Tag Archives: book review

Book review: Darkening Song

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I received a free copy of the audiobook through a randomized giveaway on StoryGraph. I did not receive any compensation for this review.

What happens when you mix a traumatic past with sudden fame? For music superstar Alora (and her intern-turned-manager Eva), the answer is both “you get everything you always wanted” and “you lose what you had.”

Delphine Seddon’s debut novel draws on her decades of experience in the music industry. Darkening Song is the story of a young record label intern who boldly becomes the manager of a 16 year old musician with superstar potential. The narration follows two threads: Eva describes the history of finding Alora, getting her signed to a contract, producing an album, and going on tour. Alora’s story is primarily told from an inpatient rehab center, where ends up after the weight and trauma of her meteoric rise become too much to bear.

Because you know early on that Alora is in rehab, the plot unfolds more as a “how did we get there?” instead of “where are we going?” The two threads are somewhat disjoint at first and converge as you approach the end. Instead of being confusing, Seddon uses the back-and-forth to build excitement, resulting in a book that’s hard to put down.

The characters live lives that are completely foreign to me, but they seem like authentically real people. They have flaws, some of which they grow out of, some of are made worse by success. The realness of characters is what keeps Darkening Song from being a “lol look at how messed up famous people are” story.

Overall, I enjoyed the plot, although the ending felt a little too out-there for me. But the style is good and the audiobook narrators were terrific. I gave it 4.25/5 stars on my totally-consistent-and-reasoned review scale.

Darkening Song is available later this month from Macmillan.

Book review: The Goal

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I am a sucker for novels as allegory for technologists. When my friend Bex recommended Eliyahu M. Goldratt’s The Goal, I knew I had to give it a try. Surprisingly, the wait for the audiobook was measured in months, so I had plenty of time to wait. But the wait was worth it.

The Goal is set in a Rust Belt town where the local factory is struggling to remain productive (and therefore profitable). Our narrator is the plant manager, who is pouring all of himself into trying to save the plant. This, as you might expect, puts a serious strain on his home life. By chance, the narrator runs into his college physics professor. The professor works in a few moments here and there to help his former student improve the plant’s flow — often in counterintuitive ways — by asking questions that lead the team to a successful outcome.

You might ask what early-1980s industrial manufacturing has to do with the modern software industry, and you’re right to ask it. The setting is not immediately applicable, and a lot of the references (and attitudes in a few places) are very dated. But just like in my review of Tom DeMarco’s The Deadline, I did not find myself thinking “boy, I’m sure glad that problem is solved now.”

What’s the goal?

We still face (as do people in many other industries) being judged on local performance, whether or not that helps — or even hurts — the broader organizational goals. A person whose performance is graded based on the number of tasks they complete will complete as many tasks as they can, regardless of whether or not it creates a bottleneck downstream or is “wasted’ work. As Jonah, the professor character, says “a system of local optimums is not an optimum system at all. It is a very inefficient system.”

This, perhaps, is the one lesson that we’ve retained. System administrators know, even if managers and executives sometimes forget, that fully-utilized systems are brittle. If you want a resilient system, you need to have excess capacity in order to handle bursts. Stable systems are inefficient, and efficiency for efficiency’s sake is a bad goal.

The overall message of The Goal, and the first question that Jonah asks, is “what is the goal of the organization?” For businesses, the goal is to make money. It’s not to manufacture widgets, ship software, sell services, or whatever. Those are ways the business achieves the goal of making money. Market fit, quality, price, etc are factors in how successful the product is, but aren’t the goal in themselves. The rest of the book describes how to analyze flow through the process to optimize overall throughput in service of that goal.

Other lessons along the way

I’m not sure how much Goldratt intended for me to take these additional lessons from his novel, but I picked up a few other things along the way. First, is that if you’re too busy to update your documentation, you will get busier due to out-of-date documentation. At one point, the plant’s leadership team is operating under assumptions based on outdated documentation, which causes them to make the wrong decision. Bad documentation leads to rework, which is both demoralizing to the worker and counter to optimizing throughput.

Another lesson is that priorities that aren’t clearly communicated and understood aren’t priorities in fact. People have to understand what they’re supposed to be working on and why. If that changes and they don’t know about it, they’ll keep following the old priorities. Understanding the “why?”, especially when something seems counterintuitive, is important to get people to buy in and follow the plan.

Lastly, the Socratic method only works if both people are willing to use it. At one point, having seen how well the Socratic method worked to lead him to improvements at the plant, the plant manager tries it on his estranged wife. Because she sees his questions as having seemingly-obvious answers, he comes across as an asshole. Asking questions to understand the layers of an answer can be a very helpful approach, but everyone involved has to be in the right space for it.

