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This is a Lewis Cole mystery. Lewis is a private non-investigator living in New Hampshire on the seacoast. He arrives at a murder scene, and then gets roped into the investigation by the feds. The logic of this coercion is by no stretch of the imagination credible. Just take my word for it, it's too stupid to go into any detail whatsoever.
Disregard my warning, go to the library or if you can't help yourself and really want to read a book based on Nazi uranium, unrecovered even now, that was on a German U-boat bound for Japan when it was captured (odd how the most outlandish-sounding part of the story is true), then submerge yourself in
Killer Waves [buy at amazon.com]
by Brendan DuBois
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I won't have time to finish Mark Frost's cultural history of modern golf right away. It's 450 pages long and I'm not even an active golfer. But there's no doubt I'll read through it fairly soon. My opinion after the first several chapters is that just about any golfer would enjoy the story of Harry Vardon and Francis Ouimet.
Keep your eye on the ball and your left arm straight. Don't look up. Swing and let your follow through carry you over to amazon.com for a copy of
The Greatest Game Ever Played: Harry Vardon, Francis Ouimet, and the Birth of Modern Golf [buy at amazon.com] by Mark Frost.
If you're interested in other golf books, take a look at my father's website GreenReading.com. If you're a golfer, don't miss his Guide to the Game of Golf
When the World Trade Center towers fell, the New York Times ran a series of portraits of the individuals who died there. It was called Portraits of Grief. It wasn't a tough decision to buy the first volume of the collected portraits when it was published in book form.
In "Momentum: How Companies become Unstoppable Market Forces", Ron Ricci and John Volkmann sketch three kinds of marketplace in the evolution of brand differentiation over the past 25 years: The marketplace of brands, the marketplace of products, and the marketplace of ideas. Then, especially for companies which produce digital products in what they call the marketplace of ideas, they outline six areas of differentiation that companies can focus on to increase the likelihood that people will buy their products.
Assuming you accept the premise that digital companies and products call for an inherently different outlook, here is the principal value of "Momentum": the identification of these six areas in which differentiation is possible, and the elaboration of their components. "Momentum" establishes a common vocabulary to discuss areas of your business where you might be doing things differently, vis-a-vis showing your customers that you have a commanding vision of the future. Most people seem to believe that success in marketing is chiefly a matter of expenditure. Ricci and Volkmann provide several entertaining counter-examples. However, they don't give away their store. Their well-presented conclusions are based on 56 or so questions, honed over time, that they asked of thousands of buyers, or potential buyers. They back their points up well with convincing and thought-provoking industry anecdotes, but they give you the charts and graphs, not the questions. In opinion research, it's all about the questions and the context in which they are asked. In the sense that there's something crucial absent from their methodology description, the book reads like an advertisement for their consulting services. You might feel like you're being made part of their "spin effort." But that's a minor complaint given that there's so much of value in this short book (only about 190 pages) which will repay careful study, assuming you're in the right kind of field to begin with. Digital. I would be remiss not to give fair warning about the prose. It sloows you down. Not always a bad thing? I had marked a page where a particularly jargon-filled sentence oozed marketing-speak oleaginously all over the page, and was going to quote it to you here. Luckily for you I've already given this valuable book to a co-worker.
You can't take a look at the digital dashboard unless you can identify the dials and what they mean. Drive over or better yet hop on your Segway Scooter [buy at amazon.com] and scoot over to amazon.com to pick up
Momentum: How Companies become Unstoppable Market Forces [buy at amazon.com] by Ron Ricci and John Volkmann. And stay tuned in. After Thanksgiving (Nov 28 in the U.S.) I'll be talking about the inevitable future growth of www.thedailychannel.com. We have some interesting features coming up in December, and in 2003.
"Momentum" by Ron Ricci and John Volkmann arrived today and I eagerly devoured the first third of the book. I use the word 'devoured' advisedly, because this book, published by Harvard Business School Press, is definitely food for thought. The basic idea is that digital products are treated in a special way by buyers. This demands a completely different kind of approach to brand differentiation.
