Tag Archives: book review

Book review — A Lawyer’s Journey: The Morris Dees story

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It’s easy to see the modern Ku Klux Klan (KKK) not as the domestic terrorism organization that murdered and oppressed black and Jewish people for decades, but as a small group of impotent ragers making noise on the fringes of society. And it’s equally tempting to see this diminished stature as the direct result of society coming to realize that the KKK’s views are abhorrent. But for as much as we might like to think that American society marginalized the KKK on its own, credit also goes to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The SPLC’s novel suits against KKK organizations helped bring legal constraints and financial ruin to prominent KKK organizations in a time when they were feeding off the resentment festering in the wake of the civil rights movement.

At the center of the suits was SPLC co-founder Morris Dees. In his book, co-authored with Steve Fiffer, Dees tells his story. He talks about how his upbringing as the son of a poor Alabama farmer shaped his life and his resulting career as a private attorney and the leader of a prominent anti-hate-group non-profit.

I received a copy of A Lawyer’s Journey after making a donation to the SPLC. If I knew I was going to receive a copy when I made the donation, I had certainly forgotten by the time it showed up. The title hardly suggested an exciting read and I didn’t know who Dees is. Nonetheless, I picked it up. Within a few chapters, I had a hard time putting it down.

As a white person who grew up in the (nominally) not-South during the time many of the cases in question were tried, I had very little knowledge of the efforts the SPLC and others made to stop the KKK in the 1980s. I assumed that the KKK went away because polite society realized it couldn’t tolerate white supremacy. Instead I learned how a few very motivated lawyers (and their brave clients) went toe-to-toe with the KKK using legal strategies that had never been tried.

As interesting as the content is, this book is not great from a literary point of view. The timeline jumps around without a clear reason. As with any autobiography, readers are obliged to read with a critical eye. Even if Dees is entirely truthful in what he tells, he presents only what he wants the reader to see. He mentions his divorces in passing, but his personal life beyond his teens years is largely absent. Apart from describing the time he and his daughter fled to a panic room (and her subsequent attendance at a major trial), we don’t know what effect the lawyer’s journey had on his family’s journey.

Given the recent resurgence of nationalism and white supremacism, this book deserves a read. People can fight hatred in many ways, and Morris proved that civil suits can be effective.

Book review: Habeas Data

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What does modern technology say about you? What can the police or other government agencies learn? What checks on their power exist? These questions are the subject of a new book from technology reporter Cyrus Farivar.

Habeas Data (affiliate link) explores the jurisprudence that has come to define modern privacy law. With interviews with lawyers, police officers, professors, and others who have shaped the precedent. What makes this such an interesting subject is the very nature of American privacy law. Almost nothing is explicitly defined by legislation. Instead, legal notions of privacy come from how courts interpret the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. This gives government officials the incentive to push as far as they can in the hopes that no court cases arise to challenge their methods.

For the first two centuries or so, this served the republic fairly well. Search and seizure were constrained to the physical realm. Technological advances did little to improve the efficiency of law enforcement. This started to change with the advent of the telegraph and then the telephone, but it’s the rapid advances in computing and mobility that have rendered this unworkable.

As slow as legislatures can be to react to technological advances, courts are even slower. And while higher court rulings have generally been more favorable to a privacy-oriented view, not everyone agrees. The broad question that courts must grapple with is which matters more: the practical effects of the technology changes or the philosophical underpinnings?

To his credit, Farivar does not claim to have an answer. Ultimately, it’s a matter of what society determines is the appropriate balance between individual rights and the needs of the society at large. Farivar has his opinions, to be sure, but Habeas Data does not read like an advocacy piece. It is written by a seasoned reporter looking to inform the populace. Only by understanding the issues can the citizenry make an informed decision.

With that in mind, Habeas Data is an excellent book. Someone looking for fiery advocacy will likely be disappointed, but for anyone looking to understand the issue, it’s a great fit. Technology law and ethics courses would be well-advised to use this book as part of the curriculum. It is deep and well-researched while still remaining readable.

It has its faults, too. The flow of chapters seems a little haphazard at times. On the other hand, they can largely be treated as standalone studies on particular issues. And the book needed one more copy editing pass. I saw a few typographic errors, which is bound to happen in any first-run book, but was jarred by a phrase that appeared to have been accidentally copy/pasted in the middle of a word.

None of this should be used as a reason to pass on this book. I strongly recommend Habeas Data to anyone interested in the law and policy of technology, and even more strongly to those who aren’t interested. The shape that privacy law takes in the next few years will have impacts for decades to come.

