Category Archives: Books

Books, Hiking, Travel

The Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen

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Mourning the loss of his wife to cancer, Peter Matthiesen joins George Schaller on a trek to Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and in hopes of glimpsing the rare Snow Leopard. His trek will take him from the slums of Varanasi to the roof of the world, both literally and figuratively, in Nepal.

Part contemplative travelogue, part Buddhist primer, The Snow Leopard reminds me often of [Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance], with the constant switching between observant travel writing and the pursuit of deep ideas. But it has a lot more zen than Pirsig’s book. He has a way of writing about Zen that encompasses both the deep philosophy of Zen and the esoterica that surrounds it, but also captures Zen in the daily moment:

My foot slips on a narrow ledge: in that split second, as needles of fear pierce heart and temples, eternity intersects with present time. Thought and action are not different, and stone, ice, sun, fear, and self are one. What is exhilarating is to extend this acute awareness into ordinary moments…for this present – even while I think of it – is gone.

The Snow Leopard is a deep book, by turns joyous, philosophical and melancholy. Matthiesen’s preoccupation with death runs through the book, starting on page 2 as he crosses paths with a dying old man in Varanasi.

The old man has been ravened from within. That blind and greedy stare of his, that caved-in look, and the mouth working, reveal who now inhabits him, who now stares out.

I nod to Death in passing, aware of the sound of my own feet upon my path. The ancient is lost in a shadow world, and gives no sign.

Matthiesen’s writing is evocative throughout. “There are no roads west of Pokhara, which is the last outpost of the modern world; in one day’s walk, we are a century away“. If I measure my interest in a book by dog-eared pages, my copy of the Snow Leopard might be one of my winners. Every 10 pages there’s something I marked when I read it. The book is all omens, dreams, portents, and deep thoughts, interspersed with the day to day minutiae of hiking, wet boots, blisters and snow blindness, together with encyclopedic descriptions of flora and fauna of his trip. He captures the dynamic of being on the trail with someone for an extended duration perfectly. After a particularly exhausting climb one day on a cliff, Schaller says something only mildly annoying, and Matthiesen remarks, not entirely joking one suspects, “How easy it would be to push him over“.

While The Snow Leopard is a book about a journey with an objective (seeing the Snow Leopard), as is usually the case, the journey IS the objective. It is a gorgeous book. If you have any interest in zen, hiking or travel, read it.

Books

The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell

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The Bone Clocks revolves around the struggle between two groups of competing immortals, the Horologists and the Anchorites, each with their own magical powers. Yet most of the book revolves around live and loves of a series of “normal” people. The Bone Clocks iterates through a series of episodes widely separated by time and place.

As the book opens, teenage Holly Sykes is experiencing a typical teenage angst caused by her mother’s disapproval of her twenty-something older boyfriend. She runs away from home to be with him. When the not-unexpected occurs, she’s set adrift, running away to a farm on the Isle of Sheppey north of London. Adventures, magical and otherwise, follow.

Hugo Lamb is a magnetic and attractive college student in Cambridge, engaged in riotous living and a few quasi-ethical shenanigans. The pretentiousness (and fun!) of college is well captured by Mitchell. Witness the synopsis of Hugo’s friend Richard’s book:

My hero is a Cambridge student called Richard Cheeseman, working on a novel about a Cambridge student called Richard Cheeseman, working on a novel about a Cambridge student called Richard Cheeseman. No one’s ever tried anything like it.

Mitchell’s descriptive prose talent is considerable. Here’s the background chatter at the Buried Bishop bar where Hugo and his pals are drinking:

The Buried Bishop’s a gridlocked scrum, an all-you-can-eat of youth: “Stephen Hawking and the Dalai Lama, right; they posit a unified truth”; short denim skirts, Gap and Next shirts, Kurt Cobain cardigans, black Levi’s; “Did you see that oversexed pig by the loo, undressing me with his eyes?”; that song by the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl booms in my diaphragm and knees; “Like, my only charity shop bargains were headlice, scabies, and fleas”; a fug of hairspray, sweat and Lynx, Chanel No. 5, and smoke; well-tended teeth with zero fillings, revealed by the so-so joke – “Have you heard the news about Schrodinger’s Cat? It died today; wait—it didn’t, did, didn’t, did …”; high-volume discourse on who’s the best Bond; on Gilmour and Waters and Syd; on hyperreality; dollar-pound parity; Sartre, Bart Simpson, Barthes’s myths; “Make mine a double”; George Michael’s stubble; ………..

Or, describing a battle between the Horologists and Anchorites:

Think of those tennis-ball firing machines, but loaded with hand grenades,” offers Oshima, “trapped in a shipping container, on a ship caught in a force-ten gale.

