Saturday, January 9, 2010

“Book reviews from Larry Cox - Tucson Citizen” plus 2 more

“Book reviews from Larry Cox - Tucson Citizen” plus 2 more

Book reviews from Larry Cox - Tucson Citizen

Posted: 08 Jan 2010 11:58 AM PST

Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Organization by Ranjay Gulati (Harvard Business Press, $35)
Ranjay Gulati, the Jaime and Josefina Chua Tiampo Professor of Business at Harvard Business School, builds a convincing case that in order to create a resilient organization there must be coordination, to connect, eradicate, or restructure silos to enable swift responses; cooperation to alight all employes around shared goals; clout to redistribute power to "bridge builders" and customer champions; capability to develop employees' skills at tackling changing customer needs; and connection so that offerings can be blended with partners' to provide unique customer solutions. Businesses that survive are generally those that have a master plan such as the one Professor Gulati provides.

Fix Your Body, Fix Your Swing: The Revolutionary Biomechanics Workout Program Used by the Pros by Joey Diovisalvi and Steve Steinberg (St. Martin's Press, $24.99)
There are more than 20 billion golf books in print, three for every person alive on the planet. With that in mind, what makes this one so special? According to Joiey Diovisalvi, the head strength, conditioning, and biomechanics coach at the PGA Tour Academy at TPC Sawgrass, and Steve Steinberg, a fitness writer and contributing editor at Men's Magazine, before a golfer can achieve success, he or she must know their body and fitness strength. What gives this book its legs is its attention to the use of biomechanics. The innovative program is broken down by accessing six physical aspects of the golfer's game, namely shoulder rotation, upper body rotation, lower body rotation, pelvic tilt & posture, balance, and full body strength & coordination. In addition to these six areas, the authors offer twelve workout secrets of the pro. By following the "Diovisalvi Plan," not only can you improve your golf game, you can also help achieve better overall health.

The Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam (Portfolio/Penguin Group, $28.95 hardbound) & Unfolding the Napkin by Dan Roam (Portfolio/Penguin Group, $20 softbound)
These two innovative books show that thinking with pictures can help develop new ideas, solve problems in unexpected ways, and share insights more powerfully. Roam, president of Digital Roam, has staged seminars throughout the country and helped such companies as Microsoft, Google, and even the U.S. Senate. Packed with illustrations that are reminiscent of Munro Leaf's early work, Roam takes readers step-by-step through the process of seeing and identifying problems and then imagining new and innovative solutions. Written with both wit and insight, the author shows how paper and whiteboards can be turned into essential business tools. The Back of the Napkin was named the best innovative book by Business Week, and Unfolding the Napkin was an Amazon.com business book pick of the year.

Revive: Stop Feeling Spent and Start Living Again by Frank Lipman, M.D., with Mollie Doyle (Fireside, $15)
Dr. Frank Lipman, the author of Total Renewal: 7 Key Steps to Resilience, Vitality, and Long-Term Health, thinks that too many Americans are plagued by a new epidemic, a pervasive syndrome he calls spent. He claims that while there is no magic pill to reverse the fatigue, back and joint pain, distractibility, irritability, or digestive problems that are symptomatic of Spent, there is a solution: Revive. His sane, accessible advice can help stressed people to slow down, detoxify, replenish, and restore the body. Delicious recipes, research-based exercises and stretches, and suggestions to nourish both the mind and body are all featured in this guide.

59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot by Richard Wiseman (Alfred A. Knopf, $24)
Psychologist and best-selling author Richard Wiseman overturns many of our accepted beliefs about self-improvement. His new book brims with tips and tricks that will help improve lives and, best of all, they are firmly grounded and come straight from the scientific community. By bringing together diverse scientific advice and simple-to-accomplish techniques, he claims you can begin changing your life for the better in less than 59 seconds. Ever wonder why writing down goals is more effective than visualizing them, or just thinking about going to the gym can help you keep in shape, or putting a pencil between your teeth makes you feel happier instantly? Wiseman has the answers to those questions and much, much more.

