Bookish

March 31, 2011

Extreme Makeover homeowners: Meet Eric and Elaine Johnson on Saturday at Blue Willow Bookshop

Michael Paulsen The Johnson family outside their former south Houston home in July 2010.

Eric and Elaine Johnson, along with their five daughters, were the recipients of a new house as part of ABC's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition in 2010.

Now the Johnsons, both faith-based counselors, have written a book about the challenges couples often face, including finances, children and intimacy. The new book provides practical principles on how to maintain a consistent level of success in life.

The couple will sign copies of Manage Your Marriage, Master the Workplace, 1 p.m. Saturday at Blue Willow Bookshop, 14532 Memorial. The new book is also for sale on their website: http://ericandelaineonlife.com.

Posted by Maggie Galehouse at 12:00 AM in Book news | Comments (1)
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March 28, 2011

Genghis Khan... and dentistry

Genghis Khan, 12th century Mongol warrior.

Every year, Bookseller magazine, a British website that offers news and commentary about the book business, gives an award to the Oddest Book Title.

(The Brits are big on oddball contests, hence the "Oddball British Contests" category in this blog.)

This year's big winner, which combines Mongolian nomads and dentistry, is Managing a Dental Practice: The Genghis Khan Way.

Bookseller calls it a go-to guide for building a dental empire.

Rather than view Khan in negative terms -- the warrior has gotten some bad press over the past 800 years -- author Michael R. Young chose to highlight Khan's warmongering tenacity and apply it to successful business building. The book covers many different subject areas, including "Managing conflict situations" and "Planning for disaster."

(Suddenly, I can't get the movie Marathon Man out of my head....Nazi dentists are truly horrifying.)

Young's book got 58 percent of the votes in Bookseller's contest. Here are the runners-up:

Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman in a scene from Marathon Man.

8th International Friction Stir Welding Symposium Proceedings, (24%)

What Color is Your Dog? by Joel Silverman (8%)

The Italian's One-night Love-child, by Cathy Williams (4%)

Myth of the Social Volcano, by Martyn White (3%)

The Generosity of the Dead, by Graciela Nowenstein (3%)

Last year's winner was Crocheting Adventures With Hyperbolic Planes. See last year's blog post on that here.

Other past winners include Living With Crazy Buttocks, High Performance Stiffened Structures (an engineering book), and If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs.

Posted by Maggie Galehouse at 05:29 PM in Oddball British Contests | Comments (1)
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Top 10 dream colleges

You gotta dream. And when high school students dream about college, California is the place they want to be.

The Princeton Review's annual "College Hopes & Worries Survey" found that four of the top 10 schools students deemed "dream colleges" are located in California. Bear in mind, this is a fantasy list -- of schools that students would choose if acceptance and cost weren't an issue:

1. Stanford

2. Harvard

3. New York University

4. Princeton

5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

6. Yale

7. University of California - Los Angeles

8. University of Pennsylvania

9. University of Southern California

10. University of California-Berkeley

Perhaps not surprisingly, parents have a different top 10 list. Their list tends toward cooler climates, the better for children to stay inside and study. Still, the lists share six schools. Here are the parents' picks:

1. Harvard

2. Stanford

3. Princeton

4. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

5. Yale

6. Duke

7. Brown

8. New York University

9. University of Notre Dame

10. Northwestern

The Review surveyed 8,219 college applicants and 3,966 parents of applicants. Since cost is an issue when it comes to college, the Review asked about that, too; 86 percent of those surveyed said financial aid was "very necessary."

And then there's the matter of getting accepted.

Last March, The Stanford Daily reported that Stanford accepted just 7.2 percent of its applicant pool of more than 32,000 students. Undergraduate tuition for the 2010-11 academic year was $38,700.

In January, The Harvard Crimson predicted that the admissions rate would decrease to around 6 percent for the class of 2015. The cost to attend Harvard this year, without any sort of financial help, was more than $50,000.

Posted by Maggie Galehouse at 12:00 AM in Tangents | Comments (32)
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March 27, 2011

Suits recounts long hours on Wall Street and going home alone

SUITS: A WOMAN ON WALL STREET
By Nina Godiwalla.
Atlas & Co., 300 pp., $24.

Reviewed by Joanna Ossinger

The life of a new Wall Street analyst is one of extremes: You're either working long hours as a slave to your tyrannical bosses or mingling with the elite of New York society at expensive restaurants and charity events.

Nina Godiwalla offers an inside look at the finance industry with an outsider's perspective in Suits: A Woman on Wall Street. Born in Texas to a Persian-Indian immigrant family, Godiwalla is well-positioned to see the humor and chaos of investment banking.

Her book tells two stories. There's the tale of her struggle to make it professionally, first as an intern at JPMorgan and then as an intern and analyst at Morgan Stanley. But it's also unexpectedly heavy on the battle to win acceptance from her father back in Houston, a strict and stubborn patriarch who always wanted sons but ended up with four daughters instead.

