Killer quotes #3

"Everybody has a plan 'till they get punched in the mouth." 

-- Mike Tyson

Shortlist for the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs 2013 bizbook of the year

Yesterday, FT/Goldman Sachs announced the shortlist for best business book of the year. Here they are, with the publishers' descriptions. Congrats to the authors!

The Alchemists: Inside the Secret World of Central Bankers by Neil Irwin
When the first fissures became visible to the naked eye in August 2007, suddenly the most powerful people in the world were three men who were never elected to public office. They were the leaders of the world’s three most important central banks: Ben Bernanke of the US Federal Reserve, Mervyn King of the Bank of England, and Jean-Claude Trichet of the European Central Bank. Over the next five years, they and their fellow central bankers deployed trillions of dollars, pounds and euros to contain the waves of panic that threatened to bring down the global financial system, moving on a scale and with a speed that had no precedent.

Neil Irwin’s The Alchemists is a gripping account of the most intense exercise in economic crisis management we’ve ever seen, a poker game in which the stakes have run into the trillions of dollars. The book begins in Stockholm, Sweden, in the seventeenth century, where central banking had its rocky birth, and then progresses through a tutorial on how the central banker came to exert such vast influence over our world, from its troubled beginnings to the age of Greenspan.

Irwin covered the Fed and other central banks from the earliest days of the crisis for the Washington Post, enjoying privileged access to leading central bankers and people close to them. The Alchemists, based on reporting that took place in 27 cities in 11 countries, shows us where money comes from – and where it may well be going.

Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy by Iain Martin
When RBS collapsed and had to be bailed out by the taxpayer in the financial crisis of October 2008, it played a leading role in tipping Britain into its deepest economic downturn in seven decades. The economy shrank, bank lending froze, hundreds of thousands lost their jobs, living standards are still falling and Britons will be paying higher taxes for decades to pay the clean-up bill. How on earth had a small Scottish bank grown so quickly to become a global financial giant that could do such immense damage when it collapsed?

At the centre of the story was Fred Goodwin, the former chief executive known as ‘Fred the Shred’, who terrorised some of his staff and beguiled others. Not a banker by training, he nonetheless was given control of RBS and set about trying to make it one of the biggest brands in the world. It was said confidently that computerisation and new banking products had made the world safer. Only they hadn't.

Senior executives, board members, Treasury insiders and regulators reveal how the bank's mania for expansion led it to take enormous risks its leaders didn't understand. Based on more than 80 interviews and with access to diaries and papers kept by those at the heart of the meltdown, Making It Happen is the definitive account of the RBS disaster, from the birth of the Royal Bank in 18th century Scotland, to the manic expansion under Fred Goodwin in the middle of a mad boom and culminating in the epoch-defining collapse.

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier
Two leading experts present a revelatory exploration of the hottest trend in technology and the dramatic impact it will have on the economy, science, and society at large. They explain what ‘big data’ is, how it will change our lives, and what we can do to protect ourselves from its hazards.

Which paint colour is most likely to tell you that a used car is in good shape? How can officials identify the most dangerous New York City manholes before they explode? And how did Google searches predict the spread of the H1N1 flu outbreak?

The key to answering these questions, and many more, is big data. ‘Big data’ refers to our burgeoning ability to crunch vast collections of information, analyse it instantly, and draw sometimes profoundly surprising conclusions from it. This emerging science can translate myriad phenomena – from the price of airline tickets to the text of millions of books – into searchable form, and uses our increasing computing power to unearth epiphanies that we never could have seen before. A revolution on par with the Internet or perhaps even the printing press, big data will change the way we think about business, health, politics, education, and innovation in the years to come. It also poses fresh threats, from the inevitable end of privacy as we know it to the prospect of being penalised for things we haven’t even done yet, based on big data’s ability to predict our future behaviour.

Big Data is the first big book about the next big thing.

The Billionaire's Apprentice: The Rise of The Indian-American Elite and The Fall of The Galleon Hedge Fund by Anita Raghavan
Just as WASPs, Irish-Catholics and Our Crowd Jews once made the ascent from immigrants to powerbrokers, it is now the Indian-American's turn. Citigroup, PepsiCo and Mastercard are just a handful of the Fortune 500 companies led by a group known as the ‘Twice Blessed’. Yet little is known about how these Indian émigrés (and children of émigrés) rose through the ranks. Until now ...