Book Review: The Woman Who Smashed Codes

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Stop me if you’ve heard this before: a woman does pioneering work in a field, only to have the men end up remembered by posterity. So it was for Elizebeth Smith Friedman. But she’s starting to receive her due. Jason Fagone’s newly-published The Woman Who Smashed Codes is not the first recognition of Friedman’s work, but it’s the most recent.

Friedman and her husband William rival the Curies as the most impressive scientific couple in history. Their careers would be impressive on their own, but it is the combination that makes them incredible. Starting out on a rich man’s compound trying to provide that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays, they went on to essentially invent the field of cryptanalysis.

Fagone’s book is a biography, but with a narrow view. He spends little time on Elizebeth’s life prior to joining George Fabyan’s Riverbank Laboratories. Life after World War II is similarly viewed on fast forward. But the three decades in between are covered in depth.

The outbreak of World War I saved the Friedmans from work they were rapidly coming to doubt. Their work decoding enemy messages – and inventing the processes for doing so – changed their personal and professional trajectories and brought them into prominence. Between wars, Elizebeth cracked the messages of Prohibition runners. When war came again, the Coast Guard cryptanalysis unit she created worked to crack three variations of the Enigma machine and was responsible for tracking the extensive Nazi spy ring in Argentina.

Despite her incredible work, Elizebeth often took a backseat to William. She seemed to prefer it that way. The Friedmans each felt the other was the smarter and more talented of the pair. Fagone devotes little of the book to Elizebeth’s personal life, except for her relationship to William. Their mutual devotion and admiration are as inspiring as their work.

This is a thick book, but it reads much faster than you’d expect. I enjoyed reading it and came away with a deep admiration of Elizebeth Smith Friedman, a person I hadn’t heard of just a few days ago.

Book review: Forge Your Future with Open Source

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If you are looking for a book on open source software, you have roughly a zillion options. Operating systems, languages, frameworks, desktop applications, whatever. Publishers have cranked out books left and right to teach you all about open source. Except for one small detail: how do you get started? Yesterday, The Pragmatic Bookshelf fixed that glitch. They announced the beta release of Forge Your Future with Open Source: Build Your Skills. Build Your Network. Build the Future of Technology by VM Brasseur.

I should disclose two things at this point: 1. VM is a friend and 2. I will receive a complimentary copy of the book in exchange for a technical review I performed. Now that I have fulfilled my ethical obligations, let’s talk about this book.

This is a very good book. It’s a book I wish I had years ago when I was first starting in open source. Brasseur covers understanding your motivations for contributing, determining requirements for a project you’ll contribute to, finding a project that matches those requirements, and getting started with your first contribution.

She assumes very little knowledge on the reader’s part, which is welcome. Don’t know the difference between copyleft and permissive licenses? That’s okay! She explains them both, including the legal and cultural aspects, without nudging the reader toward her preferred paradigm. Indeed, you’ll find no judgement of license, language, tool, or operating system choices. VM has no time for that in real life, so you won’t find it in her book either.

One of the better things about this book is that it is not really a technical book. Yes, it discusses some technical concepts with regards to code repositories and the like, but it puts great emphasis on the non-technical parts of contributing. Brasseur covers communication, community structure, and collaboration.

Forge Your Future with Open Source was not quite complete when I performed my technical review, but it was complete enough to know that this is an excellent book. Newcomers to open source will benefit from reading it, as will old hands such as myself. The final version will be published in June, but you can order a beta copy now through The Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Book review: Inside the Tornado

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Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm is perhaps the single most influential technology marketing book. When I first read it a few years ago, everything in it made sense and it gave me a better feel for where my company was (spoiler alert: it’s not necessarily where we thought we were). So when several people recommended Inside the Tornado – a sequel of sorts – I was ready to dig in and love it.

But I didn’t love it. It’s not because Moore is wrong. I don’t claim to know enough to assert that, and in fact I think he’s probably right on the whole. My dislike for the book instead is a matter of literary and ethical concerns.

The literary concern is what struck me first, so I’ll start there. Whereas the metaphor in Chasm is very straightforward, Tornado is a mess. You start in the bowling alley and then a tornado develops and eventually you end up on Main Street. Also, you want to be a gorilla or maybe a chimpanzee, but probably not a monkey. In fairness to Mr. Moore, some of this is because the concepts he tried to communicate became more complex in Tornado. Instead of the broad concepts of the Technology Adoption Life Cycle, he focuses on the more intricate motions that happen on a smaller scale. As a meteorologist, I can appreciate this. Nonetheless, the roughness of the metaphor distracted me from the message of the book.

