Category: Books

Israelis Are Tenacious, Informal, Question Authority, and Tolerate Failure

(p. A15) Israel is a country of eight million people that at its narrowest point is 9 miles wide. It is surrounded on all sides by enemies who would like to see it wiped off the map: Hezbollah to the north, Hamas to the south, plus Bashar al-Assad’s regime, Islamic State and Iran to the east. It wouldn’t take a particularly pessimistic person to bet against this besieged slice of desert. Yet this tiny nation has also built an air force, anti-missile defense system and intelligence apparatus that is revered around the world–and relied on by the U.S. military, among many others. And it’s done it with a minuscule fraction of the budget available to larger nations.
How has Israel pulled it off? In “The Weapon Wizards” Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot tell the story of how the Jewish state’s military and defense sector became one of the most cutting-edge in the world. In chapters focused on particular technologies and weapons, such as drones, satellites and cyber warfare, the authors make the case that the same factors that have made Israel a tech giant have also allowed it to become a “high-tech military superpower.” The country’s military, its schools and its extracurricular institutions inculcate in its young people tenacity, insatiable questioning of authority, determined informality, cross-disciplinary creativity and tolerance of failure.
. . .
While “The Weapon Wizards” can be a bit technical for the lay reader, the authors have skillfully conveyed a key component of the dynamic innovation culture that has made the Jewish state one of the most important entrepreneurial and technology-driven economies in the world. Not bad for a country 9 miles wide.

For the full review, see:
DAN SENOR. “BOOKSHELF; Drafting Up Innovation.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., Feb. 2, 2017): A15.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Feb. 3 [sic], 2017.)

The book under review, is:
Katz, Yaakov, and Amir Bohbot. The Weapon Wizards: How Israel Became a High-Tech Military Superpower. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017.

Founder-Led Firms Do Better

(p. A19) A study out earlier this year from Bain & Company, where we work, shows that over the past 15 years founder-led companies delivered shareholder returns that are three times higher than those of other S&P 500 companies.
. . .
Great founders imbue their companies with three measurable traits that make up what we dubbed “the founder’s mentality.”
The first is insurgency: The founding team declares war on its industry on behalf of underserved customers.
. . .
The second trait is an obsession with how customers are treated–an attention to detail that borders on compulsive.
. . .
Third, these companies are steeped in an owner’s mind-set. Too often in business, the founder’s vision becomes distorted.
Bain’s research found that the best companies–the top 20% of performers, founder-led or not–exhibit the three traits we’ve described four or five times as often as the bottom performers. The bad news: Only about 7% of companies, founder-led or not, manage to maintain these traits as they grow to scale. Yet those that do create more than 50% of the net value in the stock market in any given year.

For the full commentary, see:
CHRIS ZOOK and JAMES ALLEN. The Company Founder’s Special Sauce; No one leads a firm as effectively as the person who started it.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Dec. 19, 2016): A19.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Dec. 18, 2016.)

The Bain research mentioned above, is:
Chris, Zook. “Founder-Led Companies Outperform the Rest — Here’s Why.” Harvard Business Review Digital Articles (March 24, 2016): 2-5.

The passages quoted above are related to the authors’ book:
Zook, Chris, and James Allen. The Founder’s Mentality: How to Overcome the Predictable Crises of Growth. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press Books, 2016.

Mokyr Credits the Great Enrichment to a Culture That Values Scientific Inquiry

(p. A13) Life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” Thomas Hobbes proclaimed in 1651, and it had been that way ever since humans had inhabited the Earth. At the time Hobbes wrote those words, life expectancy averaged about 30 years old in his native England and income per person typically was around $5 a day (in 2016 dollars). Thanks to the Industrial Revolution and the Great Enrichment that followed, the typical subject of Queen Elizabeth II lives to almost 80 and has an income of over $100 a day. Perhaps more impressively, most people in the world today face the prospect of living at least that well within a generation or two.

What brought about the Great Enrichment? And why did it all start in England? Joel Mokyr, in his fine book, attributes it to the unique and productive culture that evolved there. It was a culture that welcomed change and favored scientific inquiry that spurred radical technological improvements.

. . .

According to Mr. Mokyr, three factors led to the ultimate triumph of the new modern search for scientific truth over the largely inaccurate “science” of the ancients. First, Europe’s fractured political environment was a blessing: Scientists who were banned or ostracized in one political jurisdiction fled to other locales more tolerant of their views. The controversial Franciscan monk, Bernardino Ochino (1487-1564), for example, was often in trouble and moving to evade authorities, leading him to flee from Italy to Switzerland and later, England, Poland and Moravia. Second, the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press around 1440 enormously lowered the cost of widely disseminating knowledge over large areas. Third, an extraordinary intellectual community evolved–Voltaire and others called the Republic of Letters–that made the dissemination of new information (through letters to fellow scientists) obligatory for anyone who wanted to gain respect in the growing international community of scientists.

