Business and Technology titles ...

I have not blogged about business or technology books in a while.  Here are several that we have ordered recently:

TROUBLEMAKERS by Leslie Berlin is all about “Silicon Valley’s Coming of Age” and as such it focuses on the years from 1969 to 1984.  I was shocked to realize that over the space of a few years (and roughly thirty-five miles) these five major industries were born:  personal computing, video games, biotechnology, venture capital, and advanced semiconductor logic. Berlin is Project Historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University and author of The Man Behind the Microchip.  In her new book, TROUBLEMAKERS, she tells the story of several innovators such as “one of seven women among nearly eight hundred graduate engineering students” at Stanford in the late 1960s:  Sandra Kurtzig, who ultimately became the first woman to take a high-tech company public.  Others who are profiled include Bob Taylor (Defense Department and Xerox internet guru); Al Alcorn (video game/Pong designer); Mike Markkula (Apple executive); Niels Reimers (Stanford academic); Robert Swanson (Genentech and venture capital innovator); and Fawn Alvarez (ROLM telecom executive).  TROUBLEMAKERS is truly fascinating reading about the culture, challenges and triumphs associated with a time of dramatic change and will be of special interest to students of business and technological history.  There is an extensive bibliography and notes section.  

A DOZEN LESSONS FOR ENTREPRENEURS written by Tren Griffin and published by Columbia Business School provides a more modern day take on Silicon Valley and venture capitalists, focusing on key attributes of successful start-ups and business ventures. Griffin has interviewed 35 entrepreneurs (such as Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel) and then reviewed their responses for patterns, with factors like markets, mission, and recruiting appearing most often.  Griffin summarizes by saying, “perhaps the playbook of industry disruption requires being naïve enough at the start to question basic assumptions and then staying alive long enough to employ skills that are unique and advantageous in the industry you seek to change.” Griffin has made an effort to include 6 women (of 35 total) amongst those being profiled, well above the industry proportion at senior levels. In addition, he writes in an engaging manner such as when discussing Rich Barton (Expedia, Glassdoor and Zillow) and stressing that acquiring skills may require a path that is nonlinear; “the ‘jungle gym’ replaces the ‘ladder’ as the metaphor for a career.” I have already recommended this book to our business department (there is a nice glossary of terms, too) and I know that the Entrepreneur class is anxious to see the copy we have ordered.   

In THE SENTIENT MACHINE Amir Husain, CEO of SparkCognition in Austin, Texas, focuses on “the coming age of artificial intelligence.” He opens with a story regarding the happenstance, due to having the right doctor with the right search terms, of finding an effective medical treatment for his extremely painful cluster headache condition.  From there, he refers to the benefit of having machines keep up more effectively than humans with the many medical advances – or their potential contribution in numerous other fields like astronomy, manufacturing, and financial services.  He goes on in Part One to outline the history of our fears about technological change, to explain what AI is, and to acknowledge the concerns expressed by Elon Musk, Bill Gates and others.  In Part Two, he explains that trying to suppress artificial intelligence work, “or subject it to draconian regulation, will be incredibly harmful to us as a civilization.” The final section looks to the future, reflecting on what is uniquely human and what is our purpose. THE SENTIENT MACHINE contains suggestions for further reading, extensive notes and a detailed index.

Looking for other new books on business and technology? Try Vivek Wadhwa’s DRIVER IN THE DRIVERLESS CAR  -- he contributes to pbsNewsHour and was featured in this report on the jobless future in August, 2017 OR look for HIT REFRESH by Satya Nadella about Microsoft. And you can soon check out GREAT AT WORK by Morten T. Hansen who just crafted a wonderful piece about “The Key to Success? Doing Less” in The Wall Street Journal. As always, if you have a title to suggest, please let us know.

New Short Story Collections

Several new short story collections with starred reviews appeal to a variety of interests and feature writing by award-winning authors:

The State We’re In by Ann Beattie presents interrelated stories about Maine and also about one’s mental/emotional state.  Unfortunately, I felt that these selections from an acknowledged master of the short story genre contained too much description, with little dialogue and would not be particularly compelling for students even though several of the linked pieces featured a teenager, Jocelyn.  Our students will be much more interested in the forthcoming Ghostly – which will be released in time for Halloween.  Compiled and illustrated by another well-known author, Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler’s Wife), that collection will feature stories from Ray Bradbury, Edgar Allen Poe, A.S. Byatt and many more.  All of those stories will center on a theme of haunting and cover a range of times from the eighteenth century to modern day.

Press Start to Play will be released next Tuesday (8/18) and that, too, promises to be high interest and entertaining for students.  These 26 stories have to do with video games and the attraction for their participants. The editors (Daniel Wilson – Robopocalypse and Hugo winner John Joseph Adams) plus other contributors will be instantly recognizable to students and teachers, especially sci-fi fans.  Examples include: Andy Weir (The Martian), Holly Black (Tithe, Coldest Girl in Coldtown), Cory Doctorow (Little Brother), T.C. Boyle (Tortilla Curtain), Hugh Howey (Wool), plus writers from the gaming industry. And there is a foreword by Ernest Cline (Ready Player One and the recent Armada). I am looking forward to having teachers share some of these stories and discuss the idea of video games as narrative. This collection should be fun to explore and provide hours of entertainment.

Award-winning author Neil Gaiman whose work will be included in the forthcoming Ghostly also gave us Trigger Warning earlier this year. Subtitled “Short Fiction and Disturbances,” some of the stories and poems are rather bleak, dealing as Gaiman says, with “things that wait for us in the dark corridors of our lives.” Gaiman has such a huge, creative imagination and it is on full display in his recent collection.

If you are looking for more classic mystery stories, you may like Resorting to Murder.   Edited by Martin Edwards, this set contains fourteen stories from the golden age of British crime fiction, including ones by Chesterton and Conan Doyle. Several selections are relatively rare and Resorting to Murder joins numerous recent re-issues from Poisoned Pen Press.

Finally, be sure to look for a collection which has received almost universal praise this summer:  Music for Wartime.  Written by local author Rebecca Makkai (The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House), these stories show why her short fiction has appeared in four consecutive additions of The Best American Short Stories. Recommended on NPR, pbs and in local press, Makkai’s seventeen stories deal with family, with artists, and with the human condition both during WWII and today.

If you have other short story collections to suggest, please let us know.  I am already planning additional reviews for Sept/Oct titles including O. Henry Prize Stories and Anatomy of Curiosity.