In Search of Stupidity, by Merrill R. Chapman

I love this book. On the surface it is a humorous look at high-tech marketing disasters such as Netscape, OS/2, and near and dear to me, Borland. Dig a little deeper and there is some good stuff about how to learn from these mistakes in order to not repeat them, and I imagine that some readers will thake these lessons to heart. The rest of use will laugh out loud and thoroughly enjoy reading about one catastrophe after the other in the same manner we watch NASCAR waiting for that spectacular wreck.

As interesting as the various stories are, the humor is what pushes this book from merely entertaining to magnificent. And the jokes start from page one; the preface contains this gem (and possibly the best hyphenated phrase ever written): “Yes, [Consumer Reports] is not much fun to read, and it has that annoying left-wing, tree-hugger-life-was-better-in-the-19^th-and-early-20^th-centuries-when-choo-choo-trains-belched-smoke-into-the-air attitude, but it does buy its test vehicles and this has no need to suck up to Detroit or Tokyo in the manner of publications such as Car and Driver and Road and Track.” This sort of in-your-face wit coupled with solid-but-harsh observations are repeated on virtually every page. Even the glossary was hilarious: “ROI: Acronym for return on investment. The amount of money earned on investing in a particular program or business. The concept wasn’t in use during the dot-com boom.” “Yahoo: A leading web portal that has never promised not to be evil and therefore has no compunctions about helping the Chinese government jail journalists.”

Chapman clearly has organizations and products he likes and doesn’t; Google, MSN, and Yahoo are all described quite bluntly as “evil.” Apple is largely on his good side, but he plays fair and doesn’t hesitate to scathe them when deserving. “Had Apple not been in its way every bit as stupid as IBM, the company was in a position to become the next Microsoft of OSs. But we all know how that turned out.” The chapter on Borland was especially entertaining to me as I was technically the head of Borland engineering world-wide when reading this. (Borland had been bought by Micro Focus in 2009 and become a wholly owned subsidiary so the position didn’t really mean anything, but various contracts required the company to stay in existence and I was the most senior Borland engineering employee left after the acquisition.) I had first-hand experience with the disaster that was the executive staff at Borland before Micro Focus stepped in; it was entertaining to see that the previous executives were prone to massive blunders as well. Chapman ends this section with the 2006 divestiture of TurboPascal and its progeny with the sentence, “The Borland roller coaster has not yet stopped rolling.” Fast-forward a few years and he was more accurate than he knew!

While the stories are a bit dated—this second edition was released in 2006 and the high-tech world changes very, very quickly—they are valuable lessons in hubris and arrogance. The history lesson alone makes this worth your time; I wonder how many of the youngsters entering the business today have heard of Ashton-Tate or Novell? Both insightful and funny, this should be required reading for anyone developing or marketing software.

First Sentence:

In 1982, Harper & Row published In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr.

The Drunkard's Walk, by Leonard Mlodinow

Many things we see as factual are in fact random. Mlodinow explores this illusion with humor and insight, making for a pleasant and informative read. One of the most interesting sections was the discussion of the law of small numbers and the exploration of executive success. “Executives’ winning years are attributed to their brilliance, explained retroactively through incisive hindsight.” Mlodinow believes this is nonsense, and supports this belief quite effectively. “We should expect, by chance alone, about 1 in 10 CEOs to have five winning or losing years in a row. What does this tell us? It is more reliable to judge people by analyzing their abilities than by glancing at the scoreboard.” My experiences with various CEOs makes me wish that this was a widely held opinion, because very few executives I’ve known have been what I’d consider successful.

What sets The Drunkard’s Walk above similar books is that not only does Mlodinow explore how we are fooled by random patterns, but how we fall prey to them. Because humans want to feel like we have control, we abhor randomness; this is why we often mistake luck for skill. Our need for being in command of ourselves allows us to find patterns where they often don’t exist. The discussion and analysis about how randomness rules our lives may seem that true fortune is more a factor of luck than skill. Mlodinow shows in more than one place, though, that this isn’t necessarily true. “Successful people in every field are almost universally members of a certain set — the set of people who don’t give up.” While ability clearly is a factor, “the cord that tethers ability to success is both loose and elastic.” In other words, there are talented people that fail, and mediocre people that succeed; but, mediocre people that give up easily are rarely successful. A solid conclusion to a solid book.

First Sentence:

I remember, as a teenager, watching the yellow flame of the Sabbath candles dancing randomly above the white paraffin cylinders that fueled them.

Shine On, by Mike Renfro

I love beer. My first Shiner Bock was opened shortly after moving to Austin in 1988 and I’ve never looked back. Dogfish Head, Victory, Rogue, and Stone craft some of my favorite offerings, but the little brewery in Shiner, Texas holds a special place in my world. After reading this photo-filled coffee table book, I see that I’m nowhere close to alone in that belief!

Shine On gives the corporate biography of the Spoetzl Brewery, founded in 1909. The story is actually quite interesting, giving a good overview of the industry in America as well as the details of this particular business. The number of times the brewery was on the verge of bankruptcy is surprising when looking at its success today; as the author says, “It’s a story that would ring of overdone fiction if it weren’t for the simple fact the whole damn thing’s true.” Today, Shiner Bock is seemingly everywhere; it is hard to imagine that it was nearly 1980 before it was actually brewed full-time.