Talk to Me Like I'm Someone You Love: Relationship Repair in a Flash by Nancy Dreyfus, Psy. D. (Tarcher/Penguin, $16.95)
Relationships are never easy. When there is a conflict it is tricky to maintain both your tone and inflection without mangling the message you want to communicate. Veteran psychotherapist Nancy Dreyfus has written an insightful guide that highlights the power of written messages to defuse tension and put an end to conflict. Her turning point began one day when she found herself scribbling a note on a scrap of paper that said "talk to me like I'm someone you love." That phrase and a flashcard system are the basis of her new book in which she offers more than 100 "flashcards" that can be utilized to defuse even the most volatile situation. For example, she recommends shifting gears by stating that while that it isn't necessary to see things exactly the same, it is important to respect another point of view.

How to Change Someone You Love: Four Steps to Help You Help Them by Brad Lamm (St. Martin's Press, $24.99)
This book shows in powerful, ground-breaking steps, that it is possible to stop a loved one from engaging in self-destructive behavior. Lamm thinks that it is important to first understand why one engages in destructive behaviors and then determine if the problem is likely to clear up with time or if it a situation that requires more drastic action. The author claims his approaches will make it easier to do such things as convince a loved one to stop drinking, quit gambling, end prescription drug addiction, and even stop a spendthrift from maxing out his or her credit cards. For anyone tired of watching their spouse, child, relative, or best friend go downhill, and being dragged down by them, this guide could be the lifeline needed. As Lamm puts it, no one has to endure behavior that is unhealthy, abusive, possibly deadly, and that threatens to unravel relationships. With help, we can change even the almost impossible of situations.

A Little Bit Married: When to Know When It's Time to Walk Down the Aisle or Out the Door by Hannah Seligson (Da Capo, 15.95)
A major trend in dating today comes in three basic stages: first there's love, following by years of being "a little bit married," and finally marriage itself. The long-term relationship has become a rite of passage. In fact, a quarter of unmarried Americans, some 23 million adults, claim that they are in as committed romantic relationship. From making marriage-like commitments such as moving in together to handling the stress of whether you should or should not tie the knot, Hannah Seligson, a journalist who has written extensively for such publications as The New York Times and Forbes, provides a roadmap to successfully navigating the long-term relationship which boils down to either "I Do" or "Do I?" Her book includes the Cohabitation Commandments that should be memorized by anyone even thinking of entering "a little bit married" arrangement.

Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation by David Denby (Simon and Schuster, $12)
This bestseller is finally in paperback. Hallelujah! Snark is, of course, the biting, clever put down. It is the cheap shot that is snide, condescending, and more often than not, hateful. Snark has permeated our society to such a point, it has trashed our very conversation. David Denby, a film critic for The New Yorker, serves up a lively, biting commentary on snark and what we must do as individuals to change directions.

One Year to an Organized Financial Life: From Your Bills to Your Bank Account, Your Home to Your Retirement, the Week-by-Week Guide to Achieving Financial Peace of Mind by Regina Leeds with Russell Wild (Da Capo, $16.95)
With the uncertainty of our present economic climate, most Americans need all they help they can get. That help might be as easy as getting organized. Regina Leeds, a professional organizer, and Russell Wild, a NAPFA-certified financial advisor, have designed a week-by-week plan so that controlling personal finances can be achieved with a minimum of pain. Whether you're unsure where to invest, disorganized in your bill-paying methods, or procrastinating it all for fear of what the bottom line might be, this guide will provide the structure needed to get on track. The advice includes how to organize files, determine the right insurance coverage, pay bills on time, clear the clutter, cut costs, and even protect identity and establish a retirement plan. From sticking to a budget to getting our of debt, One Year to an Organized Financial Life is essential and accessible.

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

How Data On Income Distribution Are Misunderstood And Misapplied - Investors Business Daily

Posted: 08 Jan 2010 04:16 PM PST

Thomas Sowell has just written his third book in a year, "Intellectuals and Society," and America's foremost economist and contemporary philosopher has again given IBD permission to publish excerpts.