I’m also not particularly keen on what Moore tells us we must do to achieve dominance in the market. “To hell with quality or what your customer wants” may be the best way to achieve the market position you want when conditions are favorable to you. That doesn’t mean it’s what I want to do. Reading this book made me think of Don McLean’s third-most popular song: “if winning is what matters I respect the ones who fail.”

I suppose it may be a disconnect between my goals and what Moore assumes my goals are. Although I am a very competitive person, I am not interested in winning for winning’s sake. I want to do work that makes the world better, and if we’re in second or third place, that just means that others are also making the world a better place. That doesn’t seem like losing to me.

Inside the Tornado is one of those books that every technology marketer should read. But that doesn’t mean I recommend it.

Book review: The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding

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As I move from tactical marketing work into more strategic work, my former CEO recommended several books. The first one I read is The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding by Al Ries and Laura Ries. This 2002 update of the original by Al Ries and Jack Trout includes The 11 Immutable Laws of Internet Branding.

I immediately liked the book for its easy readability and the fact that I agreed with what it said. But it’s a little bit dated. The world was different in 2002, particularly when it comes to the brands that dominate their fields. That doesn’t change the messages. After all, it’s the laws that are immutable, not the brand.

The passage of fifteen years is more evident and meaningful in the Internet section. The authors spend most of a chapter decrying the “vanity” of Jeff Bezos. Amazon, they say, should stick to books. Branching out into other markets will damage the brand in the long term. Yeah, about that…

Now the rule may be generally correct and Amazon is just a lucky exception. Certainly many other brands have outreached their grasps. But in a later chapter, they rail against the notion of convergence. Nobody would want a combination of a phone, camera, and music player. Strike two.

The future is hard to predict, so I don’t hold it against them for missing the mark. But if you repeatedly insist with great authority, you need to be proven right. The authors failed pretty miserably in that regard. This forces the skeptical reader to wonder if the rest of the authoritative statements are similarly wrong.

I’m inclined to think that the bulk of the advice is correct, but I would certainly caution the reader to not accept everything blindly.

This book is definitely focused on building a brand, not maintaining one. But if that’s what you’re after, I’d give The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding a read.

Book review: Startup

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The best books are the ones that leave you mad that they’re over too soon. Doree Shafrir’s Startup did just that. Startup focuses on the rise and potential fall of a fake-but-plausible New York City tech startup, and the people involved. Were it not for the unresolved ending, this could easily be seen as a documentary work.

The journalistic feel makes sense, since Shafrir’s day job is as a technology journalist. But instead of giving the book a sense of dryness, it has the feel of a well-crafted story. The characters are fully-developed human beings, but there are no extraneous details.

The plot isn’t immediately evident. I was probably about halfway through before I was convinced that I knew the general direction it was taking. But it didn’t matter because I had long ago committed to following the story wherever Shafrir decided to lead me.

Some will undoubtedly criticize the book for its “social justice warrior” undertones (or overtones in a few places). They’re certainly right that it has those, but that’s only because the industry has so many injustices. None of the characters exist to advance an agenda. Some of the are certainly more likeable than others, but they’re all real people with real complexities.

I would love to see a sequel that follows the story through to “completion”, but I suspect it remains better left unresolved. At any rate, I hope Doree Shafrir continues to write fiction.

My friend Emily Chapman recommended this book in her “Shit from the Internet” newsletter. I’m glad she did, and encourage you to subscribe.

Book review: The Dance of the Possible

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Few categories of book have the potential to be as obnoxious as the “how to be creative” genre. Scott Berkun’s The Dance of the Possible fails to live up to its potential in that regard. In fact, it’s not really obnoxious at all. Instead it’s filled with a humorous approach to treating creativity as a skill to be honed instead of a magical epiphany bestowed from some mysterious muse.

Berkun goes out of his way to avoid giving an easy solution to being creative, and he’s very dismissive of creativity as an end goal. The point of being creative is to create something, and creativity as a virtue is a relatively recent development. Explore the possibilities of choices in mundane situations, he suggests. Somehow, this ended up with me writing on my sock with a permanent marker at 12:30 AM.

sock

My oppressive pseudo-creative project. It will make sense if you read the book, I promise.

Any sort of creative work, even this very book review, is a delicate dance between two opposing forces: expanding what is possible for the project and contracting the scope so that it actually gets done. I can deconstruct the message of the chapters and reassemble them in any way I want, mixing them into something new. And I can shuffle these ideas around forever, but at some point the review must be published, or else what good has it done you?

