book reviews

So I was writing to my new friend Clark (see his blog here) that I met last week (Steve and I hosted him as part of the Battle Command Conference), and he asked me about some of the books that were on my reading list from a few weeks ago: Freakonomics, The Unforgiving Minute, and Planet Google. His inquiry was indicative of his wide variety of interests too. So I'm going to sham for tonight and share my "book reviews."

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Okay, Freakonomics: it was a really quick read and at the least it was entertaining. I think it was the case of this guy having some funny ideas about society and then finding the statistical research that backed up his thoughts. For example, one of his bigger claims is that the big drops in crime in the 1990's was not due to gun control laws, tougher police forces, or any of that. He says it is due to the Roe v Wade decision and the legalization of abortion. He says that the kids of inner city, low income families are more prone to lives of crime, and with abortion going on in spades, those crime-prone kids were not being born. Now I have a pretty big problem with this argument, I don't really think that anything good comes from abortion on the scale that we see it in our society. But the author makes his case and has some stats to back it up.

Planet Google was really good, it was the first of two books I have read on the company. I find them really fascinating as an organization (mostly because of my management studies I guess) and this was a good book. The other book, Google Speaks, was decent but not quite as good. All in all, there's a certain futility in reading about a company like Google because they are so ballistic or volatile or however you want to say it. They are in the thick of all things technological and that is of course a field that changes at an unbelievable rate. I think Planet Google was written in 2007, so some of the stuff is already outdated. I have been trying to keep on top of them as a company by reading about them in the news and following their blog too. I'm definitely a fan of all things Google though, so perhaps I'm a little biased in my opinions of them.

The Unforgiving Minute was...okay. The author, Craig Mullaney, is a West Point grad ('99 or '00 I think) and spent his first year or two in the army in England on a Rhodes scholarship. One of my TAC officers here knew him as a cadet and she affirmed the feeling I got from reading his book and from seeing an interview he did with John Stewart: he has the personality of a brick. The book talks about his cadet days, ranger school, his days at Oxford, and then his basic course and subsequent deployment. The whole thing he was gearing up to tell in the book is: does all the training that an officer (or any army leader for that matter) goes through (stuff like West Point, Ranger school, even extra education like Oxford) really prepare you for that "unforgiving minute"? Is there a course or a school that can teach you what it is like fight in a firefight or to have one of your soldiers killed in action? The answer is of course NO and I think he spent a lot of time leading up to that point but could have made it a little better in the end.