Inexorably, I'll return later in the week with an update (I feel that I will be gathering momentum throughout the book) but if you simply can't stop yourself, here's a link to Momentum: How Companies become Unstoppable Market Forces [buy at amazon.com] by Ron Ricci and John Volkmann
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Only a few puddles remained from yesteday's rain. The dog was very friendly to a woman sitting on the curb. The woman was talking on her cell phone, her mobile office spread out next to her on the curb: wallet, purse, driver's license, address book. She rested her feet in the street and talked away.
A rainy day for a walk, great day to test waterproofing. Aside from a small leak where my rainproof pants were tucked into the waterproof boots (have to watch that in future), the waterproofing turned out fine for me, but not so well for the dog. Would a dog wear a raincoat? Would you wear a raincoat if you were a dog? The dog wanted to quit after a mile. Not again!
Now may I bore you for a moment? I backed up my hard disk drive to an external firewire drive, using CCCloner. It's free, I definitely recommend you try CCCloner. I created a bootable copy, so now if my main drive flakes out, life can still resume. Thanks, Bombiches!
In this substantial yet slender guide, consultant Gerald M. Weinberg takes a lifetime's people knowledge and organizational savvy and translates it into humorous and easy-to-remember laws that could help you apply his insights.
There are many psychological ins and outs to consulting, and even if you have no intention of being a consultant, there is value here, as indicated by the subtitle: a guide to giving and getting advice successfully.
The bibliography at the end is dated, but still valuable for further reading.
The one thing you won't find in The Secrets of Consulting is anything technical relating to computer programming or consulting.
In fact, the computing landscape has changed so much since the time Weinberg wrote the book, that it would be out of date if he had decided to focus on technical computing.
But the focus is on the irrational side of organization and organizational processes, and how to turn everyday expectations on their heads, to the advantage of all concerned.
Under no circumstances would I loan this out-of-print book to anyone. I bought it used, on the recommendation of the great South African Java consultant Heinz Kabutz. Some people get two copies, keep one for themselves and loan out the other.
I'm not that generous. So you'll have to call a meeting, set your priorities, and make an appointment with amazon.com to get
The Secrets of Counsulting [buy at amazon.com] by Gerald Weinberg, because fortunately for you, it is available again in paperback.
In the beginning of Richard Preston's latest black bio-thriller "The Demon in the Freezer", he introduces you to Robert Stevens, a photo-retoucher working for The National Enquirer in southern Florida. I haven't followed the news with unusual avidity for the past year, but still -- I had a bad feeling about what might happen to Robert Stevens. And I was right: he was the first anthrax victim.
This is a frightening and at the same time heartwarming page-turner; the eradication of smallpox throughout the world's populations being the heartwarming part, and the preservation of various strains of smallpox virus in refrigerators somewhere in the world's two disease control centers and biological warfare centers. There were two things that surprised me. The first surprise was how recently smallpox has been eradicated. A description of a smallpox outbreak in a small German village in 1970 that was horrendously instructive. This is an incredibly contagious fatal disease. It was not easy to contain, even when most of the population had been recently vaccinated, and when the vaccine supply was plentiful. Neither of these conditions remain today. The second surprise was how thoroughly smallpox has been 'weaponized' by the Russians -- way past the point of mere potential. This book is quite convincing that they most likely did have ICBMs filled with smallpox, on the launch pad ready to go. It seems that the need for weapons inspectors in Russia is far greater, even today, than in Iraq. This book is not really a "feel-good" book, but in spite of being quite scary and filling you with forboding it is also filled with humanity. The writing, which I have talked about before, is wonderfully fluent and makes reading this book a breeze even though it is just over 200 pages long. Is there real danger from smallpox, or genetically engineered smallpox in the world? I hope not, but I will say this. After reading The Demon in the Freezer: A True Story buy at amazon.com by Richard Preston I don't plan to postpone things that I've always wanted to do.
