Month: March 2009

Here’s an idea: Let’s take William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, right? And let’s pull out all the key bits: an indecisive and tragic hero, a poisoned father, the ghost of that poisoned father, an accidental murder of a close friend, and an usurping uncle who marries the hero’s mother. Oh, oh, and that whole “play within a play” scene where Hamlet tries to guilt his uncle into confessing murder. Don’t forget that. NOW, let’s retell THAT story, except instead of rotten Denmark let’s place it in rural Wisconsin during the 1950s and instead of a kingdom let’s make it a dog breeding business and let’s replace Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with a couple of dogs. There. Now you’ve basically got The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski.

And you know, all smirk aside that’s not necessarily a bad hook. Plenty of great books have used that trope of retelling well-known stories from religious texts, legends, Greek plays, and the like. My problem with this book actually lies completely in the writing. Specifically, the plot is agonizingly slow, meandering, and just plain boring. There’s flashes of action and some neat character development, but it’s completely buried under meandering prose where nothing happens for scores of pages at a time. I don’t need all this detail on dog breeding and the letters Edgar’s dad wrote to other dog breeders, for example. It’s not necessary. Stop it.

Relatedly, Wroblewski has an annoying habit of introducing elements to the story that get a lot of attention, then just sort of sit there like a lump and eventually get left behind. This goes hand in hand with his habit of over reaching in his attempts at writing florid and poetic prose where he goes on and on about a scene or an internal monologue long after we’ve gotten the point or the appropriate impression. And for all that detail and introspection, the characters didn’t even really feel that fleshed out or detailed. Claude and even Edgar himself are only given superficial motives for their actions.

And don’t even get me started about anthropomorphizing the dogs in the story to the point where I can’t believe they’re actually dogs any more. Just …no.

The end result is that the book feels mostly disjointed, meandering, and not quite sure where it’s going. It needed some serious editing and reigning in. So I really recommend against this one. Hanging huge slabs of fatty meat on Hamlet’s bones doesn’t make for another masterpiece.

When you get old and reach the winter of your life, you don’t generally think about joining the military to go off and defend humanity against horrible alien threats. Well, you don’t, but the characters in John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War do. This is mostly because they get to be young again, but that deal in exchange for never getting to return to Earth and braving pretty bad odds on survival. Space is a pretty brutal place, what with all the different alien races competing for a relatively small number of inhabital planets and trying to crowd each other out.

This is the hook upon which Scalzi hangs his space opera, and it’s not a bad one. The main character, John Perry, is an 75-year old retiree when he enlists with the Colonial Defence Force at the beginning of the novel. Readers get to learn more about what he’s gotten himself into at about the same pace he does, since the CDF keeps everything pretty close to the vest. The author does a pretty good job of keeping things at a brisk pace, revealing just enough at a time about this world and the terms of Perry’s deal to keep us interested and turning the pages.

I don’t read a lot of science fiction so maybe I’m just not jaded enough, but I also found Scalzi to be pretty creative. I liked how humanity’s brand of technology used nanobots and genetic engineering to counter alien dangers and how their electronic BrainPals(tm) essentially made them telepaths and able to get e-mail in their head. That seems like a plausible course for future military tech to take, and indeed the implications for all this on space and terrestrial warfare is explored and played with in a pretty entertaining way. John Perry is sort of a bland character in and of himself, but like a lot of sci-fi, the world is the real main attraction and the protagonist is just there to give us someone to see it through.

So, I think it’s safe to say I liked it, so much so that I’ve already started on the sequel, The Ghost Brigades.

Well, here it is only March and we already have a strong contender for the worst book I’ll read this year. Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy and the New Science of Desire is written by advertising mogul Martin Lindstrom and if you believe the dust jacket it aims to explore the emerging field of “neuromarketing,” where advertisers and their consultants draw upon brain scanning technologies like fMRI to understand how brains react to advertising and how to to better market to them. The author claims to be the driving force behind three year’s worth of this neuromarketing research, involving subjects from around the globe and Lord knows how many millions of dollars.

That’s not a bad hook. The problem is that while the book is set up to be a scientific exploration of this new field or at least an exploration of the research couched in terms accessible to the interested layman, Lindstrom seizes that premise and twists it into marketing and advertising gobbledygook. It’s clear from the offset that he’s not a scientist or competent consumer of researcher by any stretch, yet he puts on a figurative lab coat and stomps around the territory making unsubstantiated and even nonsensical claims like “the statistical validity was as strong as could be.” Words like those have very specific meanings in a scientific context, but the author here just slings them around like marketing jingles. He also stomps around knee-deep in other fallacies like confusing correlation with causation and changing the definition of his terms (such as “product placement”) to suit his predetermined conclusions.