There are snippets of Godiwalla's life as an analyst, from dancing in the office at 2 a.m. with a club-hopping coworker to brushes with callous bosses.

"This was one of his greatest tricks, which seemed to work effectively when someone challenged him," she writes of one senior officer. "Make the other person feel stupid so he or she would give up and leave you alone. It seemed to work beautifully on this high-achieving crowd."

The job itself comes across as occasionally glamorous but mostly dreary.

"The night before I was here until four in the morning," one co-worker sobs in the middle of a breakdown. He'd been proofreading a 522-page document. "That is my challenge -- to find where EBITDA may be written EBIT or where a bar may be in the wrong column!"

The loneliness caused by long hours is a constant theme.

"Even when I met people I wanted to get to know better, like Priya, by the time I was free, she was already staffed on a new deal and was working most nights and weekends," Godiwalla writes. "'Friends' were people I spoke to about once a month."

She recalls a blind date when, desperate for intimacy, she awkwardly propositioned the guy for sex.

"I feel like I hardly know you," the poor man stammered before making a hasty retreat.

The book has a readable style, but it sometimes loses focus. The back-and-forth between New York and Houston can get confusing, and it sometimes feels as if the wrong things were included.

There's a sense that the real "woman on Wall Street" emerges from the girlish Godiwalla just as the book is ending; I'll bet the most interesting part of the story comes later.

Ultimately, as we see from her dust-jacket biography, Godiwalla left investment banking: She founded a company that teaches meditation and stress management to professionals, and lives in Austin. Though she has moved on from the financial industry, it would have been nice if she'd concentrated more on what the book's title promised -- the story of a woman on Wall Street -- and less on her journey to get there.

Joanna Ossinger wrote this review for Bloomberg News.

Posted by Maggie Galehouse at 10:15 AM in Book Reviews | Comments (0)
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C'mon, everyone's doing it. A review of Tina Rosenberg's new book.

Ken Ellis/Chronicle Illustration

JOIN THE CLUB: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World
By Tina Rosenberg.
W.W. Norton & Company, 402 pp., $25.95.

Reviewed by Steve Weinberg

Could a simple-sounding plan for reducing crime, terrorism and outright war really work?

Tina Rosenberg's nearly 400 pages of mind-bending case studies suggest that peer pressure appropriately marshaled has overthrown a repressive government, prompted minority students to excel in math classes, persuaded teenagers to demand safe sex, spurred a rebellion against cigarette manufacturers and allowed subjugated women in Indian villages to earn respect while helping their impoverished neighbors attain better health.

In short, the "social cure" of peer pressure is something special.

It has been 16 years since Rosenberg, a journalist, achieved fame with her book The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism. Because of it, she won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer and another that comes with oodles of cash, the MacArthur "genius" designation. Readers wondered what she would produce as an encore to The Haunted Land. Now they know.

OK, Rosenberg is an advocate for social change. But social change can occur in many, many ways. So why choose peer pressure?

Rosenberg's path to the social cure is instructive. In a general sense, she wanted to write more about solutions to the seemingly intractable problems she had been exposing for decades. This led her to examine the disintegrating Yugoslavia. She focused on Ivan Marovic, a student during the 1990s and into the current century, who helped form a group called Otpor, a word meaning "resistance" in Serbian. Rosenberg came to believe that Otpor ignited a movement responsible for the demise of dictator Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.

After that, Rosenberg learned, Marovic and other Otpor organizers traveled to other nations to share their methods for nonviolent change.

"What made Otpor different from every other democracy movement I had ever seen was that it focused on stripping away the fear, fatalism and passivity that keep a dictator's subjects under oppression," Rosenberg writes. "Otpor turned passivity into action by making it easy -- even cool -- to become a revolutionary. The movement branded itself with hip slogans and graphics and rock music. Instead of long speeches, Otpor relied on humor and street theater that mocked the regime."

Peer pressure of the positive kind allowed Otpor to grow. "People joined the movement for the same reason they go to the hot bar of the moment," Rosenberg writes.

She realized she had seen something similar in South Africa: an AIDS-prevention program called loveLife. It was "to the classic public-health approach what Otpor is to the typical political party," Rosenberg observes. Rather than relying on the unimaginative dissemination of depressing information, loveLife's leaders aimed to create an "aspirational life-style brand" using celebrity gossip, music, fashion, school sports and relationship advice, among other tools. In such a group, according to Rosenberg, "a girl can hear from another girl -- from a similarly bleak and dusty township -- why and how she rejected a boyfriend who demanded sex without a condom. And she will think about doing the same."

Looking beyond Yugoslavia and South Africa, Rosenberg noticed examples across the globe that seemed like a paradigm to her, despite the widely varying subject matters.