The Galleon Group was a hedge fund that managed more than $7 billion in assets. Its collapse following criminal charges of insider trading was a sensational case that pitted prosecutor Preet Bharara, himself the son of Indian immigrants, against the best and brightest of the South Asian business community. At the centre of the case was self-described King of Kings, Galleon's founder Raj Rajaratnam, a Sri-Lankan-born, Wharton-educated billionaire. But the most shocking allegation was that the éminence grise of Indian business, Rajat Gupta, was Rajaratnam's accomplice and mole. If not for Gupta's nose-to-the-grindstone rise to head up McKinsey & Co and a position on the Goldman Sachs board, men like Rajaratnam would have never made it to the top of America's moneyed elite.

Author Anita Raghavan criss-crosses the globe from Wall Street boardrooms to Delhi's Indian Institute of Technology as she uncovers the secrets of this subculture – an incredible tale of triumph, temptation and tragedy.

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg
Thirty years after women became 50 percent of the college graduates in the United States, men still hold the vast majority of leadership positions in government and industry, meaning that women’s voices are still not heard equally in the decisions that most affect our lives. In Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg examines why women’s progress in achieving leadership roles has stalled, explains the root causes, and offers compelling, commonsense solutions that can empower women to achieve their full potential.

Sandberg is the chief operating officer of Facebook and is ranked on Fortune’s list of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Business and as one ofTime’s 100 Most Influential People in the World. In 2010 she gave an electrifying TED Talk in which she described how women unintentionally hold themselves back in their careers. Her talk, which became a phenomenon and has been viewed more than two million times, encouraged women to ‘sit at the table’, seek challenges, take risks, and pursue their goals with gusto.

In Lean In, Sandberg digs deeper into these issues, combining personal anecdotes, hard data, and compelling research to cut through the layers of ambiguity and bias surrounding the lives and choices of working women. She recounts her own decisions, mistakes, and daily struggles to make the right choices for herself, her career, and her family. She describes specific steps women can take to combine professional achievement with personal fulfilment, providing practical advice on negotiation techniques, mentorship, and building a satisfying career, urging women to set boundaries and to abandon the myth of ‘having it all’.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone
This is the definitive story of Amazon.com, one of the most successful companies in the world, and of its driven, brilliant founder, Jeff Bezos.

Amazon.com started off delivering books through the mail. But its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content with being a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become the everything store, offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices. To do so, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that's never been cracked. Until now.

Brad Stone enjoyed unprecedented access to current and former Amazon employees and Bezos family members, giving readers the first in-depth, fly-on-the-wall account of life at Amazon. Compared to tech's other elite innovators – Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg – Bezos is a private man. But he stands out for his restless pursuit of new markets, leading Amazon into risky new ventures like the Kindle and cloud computing, and transforming retail in the same way Henry Ford revolutionised manufacturing.

The Everything Store is the revealing, definitive biography of the company that placed one of the first and largest bets on the Internet and forever changed the way we shop and read.

Edmund Phelps's values-driven view of national prosperity

My weekly book post for s+b's blogs is about Edmund Phelps's new book:

What is the Wellspring of Innovation?

Every author I read these days seems convinced that innovation is the wellspring of national prosperity.

But what is the wellspring of innovation? That answer is not as clear-cut.

Everybody’s got their own prescription for innovation—an education system that emphasizes science and mathematics, regulation-free markets, more patent protection, less patent protection, you name it. So I was curious to read what Edmund Phelps, a Noble laureate in economics and a professor at Columbia University, had to say on the subject in his new book, Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change (Princeton University Press, 2013).