One aspect of the book that I particularly liked was Berkun’s focus on some of the mental issues involved in trying to develop a creative work. In chapter 12, he talks about “the tightrope of creative confidence”: being confident enough to act, but not too confident. I prefer to think of it as “the eternal struggle between the Dunning-Krueger Effect and Impostor Syndrome”, but regardless of the name it’s a balancing act I know well.

All-in-all, The Dance of the Possible was a quick read. Indeed, the very first note I wrote down was “he seems to insist we not read the book.” This is not a book designed for Scott Berkun to wax poetic for chapters on end. Instead it shares real, actionable advice for exercising the thinking muscle. I enjoyed this book and found the framing of the problem and solution to be very helpful in understanding my own thought process. I can’t say that I came away with any sudden, brilliant insight, but maybe that’s the point.

 

The Dance of the Possible is published by Berkun Media. It goes on sale March 15, 2017. The author provided a review copy for this post.

Book review: The Only Rule is it Has to Work

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The instinct and tradition that go into making baseball decisions has given up some ground to statistics over the years. A sport that has long been obsessed with the most miniscule stat (if I heard “he has the best batting average after falling behind 0-2 in the first at bat of the second game of a double-header played on Thursday since Someguy Wholastplayedseventyyearsago” on a broadcast, I wouldn’t blink) is letting those stats drive some decisions. Billy Beane’s Oakland Athletics are the most well-known example, thanks to Moneyball, but it happens everywhere. Even in a small independent league in California.

The Only Rule is it Has to Work is the story of Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller: two statheads who got to use a baseball team as a laboratory for testing their hypotheses about what makes a baseball team successful. While everything went right for the Sonoma Stompers at first, the season didn’t have the satisfying payoff that a fictional account would. But even in a four-team league, only one team gets to claim the championship.

In a sense, the ending helps make the book a truer representation of baseball. While every team (and every fan) wants that trophy at the end of the season, the road is not easy and more likely ends in frustration than the sweet joy of victory. But baseball can be a wonderful sport without that joy: just ask generations of Cubs fans who have lived and died without their team winning the World Series.

I had my first exposure to unaffiliated ball this summer when the Lafayette Aviators had their inaugural season a five minute bike ride from my house. I instant fell in love with “my” team: a group of guys trying to get just a little bit better while they’re in college, in the hopes that they’ll get drafted. Playing for almost no money, in front of crowds measured in the hundreds, these guys live a life so different than the big leaguers. Reading this book gave me a greater appreciation of what the players, managers, and owners go through.

Despite the frustrating way the season ended, Lindbergh and Miller must have liked what they had a chance to be a part of: they’re still listed on the Stompers’ website as Special Assistants to the General Manager. And I think that’s what this book is really about. The stats are nice, but like the players, Lindbergh and Miller just want to be a part of baseball.

Those of us who love the game can use this book to live vicariously. The authors aren’t superstar players, and they’re not even working in the big leagues. They’re just two passionate guys working with a team just above rec leagues. It’s not so hard to imagine yourself in their shoes, and for a moment you’re a part of baseball again.

Book review: The Effortless Experience

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Anyone who has ever had to call a customer service center has at least one story of an unpleasant experience. While some companies have poor customer service because they won’t invest in it, no company sets out to intentionally provide terrible customer service. Companies that try to provide good service and fail do so because they focus on the wrong things.

That’s the basic premise of The Effortless Experience, a 2013 book by Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick Delisi. Based on extensive research from both customer and service organization perspective, The Effortless Experience challenges common assumptions about what the customer wants and how to provide it.

Companies like Amazon and Zappos (which is owned by Amazon) have made a name for themselves by providing excellent customer service. Other companies have had high profile stories of above-and-beyond customer service. Companies in competitive areas try to distinguish themselves by providing service that delights the customer. Research shows this is of little benefit.

Increasing customer loyalty doesn’t do much to keep them around. Decreasing customer disloyalty should be the ultimate goal. Disloyalty is decreased by reducing the customer’s effort. This isn’t necessarily their exertion, which is how much work they actually have to do, but the perception of that work.

The ultimate goal of any customer service interaction is to get something done as quickly and painlessly as possible. This could be changing a cell phone plan, configuring email, or ordering a part. In The Effortless Experience, the authors describe how to move toward that goal. They include the results of surveys and actual implementations from organizations that have shifted to a focus on effort.

Dixon and his coauthors give usable guidance for assessing your organization’s performance and moving to a culture that focuses on effort. This includes advice for non-call-center interactions. It’s a quick read with a lot of great content. Like many books of this type, The Effortless Experience describes what should be common knowledge. I strongly recommend it for anyone who provides service to customers.