For the full review, see:

RICHARD VEDDER. “BOOKSHELF; The Genesis of Prosperity; What brought about the Great Enrichment? And why did it start in England? It had a culture that embraced change and scientific inquiry.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., Nov. 11, 2016): A13.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Nov. 10, 2016.)

The book under review, is:

Mokyr, Joel. A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, Graz Schumpeter Lectures. New Haven, CT: Princeton University Press, 2016.

Christian Praise for Ayn Rand Novels

(p. A13) Andy Puzder, the CEO of CKE restaurants and a practicing Roman Catholic, finds nothing worrisome in that fact: “I encouraged my six children to read both ‘Fountainhead’ and ‘Mere Christianity’ by C.S. Lewis,” he told me. Each child later read “Atlas Shrugged.” Mr. Puzder argued that “there’s no contradiction between raising my children in the church, and urging them to lead the kind of lives of achievement, integrity and independence that Ayn Rand celebrated in her novels.”
Randall Wallace, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of 1995’s “Braveheart,” and the director of 2014’s “Heaven Is for Real,” is such an admirer of Rand’s work that he wrote a screen adaptation of “Atlas Shrugged.” Mr. Wallace, a Southern Baptist, said, “My faith isn’t contradicted by her beliefs. We live in a world of labels, but God surely cares less about the labels we give ourselves than about how we live because of them.” Rand, Mr. Wallace feels, wrote fiercely and fearlessly about bold and brave characters. “I think it would contradictory to my own beliefs not to admire her.”

For the full commentary, see:
JENNIFER ANJU GROSSMAN. “Can You Love God and Ayn Rand?; A friend claims the atheist philosopher at one point saw the appeal of spirituality.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., Nov. 11, 2016): A13.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Nov. 10, 2016.)

The Ayn Rand novels praised above, are:
Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957.
Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1943.

“Fear Moved Aside to Make Room for Hope”

(p. B11) Joyce Appleby, a distinguished historian and author who argued that ideas about capitalism and liberty were fundamental in shaping the identity of early Americans, died on Dec. 23 [2016] at her home in Taos, N.M.
. . .
Dr. Appleby, a former journalist who began her Ph.D. training at 32 while caring for three children, rose to the top ranks of the discipline, serving as president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.
. . .
In books like “Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s” (1984) and “Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination” (1992). Dr. Appleby argued that the revolutionaries were more individualistic and optimistic than they had been given credit for.
John Locke and Adam Smith had as much influence on founders like Jefferson as the radical Whigs — if not more, she said. In her view, the revolutionaries believed that the public good would arise out of the harmonious pursuit of private interests in a market economy.
“For me, liberalism had entered American consciousness as a potent brew blended from 17th-century entrepreneurial attitudes and the Enlightenment’s endorsement of liberty and reason,” Dr. Appleby said in the 2012 lecture. “Because nature had endowed human beings with the capacity to think for themselves and act on their own behalf, representative government seemed the perfect fit for them.
“Rather than classical republicanism’s fixation on social traumas, liberalism was optimistic, moving forward with the rational, self-improving individual who was endowed with natural rights to be exercised in a widened ambit of freedom.”
Or, as she put it in a 2007 essay on the intellectual underpinnings of American democracy, “Fear moved aside to make room for hope.”

For the full obituary, see:
SEWELL CHAN. “Joyce Appleby, Scholar of Capitalism and American Identity.” The New York Times (Fri., January 6, 2017): B11.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date JAN. 2 [sic], 2017, and has the title “Joyce Appleby, Historian of Capitalism and American Identity, Is Dead at 87.”)

The Appleby books mentioned above, are:
Appleby, Joyce. Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s, Anson G. Phelps Lectureship on Early American History. New York: NYU Press, 1984.
Appleby, Joyce. Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

In 1596 Luis de Carvajal Was Burned at the Stake for “Observing Jewish Practices”

(p. C1) It is perhaps the most significant artifact documenting the arrival of Jews in the New World: a small, tattered 16th-century manuscript written in an almost microscopic hand by Luis de Carvajal the Younger, the man whose life and pain it chronicled.
Until 1932, the 180-page booklet by de Carvajal, a secret Jew who was burned at the stake by the Inquisition in Spain’s colony of Mexico, resided in that country’s National Archives.
. . .
(p. C6) De Carvajal was a Jew who posed as Catholic in New Spain, now Mexico, during a period when the Inquisition ruthlessly persecuted heretics and false converts with deportation, imprisonment, torture and grisly public executions.
. . .
In 1596, after having been found guilty again of observing Jewish practices, he was burned at the stake. He was 30.