In the book, which is more akin to classical economic sociology than straight-up economics, Phelps examines how and why the national economies of England, France, Germany, and the United States pulled away from the rest of the world in the 1800s. He pegs the growth of these first modern economies to a new dynamism, which he defines as an “appetite and capacity for indigenous innovation.” This dynamism, he says, wasn’t the result of the “headline inventions” of the Industrial Revolution (such as spinning machines, locomotives, and iron mills); instead, the inventions were a result of the dynamism. And the source of the dynamism? Phelps says that it was the mass flourishing driven by societal values, such as individualism, curiosity, and creativity, which gave rise to a capitalistic economy...read the rest here

Less sugar...reads great

My weekly post on s+'s blog is about an unusual book by the founders of Honest Tea:

Comic Books, Iced Tea, and the Secret to Winning in Business

Once in a while I receive a business book that, like a box of Cracker Jack, comes with a prize inside. I enjoy these promotional gewgaws; often they engage me more than the books that they accompany. Mission in a Bottle: The Honest Guide to Doing Business Differently—and Succeeding (Crown Business, 2013), which arrived with a bottle of Honest Tea’s Honey Green Tea, is an exception: In this case, I was engaged equally by both.

Mission in a Bottle succeeds for a couple of reasons.The biggest is that its authors, Seth Goldman and Barry Nalebuff, offer a combination of practical experience and theoretical insight that’s atypical of business-book authors. They founded Honest Tea in 1998 in one of the most competitive CPG categories. They grew it to the point that Coca-Cola invested US$43 million for a 40 percent stake in 2008—and eventually bought the company lock, stock, and barrel in 2011...read the rest here

Customers are storytellers; companies are storydoers

My weekly book post on s+b's blogs offers a interesting twist on corporate storytelling:

What’s Your Metastory?

The first book I remember seeing on corporate storytelling was Managing by Storying Around: A New Method of Leadership (Doubleday Currency, 1992) by the late David Armstrong, a CEO who practiced what he preached. Armstrong took a time-honored idea—telling stories to communicate, disseminate, and reinforce information—and applied it to promulgating the mission, values, and strategy of a company.

Since then, many authors have written business books about how to use storytelling to galvanize employees and build brands, and more than a few of them have covered the topic in more practical detail than Armstrong—Annette Simmons immediately comes to mind. There are so many business books on storytelling, however, that I tend to give new ones a perfunctory browse and move on (been there, read that).

True Story: How to Combine Story and Action to Transform Your Business (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013), by Ty Montague, the cofounder of co:collective, a strategy and brand story consultancy, is an exception to my rule. Montague gets right to the chink in the armor of storytelling: Unless the story you tell about your company is true, it is just empty words. And the way you make a story true, he says, is by “storydoing.” Storydoing is telling a story through your actions...read the rest here

Don't forget the white space

My weekly book post on s+b's blogs is on the need for "white space" in idea generation:

Why I Get My Best Ideas in the Shower

I get a lot of good ideas in the shower, but I never thought too much about why until I read a new book by Ori Brafman and Judah Pollack, The Chaos Imperative: How Chance and Disruption Increase Innovation, Effectiveness, and Success (Crown Business, 2013). It turns out that it’s not the water pelting my noggin or the shampoo that promotes healthy, silky smooth hair triggering my creativity. It’s the default mode network in my brain...read the rest here

Rita McGrath's career assessment

My book post on s+b blogs this week offers an assessment for business people who are seeking to bolster career security:

Can Your Career Survive Transient Competitive Advantage?

Rita Gunther McGrath, a professor at Columbia Business School, has devoted her 20-year-long academic career to sussing out how companies can successfully respond to a global economy characterized by uncertainty, fast-paced change, and increasing competitive pressure. She wrote three books, with Wharton’s Ian MacMillan, which explored how to wring out growth in such an environment. In June, her latest book, The End of Competitive Advantage: How To Keep Your Strategy Moving As Fast As Your Business (Harvard Business Review Press), was released.

In it, McGrath steps squarely into the ring of strategy. “Strategy is stuck” is her first jab, and then she steps in with the body blows—arguing that sustainable competitive advantage, the holy grail of strategic concepts and frameworks put forth by such luminaries as Michael Porter and by Gary Hamel and the late C.K. Prahalad is no longer a realistic goal. Her knockout punch: Increasingly, across many markets, competitive advantage is transient and conventional business strategy isn’t prepared to handle it.