But as bad as all that is, it’s not the worst thing about this bad book. That honor goes to how Lindstrom seems incapable or unwilling to turn off his marketing speak. The entire book reads like a breathless advertisement for the author himself and his super amazing totally MIND BLOWING NEW RESEARCH!! With each new topic and chapter, the author blathers on about how you’re going to be totally amazed and shocked by what he has to tell you about the mysterious, murky happenings within the brain and how it forces you to buy a new iPod or bag of Doritos. The tone of the book is one of over the top zealotry and overselling the GEE WHIZ nature of research that in all likelihood a) wasn’t done by him, and b) misinterpreted anyway. Perhaps most annoyingly Lindstrom implies or outright states that marketing and advertising literally force you to behave irrationally, a concept that any person with a brain worth scanning in the first place would tell you is exaggerated at best and hysterical at worst.

Ironically, the only redeeming quality of Buyology comes from the parts that have nothing to do with neuromarketing. While he obviously knows jack divided by squat about scientific research, Lindstrom DOES obviously know about advertising, marketing, and brand development. And when he talks about the novel and surprising ways that companies engage in those activities, it’s often interesting. Learning how cigarette companies pay night clubs to decorate with certain colors and shapes in order to subtly advertise certain brands of cigarettes is fascinating, for example, as is hearing about how grocery stores pump in the fake scents of baking bread in order to trigger our appetites. That’s really pretty cool if insidious stuff, and it has nothing to do with neuromarketing. I could have done with a lot more of that kind of stuff without the author’s faux science veneer and frenzied trumpeting of his own horn.

No, this isn’t about the video game. The full title on this one is The Halo Effect …and the Eight Other Business Delusions that Deceive Managers. In it, author Phil Rosenzweig sets out to take the business press and best sellers to task for a list of flaws in their thinking and chest thumping. Basically, it’s a list of fallacies that you could compile from the chapter titles in most books on psychology, decision-making, and behavioral economics:

1. The Halo Effect (inferring other traits on the basis of one trait, like performance)
2. The Delusion of Correlation and Causality (assuming correlation means causation)
3. The Delusion of Single Explanations (not realizing that it’s all a rich tapestry; every outcome has multiple causes)
4. The Delusion of Connecting the Winning Dots (a.k.a., selection bias; the habit of studying only successes)
5. The Delusion of Rigorous Research (substituting research quantity for quality)
6. The Delusion of Lasting Success (forgetting that the nature of business means very few successes are permanant or even long-lasting)
7. The Delusion of Absolute Performance (not realizing that company performance is relative to your competition, not absolute)
8. The Delusion fo the Wrong End of the Stick (attributing success for a trait that both successful and unsuccessful companies share)
9. The Delusion of Organizational Physics (Failing to realize that human systems like the marketplace are too complex to predict perfectly)

I liked this book quite a bit, in part because I just like exploring these little kinks in human nature, but also because Rosenzweig fully committed himself to a no bullshit, no pulled punches critique of the silliness you see in the business press and best-selling books like Built to Last or Good to Great (which I thought was transparently terrible, too). His diatribes are replete with real-world examples, quotes, and data compilations, but also always cogent and centered around one of the delusions above (though sometimes they bleed together, as you might expect). He spends a fair amount of time splendidly savaging people like Jim Collins (of Good to Great fame and fortune), calling him on the carpet for making sure that facts, science, and sound methodology don’t get in the way of telling an uplifting story. It’s great to see someone with both the moxie to say stuff like this and the scientific training to substantiate his critiques. If the Journal of Applied Psychology were more like this, I’d read it cover to cover every issue.

My only substantial complaint about the book is that it’s almost all criticism and has very little in the way of solutions beyond “don’t fall into this faulty mode of thinking.” The subtext of the book is that business performance is gosh-darn hard to measure and even harder to predict or influence. So what do you do? How DO you identify the qualities that make businesses better? Clearly, some are better than others. What are the methodologies by which we can evaluate things in the absence of truely scientific experiments? The Halo Effect isn’t much help there. But at least the author criticizes the ways NOT to do it in an entertaining and enlightening way.