Eventually, Holly will run into Hugo in Switzerland, and the sparks fly….as they become closer and closer, Hugo is recruited into a mysterious enterprise by beautiful woman. It becomes increasingly clear Hugo is utterly amoral….but I don’t want to spoil anything…

When the dust settles, we encounter Crispin Hersey, a semi-washed up celebrity writer. Crispin will become a lifelong friend to Holly, and Mitchell’s skewering of the pretentious literary scene as they get to know each other is hilarious. Mitchell renders Crispin (and Holly and Hugo and the other characters) extraordinarily well – they’re all real, flawed, admirable, 3d characters.

Music is a running thread throughout The Bone Clocks, from Britten to club music to Shostakovich. (For fun, I made a Spotify playlist of the music mentioned, here). One song mentioned twice, I could not find anything out about. If you know anything about Exocets for Breakfast by Damon MacNish, let me know – I expect it’s made up.

The skirmishes between the immortals culminate in a final apocalyptic battle….when the dust clears we are into the last segment. It’s not a spoiler to say that Holly Sykes is old and still alive and living in ??? Ireland…???

This is where I found the book really went off the rails for me. After the last battle, the book felt nearly done. But then, the last chapter is 80 pages of non-sequitur. Holly is old and taking care of some young children, whom I’ll not identify for spoiler reasons. But if Flashback by Dan Simmons is a fever-dream of a potential bad future created by Obama, as imagined by the current right wing in the US, the last chapter of The Bone Clocks is a cornucopia of conventional modern liberalism’s bogeymen. There’s little power, little internet, nuclear accidents, religious narrow-mindedness, ice caps melting, and more:

It’s grief for ….the ice caps we melted, the coasts we flooded, the lakes we choked,..the seas we killed, the species we drove to extinction, …the oil we squandered….all so we didn’t have to change our cozy lifestyles..

or this, from Holly and Mo’s encounter with a looter thug:

“So you’re bringing back the law of the jungle?”, asks Mo.
“You were bringing it back, every time you filled your tank”.

On and on for 80 pages – I felt like I was being hectored by The Huffington Post and MSNBC…kinda tiresome, and really not much connected to anything else in the book, more of a closing homily.

I really enjoyed The Bone Clocks. The characters were great fun and I cared about them, and they went so many interesting places. The book could have been 2/3 the length, and lost the last episode, and I would have been much the happier for it. But still, a great read.

(I received a copy of The Bone Clocks through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program)

Books

The Conquest of Gaul, by Julius Caesar

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The Conquest of Gaul (Library of Essential Reading)The Conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I can’t read this without hearing the voice of Ciaran Hinds (who played Caesar on the tv series Rome) narrating this…..(oh and for you Rome fans, I ran across this line in the book: “Among the non-commissioned officers of this legion were two men named T. Pullo and L. Vorenus..”)

Although undoubtedly Caesar was writing for both then-current political consumption as well as perhaps for posterity, this is a surprisingly frank and detailed account of the 10 years it took Caesar to conquer Gaul (France, Belgium and parts of Germany, Switzerland and Italy). He details both the valor of the Gauls (his enemy) and well as periodic stupidity or cowardice of certain Romans, as well as the to-be-expected accounts of heroism on the part of Romans. His language is strikingly modest and he is constantly naming soldiers of the line and giving credit to others. While again this is partly undoubtedly to encourage political support and loyalty, one can’t but believe that Caesar had internalized a leadership style that gave credit to others (whilst undoubtedly seeing the benefit to himself thereby). His account of the cultural practices of the Druids is quite interesting and it’s clear that Caesar was a student of the people he hoped to conquer. It’s interesting to read quotes such as this – “Next to him (Mars the god) come Apollo, Jupiter, and Minerva, and about them their ideas correspond fairly closely with those current among the rest of mankind, viz. that Apollo expels diseases, that Minerva teaches ….” and speculate on Caesar’s own perspective on the gods their potential uses for political purposes.

A common practice of the time to encourage compliance after a victory was the taking of hostages. One can’t go more than a few pages without more hostages being taken, often in the hundreds. Indeed later in the book we find that there is almost an entire city dedicating to housing the hostages taken in the war.

We see in the text that Caesar was always mindful of appearance and ceremony. For example, “Caesar was nevertheless strongly of the opinion that to do so by means of boats would neither be unattended by risk, nor worth of his own or his country’s dignity.” And surprisingly matter-of-fact about the business of war: “It remained, therefore, only to do the work of devastation, and for this a few days were spent in burning the farms and villages and in rooting up the crops”. (It is striking how much of the conquest is dictated by weather and seasons – Caesar often retires to Rome for the winter, for example). There is surprising amount of engineering in warfare here – there are many accounts of interesting bridge-building techniques and challenges.