The End of Competitive Advantage explores the ramifications of this transience on corporate strategy, and how companies can manage it. At the risk of oversimplification, her core recommendation is to discover new businesses, milk them, and when the time is right, get out of them faster than everyone else. But toward the end, McGrath slipped in something that you rarely see in business strategy books—a chapter on the effect of transient competitive advantage on us, the toilers in the corporate fields, and our careers.

If our employers begin rejiggering their businesses’ portfolios at a faster pace, our jobs are going to get rejiggered more often too. And if that starts to happen, are you ready? McGrath offers the following 10 yes-or-no scenarios to help you figure that out...read the rest here

Elmore Leonard said...

Elmore Leonard passed away today at age 87. I haven't read any of his westerns, but I read many of his crime novels and always got a lot of pleasure from them. He was a crisp, clear, no-BS writer. He also published a short how-to book on writing back in 2007 that was based on the following 10 rules:

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" …he admonished gravely
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

Robert Monks takes on the corporate drones

My weekly post on the s+b blog is about a new book from a guy I've long admired, Robert A.G. Monks:

In “Drone Corporations,” Self-Interest Prevails

In Citizens DisUnited: Passive Investors, Drone CEOs, and the Corporate Capture of the American Dream (Miniver Press, 2013), Robert A.G. Monks sets the tone right off the bat by recalling the time he stood up at an ExxonMobil annual meeting and addressed CEO Lee Raymond as “emperor.” Indeed, Monks has long been a highly vocal gadfly and leading activist when it comes to corporate governance. 

Here, he argues that corporate governance is more important than ever because of two relatively recent developments. First, corporations have ascended to levels of unprecedented power in the United States, thanks in large part to legal rulings. The Supreme Court’s decision in the 2010 case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, for example, removed virtually all limitations on corporate political spending—a “grotesque decision,” rightly judges Monks. Second, the leaders of the largest and most powerful corporations in the U.S. (ExxonMobil, IBM, and General Electric top the list) have never been less accountable to shareholders. This is because of weak boards and the movement of large ownership positions to passive institutional investors, among other things. The result is “drone corporations,” in which “manager kings” have free rein to pursue their own self-interest. Monks puts more than half of the Fortune 500 among their numbers...read the rest here

Quick tips for better mentorship

This week, my book post on s+b's blog offers quick tips on better mentoring from Chip Bell and Marshall Goldsmith:

How You Can Be a Great Mentor, and a Great Protégé 

Revised editions of books don’t often pique my interest, even when they are best-selling business books, such as Chip Bell’s Managers as Mentors: Building Partnerships for Learning, which Berrett-Koehler originally published in 1996. But there is something unusual about the newly published third edition: Bell has taken on Marshall Goldsmith as a coauthor. When I asked Bell why he decided to share the author credit on such a well-regarded book, he said, “No one on the planet has more expertise and is better known in the coaching field than Marshall.” No argument here. 

Accordingly, there’s lots of new content in the book, such as interviews with a number of notable corporate leaders and a mentoring toolbox. The latter features, among other things, the following “quick tips” list for mentors and their protégés (reprinted with the authors’ permission)...read the rest here

Stephen King on opening lines

There's a very cool one-question interview with Stephen King in The Atlantic. Joe Fassler asked him about his favorite passages in a couple of his books and King mentioned two opening lines. That lead to King talking about the art and craft of a great opening line. Where are you gonna get better advice than that?

Stephen King: There are all sorts of theories and ideas about what constitutes a good opening line. It's tricky thing, and tough to talk about because I don't think conceptually while I work on a first draft -- I just write. To get scientific about it is a little like trying to catch moonbeams in a jar.

But there's one thing I'm sure about. An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.

How can a writer extend an appealing invitation -- one that's difficult, even, to refuse?... read the rest here

Finding common ground

My post on s+b's blog this week is about a quietly fascinating book that examines a mediator's career for insights into conflict resolution and change management:

What Managers Can Learn from Mediators

When it comes to challenging careers, mediation can make management look like a cakewalk. Take the contentious and long-running disputes over water rights, grazing land, nuclear waste dumps, and Native American treaties that arise on environmental mediator Lucy Moore’s home turf in the Southwestern United States. These are the kinds of conflicts that can lead to real-life shoot-’em-ups. 