My verdict

Overall, I thought The Goal was a solid book. The lessons are well-communicated, valuable, and not overly-preachy. The audiobook version is surprisingly well-produced, which made it fun as well as informative. If I ever become a college professor (unlikely!), I’d love to teach a course of allegorical novels, and The Goal will fit in well with The Deadline and The Phoenix Project.

Book review: Guiding Star OKRs

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Setting, tracking, and reporting OKRs is terrible. But what if it wasn’t? In Guiding Star OKRs: A New Approach to Setting and Achieving Goals, Staffan Nöteberg lays out a framework that focuses on heading in the right direction instead of trying to meet exact targets. Unlike the OKRs you may have experienced, Guiding Star OKRs are focused on getting the right results, not the pre-determined results.

In a previous role, management was big into setting cascading OKRs (which Nöteberg says not to do). My objectives were my manager’s key results. My manager’s objectives were my VP’s key results, and so on. The end result was that there was no reward for helping colleagues meet their individual OKR targets. Instead of working together, we all worked individually in the hope that it ended up achieving the company’s broader goals. Spoiler alert: it did not.

I went into reading Guiding Star OKRs expecting to shake my head at a slight variation on a broken system. Instead, I came away enthusiastic about Nöteberg’s approach. Finally, OKRs that are meaningful!

The concept of setting and attracting objectives and key results (OKRs) really took off a Google. As anyone in the sysadmin/DevOps space in the early 2010s can tell you, a lot of organizations copied Google without considering if they need to.

This book is full of practical advice and examples to help the reader adopt the framework to their organization’s specific needs. For example: “never engage in setting objectives or key results when tasks are already determined.”

Guiding Star OKRs is a must-read for leaders who want to achieve results in a sustainable way. It’s now available in print and digital formats from The Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Full disclosure: I provided the publisher with a praise quote for this book and received a complimentary copy as a result. I received no compensation for this review.

Book review: Business Success with Open Source

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Open source is big business, whether you mean companies producing open source software or using it to build their products. But too many companies don’t take an intentional approach to how they consume and create open source. There’s no excuse for that now that VM Brasseur’s new book, Business Success with Open Source: Strengthen Your Business with Free and Open Source Software, is published.

At 470 pages, this is no light treatment of the topic. Brasseur digs deep into the intersection of business and open source software with insights from her years of experience. Readers who are already deep in the open source world may find the early chapters unnecessary, but Brasseur ensures that no one gets left behind.

If you’re in a leadership role in your company and have anything to do with open source at all, you need to read this book. It’s now available in print and digital formats from The Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Full disclosure: VM Brasseur is a close personal friend. In addition, I was a technical reviewer for this book and received a complimentary copy for my work. I received no compensation for this review.

Book review: The Sympathizer

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What does it mean to pretend to be something else? In one of my favorite books, Mother Night, the character Howard W. Campbell, Junior concludes that “we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” Viet Thanh Nguyen’s narrator in The Sympathizer reaches no conclusions, but he struggles with the thought throughout the story.

I saw — or imagined — a lot of parallels between Mother Night and The Sympathizer, which no doubt predisposed me to liking the latter. Both books take the form of the protagonist recounting his exploits for a captor, mixing self-reflection with facts. Both take place in a war setting, which characters having authentic connections to the people they’re trying to deceive.

But just because the themes rhyme, The Sympathizer is its own work. If nothing else, it’s a rare work that looks at the Vietnam War from the North Vietnamese perspective. It’s also a really enjoyable book in its own right. The fact that the narrator cannot answer the questions he asks himself gives the reader something to think about long after the book is done.

I loved this book to the point that I stayed up far too late to finish it. I’m looking forward to reading the sequel that I just found out existed.

Book review: If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal

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I recently read Justin Gregg’s If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity. As humans, we tend to assume that our intelligence sets us apart and that our exceptional cognitive abilities are good. There’s no doubt that we’re exceptional, but it’s not clear that we’re good. As Gregg wrote:

Our many intellectual accomplishments are currently on track to produce our own extinction, which is exactly how evolution gets rid of adaptations that suck.

Unique among Earth’s animals, humans have bent our environment to our will. This, of course, has resulted in some undesirable side effects. Despite all of our supposed advancement, we are biologically predisposed to prioritize immediate needs over long-term needs. We get benefit from burning fossil fuels now and assume that we’ll be able to deal with the long-term impacts later. But will we?