For the full story, see:
JOSEPH BERGER. “A Jewish Treasure in Fine Print.” The New York Times (Weds., JAN. 4, 2017): C1 & C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JAN. 1, 2017, and has the title “A Secret Jew, the New World, a Lost Book: Mystery Solved.”)

Carvajal’s writings were translated into English and published in:
Carvajal, Luis de. The Enlightened; the Writings of Luis De Carvajal, El Mozo. Translated by Seymour B. Liebman. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1967.

Robert Conquest Documented the Millions Killed by Stalin

(p. A7) Mr. Conquest’s master work, “The Great Terror,” was the first detailed account of the Stalinist purges from 1937 to 1939. He estimated that under Stalin, 20 million people perished from famines, Soviet labor camps and executions–a toll that eclipsed that of the Holocaust. Writing at the height of the Cold War in 1968, when sources about the Soviet Union were scarce, Mr. Conquest was vilified by leftists who said he exaggerated the number of victims. When the Cold War ended and archives in Moscow were thrown open, his estimates proved high but more accurate than those of his critics.
. . .
Though Mr. Conquest’s body count was on the high end of estimates, he remained unwavering at the publication of “The Great Terror: A Reassessment,” a 1990 revision of his masterwork. When Mr. Conquest was asked for a new title for the updated book, his friend, the writer Kingsley Amis, proposed, “I Told You So, You F–ing Fools.”
. . .
He was also an enthusiastic crafter of limericks, a form in which his irreverence and flair for language flourished. One version of an often-quoted one reads:
There was a great Marxist named Lenin
Who did two or three million men in.
–That’s a lot to have done in,
But where he did one in
That grand Marxist Stalin did ten in.

For the full obituary, see:
BRENDA CRONIN and ALAN CULLISON. “Historian Exposed Stalin’s Reign of Terror.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., Aug. 5, 2015): A7.
(Note: ellipses added; italics in original.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Aug. 4, 2015, and has the title “Robert Conquest, Seminal Historian of Soviet Misrule, Dies at 98.”)

The revised edition of Conquest’s master work, is:
Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror: A Reassessment. 40th Anniversary ed. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 2007.

Automation Raises Productivity, Consumer Spending, and Creates New Jobs

(p. B1) Since the 1970s, when automated teller machines arrived, the number of bank tellers in America has more than doubled. James Bessen, an economist who teaches at Boston University School of Law, points to that seeming paradox amid new concerns that automation is “stealing” human jobs. To the contrary, he says, jobs and automation often grow hand in hand.
Sometimes, of course, machines really do replace humans, as in agriculture and manufacturing, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology labor economist David Autor in a succinct and illuminating TED talk, which could have served as the headline for this column. Across an entire economy, however, Dr. Autor says that’s never happened.
. . .
(p. B4) . . . a long trail of empirical evidence shows that the increased productivity brought about by automation and invention ultimately leads to more wealth, cheaper goods, increased consumer spending power and ultimately, more jobs.
In the case of bank tellers, the spread of ATMs meant bank branches could be smaller, and therefore, cheaper. Banks opened more branches, and in total employed more tellers, Mr. Bessen says.

For the full commentary, see:
CHRISTOPHER MIMS. “KEYWORDS; Automation Actually Can Lead to More Job Creation.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Dec. 12, 2016): B1 & B4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Dec. 11, 2016, and has the title “KEYWORDS; Automation Can Actually Create More Jobs.”)

Bessen more fully presents his ATM example in his book:
Bessen, James. Learning by Doing: The Real Connection between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015.

British Socialized Medicine Refused to Save Life of Critic Who Loved America

(p. A29) A. A. Gill, an essayist and cultural critic whose stylishly malicious restaurant reviews for The Sunday Times made him one of Britain’s most celebrated journalists, died on Saturday [December 7, 2016] in London. He was 62.
Martin Ivens, the editor of The Sunday Times, announced the death, calling Mr. Gill “the heart and soul of the paper.” The cause was lung cancer.
. . .
In a long article published Sunday [December 8, 2016], after his death, Mr. Gill wrote, without rancor, that Britain’s National Health Service had refused to pay for immunotherapy that he said might have extended his life.
. . .
As a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, he dismissed the pâté at the beloved Paris bistro L’Ami Louis as tasting like “pressed liposuction.” The shrimp and foie gras dumplings at Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Asian restaurant 66, in Manhattan, were “fishy liver-filled condoms,” he wrote, “with a savor that lingered like a lovelorn drunk and tasted as if your mouth had been used as the swab bin in an animal hospital.”
Vituperation was not his only mode. He could praise. He could turn an elegant phrase and toss off a pithy bon mot. “America’s genius has always been to take something old, familiar and wrinkled and repackage it as new, exciting and smooth,” he wrote in “The Golden Door: Letters to America” (2012), published in the United States in 2013 as “To America With Love.”
. . .
“When people fatuously ask me why I don’t write constructive criticism, I tell them there is no such thing,” he wrote in his memoir. “Critics do deconstructive criticism. If you want compliments, phone your mother.”