IBD Exclusive Series:
Thomas Sowell on Intellectuals and Economics

The new book is a study of what intellectuals do, why they do it the way they do and — most important — their effects on society.

Below is the first installment of a seven-part series that focuses on the third chapter, "Intellectuals and Economics."

Other chapters in the 398-page volume released last week by Basic Books cover "Intellectuals and Social Visions," "Intellectuals and the Law," "Intellectuals and War" and "Optional Reality in the Media and Academia," among other topics.

In October, IBD excerpted the chapter on "Economics and Medical Care" from Sowell's "Applied Economics" — one of six books he has written on economics. Others include "Basic Economics," a classic text that's been translated into six languages. In November, IBD excerpted the chapter on politics from Sowell's "The Housing Boom and Bust."

All told, Sowell has written 44 books, two monographs, 87 articles in periodicals and books, and 33 book reviews. Now a scholar in residence at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, he also writes a column that appears weekly in IBD and other newspapers.

Born in North Carolina in 1930, Sowell grew up in Harlem. After dropping out of high school, he was drafted and served in the Marines during the Korean War.

During his 20s, when he was a self-described Marxist, he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard with a B.A. in economics. He also has a master's in economics from Columbia and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago.

Whether one is a conservative or a radical, a protectionist or a free trader, a cosmopolitan or a nationalist, a churchman or a heathen, it is useful to know the causes and consequences of economic phenomena. — George J. Stigler

Most intellectuals outside the field of economics show remarkably little interest in learning even the basic fundamentals of economics. Yet they do not hesitate to make sweeping pronouncements about the economy in general, businesses in particular, and the many issues revolving around what is called "income distribution."

Famed novelist John Steinbeck, for example, commented on the many American fortunes which have been donated to philanthropic causes by saying:

One has only to remember some of the wolfish financiers who spent two thirds of their lives clawing a fortune out of the guts of society and the latter third pushing it back.

See Also
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  • Has Nothing Been Learned From Crash? 01/05/2010 06:30 PM ET
  • Peddlers Of Ideas Seldom Pay The Price 01/04/2010 07:11 PM ET
  • Mission Essential For Those In Uniform 12/30/2009 06:57 PM ET

Posted By: MadMtnScot(160) on 1/8/2010 | 9:40 PM ET

This man needs to be on a Republican President's cabinet. His genius and experience needs to be utilized for the benefit of the country.

Posted By: niteski(280) on 1/8/2010 | 8:55 PM ET

Figure never lie but liars can always figure. As wealth is created the standard of living for everyone increases. The lifestyle of the poor in this nation is far more improved than the "incomes" indicate even in this economic environment.

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

In search of immortality - Irish Times

Posted: 08 Jan 2010 05:28 PM PST

The Irish Times - Saturday, January 9, 2010

The 'cesspool' of New York in the 1960s and 1970s was the setting for Edmund White's quest for literary fame and friendship, writes GREG BAXTER 

EDMUND WHITE'S memoir of his life in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s, City Boy , is a love song for the city – not the ultra-rich, patriotic, confident, safe tourist destination, but a "cesspool" that America didn't want: "grungy, dangerous, bankrupt".

New York in the 1970s was "loud and leaking – the manholes were leaking steam. . . ambulances and fire-wagon sirens were shrieking around the clock, people's bodies were leaking blood and sperm."

Out of this mayhem came sexual liberation, intellectual independence, and a sense of purpose and urgency in art.

White arrived in New York in July 1962 from the American Midwest. His defining obsession at the time was to become published, to be recognised as serious and original, and create a reputation for posterity, but he was "too busy writing unproduceable plays and meeting new people and killing time at work".

Some 20 years later, in 1983, with an international reputation as a writer secured, he left New York for Paris: he wanted to continue to have "industrial quantities" of sex, and New York had become a morgue with the arrival of Aids.