Gregg studies animal cognition, so this book is steeped in facts. Indeed, the reader will probably learn more about animals than people. And after reaching the end, the reader may find it’s hard to disagree with Gregg’s assertion that Nietzche — and the rest of the species — would have been happier as a narwhal.

Evolution has many dead ends. It could be that what makes us special actually makes us less happy. Humans have a relatively short time on Earth, so it’s folly to assume that our unique adaptations aren’t maladaptive. It reminds me of the joke where an angel is talking to God about creating humans and says “you’ve ruined a perfectly good monkey. Look, it has anxiety!”

I didn’t come away from this book convinced that human cognition is a bad thing on balance. But as a philosophical starting point, I see a case for Gregg’s argument that “human intelligence may just be the stupidest thing that ever happened.”

Book review: Sapiens

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I just finished listening to Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuvah Noah Harari. It an interesting look at the history of our species as viewed through the lens of thee revolutions: cognitive, agricultural, and scientific.

Harari takes a detached — and sometimes cynical — view of history. He does not place humanity at the center of the story. Instead, he talks about humans and human systems as part of a broader evolutionary process. For example, he says “we did not domesticate wheat; it domesticated us.”

There is no inevitability

It is a mistake, he argues, to ascribe intent to evolutionary processes. Humanity is not the end goal. It follows, then, that there is no underlying purpose of human life. We exist because we exist. Whatever meaning we give life is a shared myth, as is all of human culture. Our economic, political, religious, and all other systems exist and have power because we agree they exist and have power.

For me, some of the more interesting parts of the book were the descriptions of how various economic systems influenced — or even necessitated — historical outcomes. European colonization and empire from the 15th century to today is not because of any innate nature of Europeans. Environmental factors and accidents of invention gave Europe’s leaders the ability and motivation to conquer the globe. Were we able to replay history a hundred times, how many times would western Europe become the home of global empire rather than, say, the Middle East?

Are you better off than your ancestors?

I was also intrigued by early discussions of the relative quality of life and later discussions of human happiness. For all of the hardships we imagine our ancestors faced, Harari argues that our hunter-gatherer forebears may have had a greater overall standard of living than their post-agricultural-revolution descendants. Nevertheless, the agricultural revolution prompted changes in our societies that made going back all but impossible.

“Happiness” is a difficult concept to explain, let alone measure. Nonetheless, it seems plausible that we are no more happy than our grandparents’ generation, or their grandparents’ generation, or… If happiness has not increased, what was the point of the millennia of changes? Why do we try to increase our wealth, expand our understanding, and conquer disease? What, truly, is the point of anything?

The questions to ask

“What, truly, is the point of anything?” is a question to ask. But it’s a mistake to think any answer find is universal. What we consider as fundamental human rights are only fundamental because we think they are. Perhaps societies many thousand years ago that had little concept of individual well-being and instead focused on the well being of the collective were right? Ah, but what does it mean to even be right? Rightness depends on the cultural context, which in tend depends on the shared myths in that place and time.

Sapiens ends with a look at the future and how our technology puts us in a position to render ourselves obsolete. We are forced to confront the question of “what do we want?” for our future. But that’s not the most pressing question, Harari says. We should be asking ourselves “what do we want to want?”

Should you read this?

Although I found much of the latter part of the book less interesting, the book overall was well worth the time. It was thought-provoking in ways that I did not expect. I may end up re-reading it with the intent of putting it aside to explore the thoughts as they arise.

Sapiens was first published in English in 2015. Although that was less than a decade ago, some parts of it feel out of touch. Harari describes a move away from nationalism. While that may be true in the broader sense, the last few years have bucked that trend — in the US and elsewhere. Similarly, he says that no state can “declare and wage war as it pleases”, yet Russia has done just that. Although it faces international retribution, and indeed may prove to be worse off as a result, it nonetheless is very much waging a war against Ukraine.

It’s a mistake to assume that history is a smooth line. Only time will tell if recent events are the start of a long trend or a ripple in the trajectory of history of homo sapiens.

Book review: Why Fish Don’t Exist

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I found Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life by accident. Someone had shared a screen capture of a Tumblr post which talked about how trees aren’t a thing, taxonomically speaking. How weird. And then I saw that fish are also not a thing. Mindblowing. Somewhere in my searches to prove to my girlfriend that I was not making this up (although she can be forgiven, because that is very much the sort of thing I’d make up), I found Lulu Miller’s 2020 book.

I checked it out from the library as an audiobook so that Miranda and I could listen to it together. We were prepared to learn all about how fish are a lie. But we did not learn that.

