BOOKCASE : What The Dog Saw
(March 2010) • Malcolm Gladwell • Allen Lane TPB • RRP $37.00
“Good writing,” says author and New Yorker magazine columnist Malcolm Gladwell in this, his latest book, “does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. Not the kind you’ll find in this book anyway. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think.” And that, I’m afraid, is what wins me over with this guy each time I read him.
BOOKCASE : What’s Keeping You Awake at Night?
(March 2010) • David Bogan • Harper Collins • RRP $29.00
As one who frequently quits my bed for a book and the couch to counter the hours wasted awake and worrying about nothing of real consequence, I opened this book expecting to be disappointed. I wasn’t, well not entirely. Time, I suppose, will prove its real value to me personally, but it was accessible, sensible and personally revealing.
BOOKCASE : Your Brain at Work
(February 2010) David Rock • Harper Business • $49.99
Our brain reacts positively to storytelling – I’m sure of that. David Rock, business consultant, leadership coach and author of Your Brain at Work, is obviously convinced of it. He’s adopted the technique to get cut through in an intensely competitive and increasingly populated segment of the book-publishing market.
A book to start the year with. If you have taken a break and thought about how to take your organisation into the future, particularly a small business enterprise, kick out by reading Changing Gears.
• Steven D Levitt & Stephen J Dubner • Allen Lane TPB • RRP $38.00
We took economists increasingly seriously over the past 10 years and where did that get us? In schtuk. Well, perhaps that is something of an exaggeration, but that’s what makes things interesting. So, here again are storytellers, one an economist, the other a journalist, with the follow-up to their enormously successful first book Freakonomics, published back in 2005. And what now do they have to say, these messrs Levitt & Dubner? In many respects, just more of what they said before.
BOOKCASE: The New Economics: A Bigger Picture
(December 2009)
• David Boyle and Andrew Simms • Earthscan • RRP $50
The sheer diversity and seriousness of the current global crises that face us – in credit, climate and energy – compel a response that is both more effective and imaginative than propping up the miscreants and carrying on with business as usual. The New Economics provides both an excellent critique of what’s gone wrong and a useful blueprint for how to formulate an economic system that values real rather than illusory wealth and puts people and planet first.
BOOKCASE: Madoff: The Man Who Stole $65 billion
(December 2009)
• Erin Arvedlund • Penguin • RRP $30.00
When you think about the crooks you know, if indeed you know any at all, it is surprising what a high percentage of them look the part. By that, I mean, they don’t look like crooks at all. For an outstanding and real-life example of what I mean, consider Bernie Madoff, the 71-year-old fraudster who pillaged billions, 65 in fact, from his closest friends and others of his extensive Jewish congregation. Bernie, with his authoritative bearing and soft, silver locks, was every inch the respectable Wall Street banker he was supposed to be.
Getting mugged on your Brooklyn back doorstep on Christmas Eve could provoke a bunch of reactions – for Douglas Rushkoff it became the impetus for writing a book that explores how human values and local community interest somehow got subsumed by financial values and corporate self-interest. Why? Because when he posted his mugging experience on a local website, the first responses were from neighbours angry that highlighting it would have a negative impact on local property values.
• Malcolm Gladwell 
• David Bogan 
David Rock • Harper Business • $49.99
David Irving, Darl Kolb, Deborah Shepherd & Christine Woods • Auckland University Press • RRP $29.99 