The photographs that accompany the text are plentiful and include many sent in from loyal drinkers giving a friendly feel to the book which meshes well with the story being told. One of my favorites was of a Volkswagen Bug painted to resemble a bee; when Shiner introduced their hefeweisen (then called Shiner Honey Wheat) they built a “buzz” by sending these “bee-hicles” to local bars and encouraging people to try the new beer. A friend of mine and I dragged our families all over San Antonio chasing the slugbugs and getting free beer. That was a very fun night!

Rich details, colorful photographs, and fond memories make Shine On a refreshing read. It has a permanent place on our coffee table and brings a smile to my face each time I crack it open. If you enjoy Texas history and a good beer, open a cold one and spend an afternoon with this book.

First Sentence:

Just for grins, turn the air conditioning off for a few days.

The Everlasting Man, by G.K. Chesterton

I am not a religious person, but usually enjoy books that challenge my beliefs (like Strobel’s The Case for Christ). The Everlasting Man, however, was hard to finish not only because it was an argument against evolution but because the writing was so difficult. The prose was dense and hard to parse; a typical sentence: “Doubtless those more antiquated men of antiquity who clung to their solitary statues and their single sacred names were regarded as superstitious savages benighted and left behind.” Or even worse, “All this indescribable thing that we call the Christmas atmosphere only hangs in the air as something like a lingering fragrance or fading vapour from the exultant explosion of that one hour in the Judean hills nearly two thousand years ago.”

Chesterton argues that if evolution was real, man wouldn’t be so unique in the world. While that is an interesting argument, there is so much truth in what we do know that I find it ludicrous to dismiss the entire theory. (I also find it interesting that virtually all opposition to evolution is from the religious community and not the scientific one.) Chesteron takes a similar approach to why Christianity is still going strong where other religions have died out, assuming that proves the Church is correct. Hinduism and Buddhism are both older, though, and it is hard to argue they are dying out. Interesting discussion points, but they ring false to me. Chesterton writes, “A history of cows in twelve volumes would not be very lively reading.” While that may be true, only the length of that bovine history makes it less appealing than The Everlasting Man.

First Sentence:

Far away in some strange constellation in skies infinitely remote, there is a small star, which astronomers may some day discover.

Lost Girls, by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie

This controversial graphic novel examines the erotic lives of three ladies: Dorothy, Alice, and Wendy. As the women tell each other sexually explicit stories from their past, we come to recognize them as the lead characters from the Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan. The tales become wilder and wilder, starting with simple promiscuity and spinning into drug-fueled orgies and outright incest. Interestingly there are no consequences of any of these decadent actions; no pregnancies, no diseases, no apparent psychological trauma: clearly a fantasy.

While clearly pornography, the book is beautiful and can be appreciated on several levels. For example, a seemingly straightforward conversation between a married couple has an entirely different interpretation when the shadows they are causing are examined in the background. Elsewhere a journal entry is shared that is illustrated with both an opium-induced tryst and a depiction of the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, with both sets of drawings make sense. In another place the seven deadly sins are juxtaposed with a lesbian seduction. Moore and Gebbie have clearly taken the term “graphic” in “graphic novel” to extremes here, with interesting results.

First Sentence:

Tell me a story.

Opening Atlantis. by Harry Turtledove

Alternate history is one of my favorite genres, and Harry Turtledove is undeniably one of the masters of this oeuvre. Sadly, Opening Atlantis didn't meet my considerable expectations. The idea is interesting: millions of years ago the eastern coast of North America from Florida to Nova Scotia broke away from the mainland and is located much further east than in our world, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Being closer to Europe this eighth continent is discovered earlier, although the British and the French still both manage to become dominant. A rich milieu in which to tell stories, but I had a difficult time staying interested here. There is a brief exploration of the island during the initial colonization, but Turtledove jumps altogether too quickly into war; he has a wealth of experience with this topic, but with such a rich backdrop it feels almost like a cop-out to devolve into a pastiche of the French and Indian War. Not a terrible book, but far below Turtledove's usual effort.

First Sentence:

Edward Radcliffe steered the St. George toward Le Croisic.

Tales of the American West, edited by Richard S. Wheeler

While I adore movie westerns (“Unforgiven” and “The Shootist” are my favorites) my love hasn’t translated to the written word. I’ve read the odd Zane Grey and a handful of others, but the genre never had the same hold on me as sci-fi or mystery novels do. For this reason when I unwrapped Tales of the American West at Christmas my first thought was this would take forever to complete, but once opening it I found myself very pleasantly surprised.

My favorite story was Continuity by Elmer Kelton, a poetic portrayal of why youth innovates yet age brings a resistance to change. Charity by Sandra Whiting was a close second, describing a touching relationship between a white woman and an Indian spanning decades. The single line in the anthology that I found most impressive, though, came from Jory Sherman’s Comes the Hunter: “He loved so many things about her that they all became tangled up in his mind until he felt his mind could not breathe nor sort through them for explanation.” Beautiful.

First Sentence (from the Introduction):

The Spur Awards, given out annually by the Western Writers of America, have been the hallmark of excellence in the field of western literature for almost half a century.