The Conquest of Gaul culminates in the battle of Alesia where the Gaul King Vercingetorix surrenders to Caesar after a prolonged siege and battle. (The description of the innovations Caesar and his army made in fortifications are quite interesting.). Interestingly enough there is little description of Vercingetorix’s fate in the book (nor much celebration of what would prove the final victory for Caesar), but he would be sent to Rome, kept a prisoner for 5 years, and executed during Caesar’s triumph, but that time period is not covered by the book.

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Books, Startups

Do more than is required of you

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Last and final excerpt from an old leather-bound book from 1926 called “As A Man Doeth”, that belonged to my grandfather. It’s the collected Monday morning motivational writings of William Danforth, the founder and president of Ralston Purina, of animal feed fame, I found it digging through some stacks.

Do More than Is Required of You; Do Twice as Much

Here’s another Bruce Barton story. He is a perfectly fascinating fellow, and it pays to listen to him.

“I was traveling from Chicago to New York on the Twentieth Century Limited. We were due in the Grand Central Station at nine-forty, a nice leisurely hour, and three of us who were traveling together decided to make a comfortable morning of it. We got out of our berths at a quarter after eight, shaved and dressed, and half an hour later were making our way back to the dining car.

A door to one of the drawing rooms was open, and as we walked by we could hardly keep from looking in. The bed in the room had been made up long since; a table stood between the windows, and at the table, buried in work, was a man whose face the newspapers have made familiar to everyone. He had been Governor of New York, a justice of the Supreme Court, a candidate for the Presidency of the United States, and was at the time, practicing law and reputed to be earning more than a hundred thousand dollars a year.

My companions and I were young men; he was well along in middle life. We were poor and unknown; he was rich and famous. We were doing all that was required of us. We were up and dressed, and would be ready for business when the train pulled in at a little before ten. But this man, of whom nothing was actually required, was doing far more. I thought to myself as we passed on to our leisurely breakfast, ‘That explains him; now I understand Hughes’.”

This is a Monday morning thought which ought to carry through the whole week.

This is great advice for someone, especially early in their career. Develop a reputation for going above and beyond and you will be on everyone’s list to recruit or promote.

This is also one of my favorite interview questions. I am a big fan of “Behavioral Interviewing” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_interview#Behavioral_questions) – if it’s not in your arsenal already as an interviewer, it should be. Rather than ask people to theorize about how they’d respond to a hypothetical circumstance in the future, you ask them to relate how they tackled things in the past. It is amazing what kinds of information you get when you insist on a specific answer with real past behaviors (both fantastic answers that sell you on a candidate and awful answers that effectively end the interview).

“Tell me about the last time you went above and beyond what was required. Why motivated you to to do it? What did you learn?”

Books, Startups

Get The Thirst for Digging (more lessons from a long-lost book)

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So, I’m down visiting my parents and helping out by doing a bunch of house cleaning, including rummaging through some old books (my favorite kind of cleaning). As I mentioned yesterday, digging through the piles I found an old leather-bound book from 1926 called “As A Man Doeth”, that belonged to my grandfather. It’s the collected Monday morning motivational writings of William Danforth, the founder and president of Ralston Purina, of animal feed fame. Here’s another fun note he wrote.

Along the magnificent semi-circular harbor of the Mediterranean Sea on the coast of Northern Algeria lies the picturesque little town of Bone. Nearby are some ruins of the ancient city of Hippone, where around 400 A. D. Saint Augustine lived and wrote his “Confessions” and his “City of God.” Some thirty years ago, a farmer was ploughing in the fields close by and his plow kept striking a stone. He decided to remove the stone and started to dig it out. But instead of a stone he found a marble column that dated back 1500 years and was part of an ancient Roman palace. Digging down still farther he discovered priceless mosaic floors of the Fourth Century. Then, his appetite whetted, he dug still deeper and found more mosaic floors of the first century. Still not content, he kept digging and unfolded huge stone piers that had once been a Phoenician embankment built about 800 B. C.

Here’s a discovery we all can make:

That stone or obstacle in our lives may have been put there by Providence to make us dig. Unheeded and unconquered it will worry us all the days of our lives. But if we go after it in a determined way, and dig it out, we will discover hidden wealth underneath.

So dig, Brother Purina Men, dig deep!

I just find it wonderful that a man making “Purina Horse Chow” tells stories about St Augustine and the Roman empire to inspire his workforce.

Curiosity is a powerful force. It’s one of the key traits I interview for when I’m recruiting. Curious people figure things out; incurious people don’t. More generally, I think it is far more important to interview for intrinsic personality traits than skills. Skills can be taught or self-taught. It’s very hard to teach curiosity or passion or work ethic or creativity.