The cover of Mary Anne Weaver's book "Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan" is smooth: the book is a pleasure to hold. The cover illustration shows the green flag of Pakistan, framing in its corner a devout muslim bent in kneeling prayer, facing west, for Mecca is west of Pakistan. The image is beautiful and peaceful.
Pakistan is a country with rough beginnings: founded about 50 years ago as an Islamic state, after a brutal border war at the time India was also being formed. Pakistan is five regions, controlled for much of its history, as it is now, by one military dictator or another. Today, even though elections have just been held, it is Pervez Musharraf.
Have you ever operated a microscope? If so, you're familiar with what happens. First you try to find the thing you want to look at. Then you focus in on it. As you turn the focus knob, sometimes you're not sure what you're looking at. Finally, you get a perfect view of something you have never seen before. the image may be beautiful, anomalous, troubling. Expert microscopists put in a huge amount of effort getting just the images they want. Mary Anne Weaver aims her journalist's microscope all over Pakistan. Weaver focusses her microscope on Pakistan's personalities, major as well as minor. Her characterization of Musharraf is invaluable and as soon as she gets his answer on Islamic jihadists with private armies (Musharraf says no, of course not), she goes right out and talks to some in the same city. Her long chapter, Daughter of Pakistan, is based on interviews with Benazir Bhutto, the fiery young prime minister from the southern Sindh region. During her time in prison, occasionally Bhutto would be told she was going to be executed the next day. And then a bottle of poison would be left in her cell. What kind of country treats its former presidents as criminals? The best chapters of all, by themselves well worth the price of the book (the information on Osama Bin Laden is quite valuable too), are the chapters on the tribal lands of Balochistan and the Saudi Arabians who hunt birds there. During hunting season, which starts not too long after the holy month of Ramadan, the sheikhs of the gulf -- not just Saudi Aradia -- pack up their tents, their falcons, their land-rovers, their cranes to pull the Land Rovers out of sand dunes, their electrical generators, water trucks, oil and gasoline trucks and refrigerated trucks to carry the birds that they kill, pile them into caravans of C130 aircraft, and fly them off to the deserts of western Pakistan to go hunting. They stay for a couple of months, or however long it takes to bag a year's supply of houbara bustard. We are talking tent cities in the desert here. I'm sure one of the reasons the Saudis won't let us use their airspace is that last year we messed up their houbara bustard hunting plans by using their very own private airports, which they built to land their air caravans for the hunt, as jumping off points for our Afghanistan campaign. Well, maybe not, but nonetheless Weaver goes out into the desert and although being a woman she's not exactly an honored guest on the hunt, she fully captures the turmoil, madness, obsession of it all, and its effect on Pakistan. The five disparate provinces are a jigsaw puzzle that doesn't really fit together very well; you can't find out all you need from just one book. Whatever other books about Pakistan you read, you should definitely include this one, to give you a close, personal look at a country where today, religious education is a lot more important than public education, and everyone is very proud of their new nuclear bombs. By Mary Anne Weaver: Pakistan: In the shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan buy at amazon.com
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The nawab called for a servant and gave him instructions
in Balochi. The servant left the room, and he returned
carrying a custom-built leather case. He placed it at my feet.
"Open it," the nawab said.
I did. Nestled inside, protected by a fur lining was a
24-karat-gold-plated Kalashnikov. It was a gift to the nawab
from the Minister of Defense of the United Arab Emirates, who
hunted in Balochistan each year. It was the size of a normal
Kalashnikonvv but was perhaps three pounds heavier, because of
the gold. It was engraved with the royal coat of arms,
and its two magazines were also plated in 24 karat gold.
The nawab handed it to me. I had held a Kalashnikov before,
but I had never held three pounds of gold.
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