City Boy is largely the story of how White went from unknown to well-known, and is populated by the literary immortals, somebodies and nobodies he met along the way. It contains unabashed name-dropping, gossip, and score-settling as well as courageous admissions of vulnerability and pettiness.

Fans of Edmund White will recognise that much of the book is a condensed, sometimes verbatim rehash of White's autobiographical novel, The Farewell Symphony . So, a lot of this love song for New York City was pre-recorded.

The Farewell Symphony , published in 1997, is also the story of White's life in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. It's a large, ambitious documentary on the unique fate of gays in America – no group went from oppression, to revolution, to liberation, then to annihilation so swiftly. It writhes in sex and unapologetically purple prose.

The subject of City Boy is no longer history and sex but White's insecurity as a writer. Sex seems to have lost some urgency for the ageing White, whose interests in City Boy reflect a shift from the physical to the cerebral, from battle to resignation.

But the atmosphere of volatility that sex provided White for so long must come from somewhere: in City Boy , it comes from a gossip-rich journey, as a late-blooming and unconfident author, through a landscape (or up a ladder) of artists, writers, geniuses, fools, madmen, snobs, and backstabbers – for whom he delivers about equal doses of fawning praise and juicy contempt. (White almost never lets a noun get away without an adjective).

The poets Richard Howard and James Merrill (with different names) are important characters in The Farewell Symphony , but in City Boy there are many more: Howard, Merrill, Nabokov, Balanchine, Michel Foucault, Fran Lebowitz, William Borroughs, Lillian Hellman, Jasper Johns, Christopher Isherwood, Jamaica Kincaid, John Barth, John Irving, Robert Mapplethorpe, Virgil Thomson, Harold Brodkey, Thom Gunn, his editors, collaborators, etcetera, and, towering over all the others, like a horrifying, thousand-foot-tall, infinitely smart goddess – Susan Sontag.

The anecdotes he tells provide interesting glimpses of the human beings behind the reputations. Sontag was a snob and a bore. The arrival of Aids made Thom Gunn a better writer (in fact, Aids would bring seriousness to the work of gay writers "that our work had never before possessed"). Mapplethorpe nurtured writers as friends so they would write favourable reviews of his work. Others were lunatics, like Brodkey, who, I learned in City Boy , was once considered the greatest American writer of the twentieth century – America's Proust: except the book that was supposed to prove this was a catastrophic flop. Some of these people are depicted as users and frauds, but White never wholly admonishes any of them. As much as the book is delicious gossip, it's also a narrative of understanding and friendship, a celebration of a destiny they all shared by being alive in a poor and decaying and free and lusty New York for two amazing decades.

Whatever weaknesses he scorns in others, he scorns them in himself as much or more. He castigates himself for an obsession with immortality and genius – he seems to accept, in City Boy , that genius is something that shall elude him and all living writers from now on. He scorns himself for the treachery he feels compelled to commit upon those who have helped him. He admits he wrote positive book reviews to garner favour from luminaries, and this ultimately made him feel, when both Sontag and Richard Howard accused him of not being "positive enough" about them in a review, like "their puppet in the Bunraku theatre of their careers".

He would, as a form of liberating himself from this sickening feeling, write a novel that parodied Sontag – whom he had idolised all his writing life. Sontag, whose recommendations and blurbs got him a Guggenheim fellowship and international stardom, never forgave him.

A peripheral but revealing question that pops up often in the book goes like this: has his legacy and literary importance suffered because he was a gay writer, as opposed to a writer who happened to be gay? It's an interesting question to ask, coming from an author who has achieved such success. In an accusatory tone, he names the many "blue chip" authors whose status as immortals, he speculates, was a consequence of concealing, or making nothing of, their homosexuality. Even now, even as White's lifelong monomaniacal lust for publication – this is his own admission – has been sated many times, he feels something is missing, and fears the darkness of being forgotten.

Greg Baxter is the editor of the online journal Some Blind Alleys. His memoir, A Preparation for Death , will be published by Penguin Ireland in July.

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