Well, we learned it eventually. But only in the last chapter does Miller actually touch on the subject. The rest of the book is a mix of her life and the life of David Starr Jordan. Jordan was a famous researcher in his day, credited with discovering a fifth of the fish species we know today. He was president of Indiana University and later was the founding president of Stanford University. Oh yeah, he was also a eugenicist and may have been involved in murder.

Miller does an excellent job of tying the ups and downs in her life to Jordan’s. He serves as both inspiration and…whatever the opposite of inspiration is. The book is a fascinating and engaging tale. Had I not been waiting to learn about the fish, I would have loved it. Instead, I found it frustrating. I might read it again, knowing what to expect—and what not to expect.

Book review: Word Freak

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I wasn’t sure what I’d get when I started reading Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive SCRABBLE Players by Stefan Fatsis. I’m a fan of the game, although I’ve never played it competitively. After reading this book, I never will.

It’s not that the book is bad. To the contrary, it’s surprisingly engaging. But the competitive game bears little resemblance to the game I play with friends. And the people who play at a high level? If Fatsis is to be taken at his word, they’re a pretty messed up bunch.

Can Fatsis be trusted, though? He’s hardly an objective observer. Instead of a distanced, sociological study, Fatsis immerses himself. He becomes what he studies, trying to achieve an expert ranking and befriending his subjects. Yet the way he describes them is hardly flattering. He paints them as a group of barely-functional obsessives.

Are they? Perhaps. It could be that he focused on the misfits because the normies don’t make for a good book. But whether or not the word freaks are representative of Scrabble’s top tier, Fatsis becomes one of them. Frankly, he does not paint himself in a very flattering light either. Although the arc of the book is his quest for an expert-level ranking, he’s not a sympathetic protagonist.

The history of the game is interesting. The strategies of the world’s top players are astounding. And the people are mostly pitiable. It makes for an interesting read, despite the length. But if you find yourself wanting to join that world, I think you should reconsider.

Book Review: Pleading Out

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I was only a few pages in when Pleading Out: How Plea Bargaining Creates a Permanent Criminal Class made me angry. It wasn’t because of how Dan Canon wrote. It was because of what he wrote. In Bordenkircher v. Hayes, the Supreme Court held that prosecutors could, in effect, punish a defendant for asserting their right to a trial. Potter Stewart wrote that this was part of “any legitimate system which tolerates and encourages the negotiation of pleas.”

While legal systems in the United States do tolerate and encourage plea deals, a reasonable person can question the legitimacy of the system. That Paul Hayes received a life sentence for forging a $88.30 check calls the legitimacy of the system into question.

Canon spends the rest of the book making the case that the plea bargain system as practiced in the United States is not legitimate. It does not serve the interests of justice, but of power. “The American legal system,” he writes, “was designed by people in power as a tool to keep them in power whatever the cost.”

American exceptionalism

Plea bargains are rare in other countries. In the United States, 97% of convictions come from guilty pleas. Most of those are bargained. Why is that? Prior to the 1830s, plea bargains were rare in America. Attitudes started shifting when labor solidarity developed in the early industrial factories. Plea bargaining hid prosecution from the public eye, preventing scrutiny and revolt.

The expansion of federal crimes after Prohibition led to a need to process cases more efficiently. “What we have inherited is an amoral system of criminal proceedings; it cannot be called criminal justice. Expediency, not fairness, is the principal concern.”

It’s no coincidence that the United States has the highest incarceration rate and also the highest plea bargain rate. As Michelle Alexander explores in greater depth in The New Jim Crow, the legal system creates a permanent criminal underclass that has long-lasting effects.

Liberty and justice for some

The high volume of cases means that lawyers can’t keep up. Prosecutors can’t screen cases to drop the obviously bad ones. Worse, defense attorneys can’t mount vigorous defenses. Canon notes that in 15% of exonerations, the defendant gave a false confession. Thousands of innocent people are sitting in jail today because the police or prosecutors railroaded them into confessing to a crime they didn’t commit.

Because plea bargains are secretive, there’s no accountability. Wealthy defendants can work themselves into a sweet deal. Poor and middle-class defendants have to take what the prosecution offers. If they dare insist on a trial, they face persecution, not prosecution. Ask Paul Hayes. This does not benefit society.

So what do we do?

It doesn’t have to be this way. Canon writes about the decade when Alaska eliminated plea bargaining. The system adjusted. Prosecutors dropped cases they couldn’t—or shouldn’t—prove. Police got more careful with their investigations, knowing they’d actually be accountable. It wasn’t perfect, but it was an improvement.

Our current system doesn’t have to be our system forever. But it won’t change on it’s own. The first step is an informed populace. That’s why I’d recommend Pleading Out to anyone who cares about justice.