For the full obituary, see:
WILLIAM GRIMES. “A. A. Gill Dies at 62; Skewered Britain’s Restaurants.” The New York Times (Tues., DEC. 13, 2016): A29.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed dates, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date DEC. 12, 2016, and has the title “A. A. Gill, Who Gleefully Skewered Britain’s Restaurants, Dies at 62.”)

Gill’s book praising America, is:
Gill, A.A. To America with Love. Reprint ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013.

Hitler Could Not Face Reality (or His Conscience?) Without Opiates and Cocaine

(p. C1) Given the sheer tonnage of books already devoted to the Nazis and Hitler, you might assume that everything interesting, terrible and bizarre is already known about one of history’s most notorious regimes and its genocidal leader. Then along comes Norman Ohler, a soft-spoken 46-year-old novelist from Berlin, who rummages through military archives and emerges with this startling fact: The Third Reich was on drugs.
All sorts of drugs, actually, and in stupefying quantities, as Mr. Ohler documents in “Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany,” a best seller in Germany and Britain that will be published in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in April [2017]. He was in New York City last week and sat for an interview before giving a lecture to a salon in a loft in the East Village, near Cooper Union.
. . .
. . . the most vivid portrait of abuse and withdrawal in “Blitzed” is that of Hitler, who for years was regularly injected by his personal physician with powerful opiates, like Eukodal, a brand of oxycodone once praised by William S. Burroughs as “truly awful.” For a few undoubtedly euphoric months, Hitler was also getting swabs of high-grade cocaine, a sedation and stimulation combo that Mr. Ohler likens to a “classic speedball.”
. . .
(p. C4) “There are all these stories of party leaders coming to complain about their bombed-out cities,” Mr. Ohler said, “and Hitler just says: ‘We’re going to win. These losses make us stronger.’ And the leaders would say: ‘He knows something we don’t know. He probably has a miracle weapon.’ He didn’t have a miracle weapon. He had a miracle drug, to make everyone think he had a miracle weapon.”
Lanky and angular, Mr. Ohler quietly conveys the mordant humor that occasionally surfaces in his book, which has a chapter titled “High Hitler.”

For the full interview, see:
DAVID SEGAL. “How Hitler’s Henchmen Were Kept Hopped Up.” The New York Times (Fri., December 10, 2016): C1 & C4.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date Dec. 9, 2016, and has the title “High on Hitler and Meth: Book Says Nazis Were Fueled by Drugs.”)

The book mentioned in the interview, is:
Ohler, Norman. Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

Kahneman Was “Consumed with Despair” Over Writing “Thinking, Fast and Slow”

(p. C23) Mr. Lewis has always had a knack for identifying eccentrics and horde-defiers who somehow tell us a larger story, generally about an idea that violates our most basic intuition. In “Moneyball,” he gave us Billy Beane, who rejected the wisdom of traditional baseball scouts and rehabilitated the Oakland A’s through statistical reasoning. In “The Big Short,” he gave us an assortment of jittery misfits who bet against the housing market.
In “The Undoing Project,” Mr. Lewis has found the granddaddy of all stories about counterintuition, because Dr. Kahneman and Dr. Tversky did some of the most definitive research about just how majestically, fantastically unreliable our intuition can be. The biases they identified that distort our decision-making are now so well known — like our outsize aversion to loss, for instance — that we take them for granted. Together, you can safely say, these two men made possible the field of behavioral economics, which is predicated on the notion that humans do not always behave rationally.
. . .
In a remarkable note on his sources, Mr. Lewis reveals that for years he watched Dr. Kahneman agonize over his 2011 book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” which became both a critical and a fan favorite. “Every few months he’d be consumed with despair, and announce that he was giving up writing altogether — before he destroyed his own reputation,” Mr. Lewis writes. “To forestall his book’s publication he paid a friend to find people who might convince him not to publish it.”

For the full review, see:
JENNIFER SENIOR . “Books of The Times; Two Men, Mismatched Yet Perfectly Paired.” The New York Times (Fri., December 2, 2016): C21 & C23.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 1, 2016, and has the title “Books of The Times; Michael Lewis on Two Well Matched (but Finally Mismatched) Men.”)

The book under review, is:
Lewis, Michael. The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2016.