To Rosenberg, it began to seem obvious that peer pressure could achieve wonders. After all, peer pressure has always worked to achieve negative results --violent street gangs, suicide pacts, high-school dropouts, persecution of minorities.

Turning peer pressure on its head might equalize its negative power.

Throughout Join the Club, Rosenberg grapples with the shortcomings of this new peer pressure paradigm. She is wise to do so, because not every social problem can be solved by the social cure.

To play devil's advocate, I would suggest that the social cure is quite likely to be ineffective if used to increase the construction of new low-cost housing in a city; housing construction is a big-ticket spending item. The combination of private-sector drive for substantial profit and constricted government budgets would seem fatal.

Furthermore, some social problems such as combating global terrorism might prove susceptible to change theoretically, but the appropriate visionaries have not emerged to organize a movement -- and might never emerge. In her final chapter, Rosenberg posits how the social cure might alleviate global terrorism, and theoretically her thinking offers promise. But on a practical level, her reasoning feels like reaching.

Still, I choose to express optimism -- excitement, even -- about Rosenberg's prescriptive book.

Steve Weinberg is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

Posted by Maggie Galehouse at 12:00 AM in Chronicle Book Reviews | Comments (0)
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Local book events: March 27-April 2

• Rebecca Stead, 2010 Newbery Medal winner, will read from When You Reach Me, 3 p.m. today (March 27) at Pershing Middle School auditorium, 3838 Blue Bonnet, as part of Inprint Readings for Young People Reading Series; 713-521-2026 or go to inprinthouston.org. Book sales by Brazos Bookstore.

• Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts will discuss and sign Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America, 7 p.m. Monday (March 28) at Brazos Bookstore, 2421 Bissonnet; 713-523-0701.

• David Brooks will discuss and sign The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, 6 p.m. Tuesday (March 29) at Brazos Bookstore, 2421 Bissonnet; 713-523-0701.

• Larry D. Thompson will launch the release of The Trial, 6:30 p.m. Tuesday (March 29) at Murder By The Book, 2342 Bissonnet; 713-524-8597.

• Boo Weedley will discuss and sign True Boo: Gator Catchin', Orangutan Boxin', and My Wild Ride to the PGA Tour, 7 p.m. Tuesday (March 29), Barnes & Noble, 1201 Lake Woodlands, The Woodlands; 281-465-8744.

• Wayne Arthurson will discuss and sign his debut, Fall From Grace, 6:30 p.m. Wednesday (March 30) at Murder By The Book, 2342 Bissonnet; 713-524-8597.

• Jay Jennings, author of Carry the Rock: Race, Football, and the Soul of an American City, will speak 7 p.m. Wednesday in Fondren Library's Kyle Morrow Room, Rice University, 6100 Main; 713-528-2145. Book sales by Brazos Bookstore.

• Piper Kerman will discuss and sign Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison, 7 p.m. Wednesday (March 30) at Brazos Bookstore, 2421 Bissonnet; 713-523-0701.

• Mimi Vance will lead a special storytime featuring her series, Words by the Handful, 10 a.m. Thursday (March 31) at Blue Willow Bookshop, 14532 Memorial; 281-497-8675.

• Kate Atkinson will discuss and sign her new book, Started Early, Took My Dog, 6:30 p.m. Thursday (March 31) at Murder By The Book, 2342 Bissonnet; 713-524-8597.

• Former University of Houston men's basketball coach Tom Penders will discuss Dead Coach Walking: Tom Penders Surviving and Thriving in College Hoops, 7 p.m. Thursday (March 31) at Brazos Bookstore, 2421 Bissonnet; 713-523-0701.

• Author Jacky Davis and illustrator David Soman will discuss and sign their latest book in the Ladybug Girl series, Ladybug Girl and the Bug Squad, 4 p.m. Friday (April 1) at Blue Willow Bookshop, 14532 Memorial; 281-497-8675.

• Robin Davidson will read selections of poetry 8:30 p.m. Friday (April 1) at Inprint House, 1520 W. Main; hpfest@aol.com.

• Houston Indie Book Festival, hosted by NANO Fiction and Gulf Coast, runs 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday (April 2) at Menil Park, 1450 Branard; 713-523-0701.

• Eric and Elaine Johnson will share and sign their latest book, Manage Your Marriage, Master the Marketplace, 1 p.m. Saturday (April 2) at Blue Willow Bookshop, 14532 Memorial; 281-497-8675.

• Mayor Annise Parker kicks off a Poetry Reading Series with a poem of her choosing, plus poetry from Rich Levy, Martha Serpas, Eva Skrande and Deborah D.E.E.P. Wiggins, 2 p.m. Saturday (April 2) at the Houston Public Library, 500 McKinney; 832-393-1313.

Posted by Maggie Galehouse at 12:00 AM in Local Book Events | Comments (0)
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