Moore has written an engaging and thoughtful new book, Common Ground on Hostile Turf: Stories from an Environmental Mediator (Island Press, 2013), in which she describes her work and, better yet, teases out some of the lessons she has learned about getting people with sometimes radically different backgrounds and perspectives to come together and undertake change...read the rest here

Daniel Pink’s new pitch

A few months ago, I got the opportunity to interview Dan Pink for strategy+business. Smart guy, great writer, fun to talk with. The results were published yesterday. Here's the opening:

Daniel Pink didn’t plan a career exploring the world of work as much as he gravitated toward it. After studying linguistics at Northwestern University and law at Yale, he became an aide to U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, and then served as chief speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore. “When I had the opportunity to dole out assignments, I kept the ones about work, labor, business, economics, and technology,” he recalls.  

In 1997, disillusioned by the realities of politics and burned out by the workload, Pink quit to write under his own byline. An article published in Fast Company later that year became the kernel for his acclaimed first book, Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself (Warner Books, 2002). It plumbed the transition from employee to self-employment by millions of people much like Pink himself, and established a format that Pink has been following ever since: presenting a highly articulate, accessible synthesis of a topic or trend and a practical tool kit for putting it to work at work.

Several more books followed, bringing Pink into the ranks of the world’s leading management thinkers and speakers. His most recent book, To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth about Moving Others (Riverhead Books, 2012), explores a topic ripe, perhaps even overripe, for Pinkian synthesis. The very nature of selling has been fundamentally altered by digitization, which continues to render long-accepted sales conventions irrelevant, yet, paradoxically, makes salespeople more important to companies and customers than ever before...read the rest here

China's real industrial advantage

My post on the s+b blog this week is about a book that seeks to illuminate one of the less understood sources of China's industrial might:

Government Subsidies Pave the Way in China

In the 2000s, China transformed itself from a net importer to one of the largest producers and exporters in the world in four mature, capital-intensive industries: steel, glass, paper, and auto parts. What accounted for this success, which in each case was achieved in a short five-year span? 

Industry research reveals that each of the four has relatively low labor requirements, so it wasn't China’s seemingly endless supply of inexpensive workers. The Chinese companies didn't enjoy economies of scale or scope. Nor did the undervaluation of the renminbi explain their growth.

According to Usha Haley, director of West Virginia University’s Robbins Center for Global Business and Strategy, and George Haley, a professor of marketing and international business at the University of New Haven, it was government subsidies that drove this industrial transformation. In Subsidies to Chinese Industry: State Capitalism, Business Strategy, and Trade Policy (Oxford University Press, 2013), they calculate that subsidies from China’s governmental bodies—in the form of free or low-cost loans, energy, materials, land, and technology—provided the dollar equivalent of as much as 30 percent of the output of these four industries...read the rest here.

A practical take on creativity

This week's book post on the s+b blog is a one-question interview with the authors of a new book proposing that we rein in our creativity efforts: 

Thinking Inside the Box
Books about business innovation seem to arrive as quickly as ideas on a whiteboard in a brainstorming session. But Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results  (Simon & Schuster, 2013), by Drew Boyd and Jacob Goldenberg, jumps out for its counterintuitive take on creativity.

In the book, Boyd, assistant professor of marketing and innovation at the University of Cincinnati and former director of Johnson & Johnson’s Marketing Mastery program, and Goldenberg, professor of marketing at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s School of Business Administration, assert that thinking inside the box enhances idea generation. Thus, they argue, innovation initiatives should be limited to resources close at hand...read the rest here

John J. Raskob: A CFO for the Roaring '20s

My book post on s+b's blog this week covers the first biography of the most influential CFO in the U.S. a century ago.

Resurrecting a Forgotten Capitalist 

In June 2013, echoes of the Roaring 20s were everywhere in Manhattan. The Great Gatsby was in movie theaters, and the film’s marketing partners—the Plaza Hotel, Brooks Brothers, and Tiffany among them—were playing up their Gatsby connections and collections. Oxford University Press got into the act, too, with the timely release of Temple University history professor David Farber’s seminal biography, Everybody Ought to Be Rich: The Life and Times of John J. Raskob, Capitalist. 

