test by running experiments. Do mosquito nets get ignored if given away for free? Let’s compare outcomes between regions that did give them out for free and others that did not. Do  poor people bypass childhood vaccinations because they are uninformed, or do they simply procrastinate, like the rest of us? Are crises always worse for the very poor, or for the middle class? Is fertilizer better purchased right at harvest time or when it is needed?

Through simple experiments the authors find that “the poor” are just like everyone else: they procrastinate, they spend rather than save, they practice diversification in their meager assets — but they don’t have a cushion, so when things go bad, they go really badly. The book is careful about prescriptions but still makes it clear that most anti-poverty programs are shooting blindly, using untested (and arrogant) assumptions when it would be pretty simple to ask, test, and measure. An inspiring and very approachable book. Since I said mean things about Ecole Normale intellectuals earlier I should mention that Duflo was educated there, and shines.

* Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson

Ten Thousand Saints starts with a teenager’s dying of an overdose and proceeds to a tedious description of how his best friend moves away to live with his drug-dealing father in New York city and the dad’s  cocaine-abusing stepdaughter. Unfortunately the dialog generated by drug-addled teenagers and their drug-addled parents is mind-numbingly boring. On top of that,  the dead boy’s girlfriend is pregnant and somehow decides that she will raise the baby with the best friend — a great plan when you are sixteen and have no parental support, don’t you think? I know the kids are on drugs but no sixteen year old is that misinformed and stupid, right?

By the end of the book I was relieved to find that the baby would be raised by someone else but most of all I was relieved I had turned the last page.

*** Just My Type by Simon Garfield

As I gushed about Just My Type: A Book About Fonts to my friends I encountered many blank stares and realized that, just maybe, the topic of typefaces (you know, Times Roman versus Helvetica versus tens of thousands of others) might be best suited to a few geeks. Well, geek I am, about type at least, but this book is not just for geeks! The author focuses each chapter on a particular typeface, giving some historical facts (from Gutenberg to the IBM Selectric ball — how’s that for a boomer’s artifact?) or relating funny experiments (as in trying to live without looking at any Helvetica fonts for a day — an impossible feat in any urban setting). There are deja vu stories about types for road signs (as described in The Big Roads) and new stories about designing types for particular airports (Charles de Gaulle, anyone? if only the passenger areas could be as beautiful as the Frutiger type!)

My only nit is that the author should have included even more illustrations. I got lost sometimes when he emoted about the curve of a g in a type I was not familiar with. But I loved the book otherwise. It made me wonder about how we can wander around the world not knowing the names or families of the fonts that surround us, much like people who don’t know about plants must be missing out when they take a walk…

*** The Memory Chalet by Tony Judt

The Memory Chalet is a poignant memoir by an erudite historian who, felled by Lou Gehrig’s disease into complete paralysis, lets his sharp mind meander, remember, and ruminate into dazzling essays. The title is a self-deprecating play on words from the memory palace of classical memorizers, more modestly sized to suit the author, who nevertheless needs to compose the essays entirely in his mind since he cannot physically write them but it’s a prodigious chalet where a simple bus ride evokes class warfare, formidable teachers hammer German into his head, and French intellectuals of the Ecole Normale are as narrow-minded as I remember them to be. Highly recommended, for all its ivory tower undertones.

 

** Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

I had liked In the Gardens of Beasts and I also liked The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, in which the author weaves together the story of the building of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and that of   serial killer who preyed on women (I suppose all serial killers, by definition, are horrible, but this one seems especially wicked, perhaps because the author has such a knack for telling stories that we can see his victims and hear their cries in the gas chamber he built in his house). Although the focus of the World Fair story is more on the architecture, I particularly enjoyed the sad struggles of the landscaper, forced to work miracles in a few weeks since all the buildings were late.  There’s also a great story about the Ferris wheel, which debuted at the fair.

My only quibble is that I did not think that the two stories went particularly well together. Sure, they happened at the same time and the murdered and several victims visited the fair, but the link is really tenuous. Still, a great job on making history come to life. I repeatedly forgot this was not a novel.

*** We The Animals by Justin Torres

What a terrific book in a slim package! We the Animals tells the story (apparently highly autobiographical) of three boys growing up with parents who love them but who have problems. The dad leaves, comes back, hits the mom, hits the kids, the mom get depressed, and no one gets enough sleep. Somehow there’s a lot of hope in the story but it’s never sugary either. Read it, it’s only 120 pages and good for the soul.

* The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

This one may work for incurable romantics, but not for me. The Language of Flowers is the sugary story of a newly emancipated foster child who magically finds a job, a lover, and a family based on the Victorian language of flowers she learned from one of her foster mothers long ago. There  are a few bright spots: a feast-your-eyes San Francisco travelogue, for one, and the interesting, if depressing background of foster care and the ridiculousness of pushing 18-year-olds out to live on their own, barely educated. But the rest is pure and sometimes silly fantasy, all the way to the perfect family finish, with incongruous descriptions of 9-year olds reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (really?), matilija poppies being too sensitive to transplant (obscure gardening fact, I know, but this is a book about plants!), professional florists throwing flowers to each other (ditto), and a young, sexually active woman throwing up and not knowing why (give me a break). The lengthy and exceedingly detailed breastfeeding scenes don’t add anything to the story, either.