Raskob is relatively unremembered today, but he shouldn’t be: He is as much an icon of that high-flying decade as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s glamorous and doomed protagonist, Jay Gatsby. Raskob was America’s leading CFO (“treasurer” in those days). Reportedly able to size up complex financials at a glance, Raskob was instrumental in the growth of two industrial giants: DuPont and General Motors...read the rest here

How to get filthy rich in rising Asia

This week, my book post on the s+b blogs calls out a novel that offers lessons about the pursuit of wealth.

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia  

It’s always enlightening—and enjoyable—to read business literature that actually qualifies as literature. And Mohsin Hamid’s new novel fits the bill perfectly.

Hamid, whose previous novels, The Moth Smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, were shortlisted for several major literary awards, including the Booker Prize, creatively appropriates the self-help format in How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. It’s the life story of an unnamed man, an amoral Horatio Alger who is born to a poor family in a rural village in a country that sounds a lot like India (but could be any developing nation with an emerging economy)...read the rest here.

Decisive

My weekly book post on the s+b blogs is about the Heath brothers' new book, Decisive:

Smarter Executive Decision Making Is Within Reach 

Chip and Dan Heath are back with another book that applies cognitive science to management. In 2007, the brothers—Chip is a business professor at Stanford and Dan  is a senior fellow at Duke’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship—had a hit with Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (Random House), which David Hurst reviewed  in s+b’s Summer issue that year. And in 2010, they published Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Broadway), which Judith Glaser called out as one of the year’s best business books in s+b. Their new book, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work (Crown Business), looks just as promising. 

So when the publisher offered me a bit of Dan’s time, I used it to ask him a question: “In writing the new book, what did you guys discover about improving a company’s executive decision making?” Read Dan's answer here...

American Turnaround

My strategy+business blog post this week is on Ed Whitacre's management memoir:

AT&T from Apples to iPhones

My grandfather repaired switchboards in Manhattan for the Bell system. When he retired in the 1960s, he and my grandmother lit out for the wilds of western New Jersey, where they bought a couple of acres of apple trees and lived quite comfortably on his pension. My great-grandparents, a waiter and an embroiderer, lived on the dividends from the AT&T shares they had purchased through my grandfather’s employee stock plan. Those were the days.

My mother inherited that stock in 2000. A few months later, AT&T announced an 83 percent dividend cut. By 2005, the former blue chip had been written off. “AT&T was a stripped-down long distance company with twenty straight quarters of declining revenue,” recalls Ed Whitacre in his memoir cum management guide, American Turnaround: Reinventing AT&T and GM and the Way We Do Business in the USA(with Leslie Cauley, Business Plus, 2013). “It was bleeding customers by the thousands, with no way to bring them back…a shell of a company with no future, a crummy balance sheet, and a tarnished brand name.”...read the rest here

Story of My People

I've been neglecting my blogging responsibilities lately. Too much work, too little time. But starting last week, part of that work includes a weekly post on business books for the newly launched strategy+business blogs. I'm excited about it: I've been serving as s+b's senior editor for books since 2007, but mostly behind the scenes - managing book reviews and features, and editing a really terrific group of expert freelance reviewers. Now, I get to call out books that catch my eye but might not make it into s+b otherwise, and stick in my own two-cents (one of the great joys of life...just ask any Kinni).

Going forward, I'll keep this blog going in the usual sporadic fashion. I'll also post a teaser of my weekly book post with a link back to the s+b blog. Here's last week's:

Another Facet of Globalization

“Who can say whether there was ever a moment, an hour, a day when we reached the apex of our economic lives, and from that day forth, our dreams became chimeras, our successes privileges, our future an imaginary quantity?”

So begins the climactic chapter of Edoardo Nesi’s Story of My People (Other Press, 2012), an eloquent, emotion-laden, and, I think, essential addition to the globalization bookshelf. Just released last month in the U.S., this slim memoir won the 2011 Strega Prize—the first time a work of nonfiction has received Italy’s most prestigious literary award since it was established in 1947...read the rest here