Category: Books

Open Offices Are “an Absurd Attack on Concentration”

(p. A11) Mr. Newport acknowledges the good intentions behind open offices: They are meant to encourage serendipity and teamwork. But he argues that burdening workers with perpetual distractions constitutes “an absurd attack on concentration” that creates “an environment that thwarts attempts to think seriously.” Sure, there’s collaboration–not least the unspoken camaraderie among coworkers who have shared in the cringe-inducing experience of hearing a colleague castigate her spouse over the phone.
Mr. Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown, is the unusual academic who will sully himself with matters as practical as: How can a talented employee rack up the rarefied and acute skills–writing, coding, scouring the latest mergers and acquisitions–that make someone indispensable? His answer? Expanding your capacity for “deep work,” ruthlessly weeding out distractions and regularly carving out stretches of time to sharpen abilities. Mr. Newport explains why honing an ability to concentrate can yield enormous professional payouts. Then he lays out rules for becoming one such rare bird.
Most corporate workers, Mr. Newport argues, don’t have clear feedback about how to spend their time. As a result, employees use “busyness as a proxy for productivity,” which Mr. Newport describes aptly as “doing lots of stuff in a visible manner”–blasting out emails, for instance, or holding meetings on superficial progress on some project.
. . .
The book’s best example is the Pulitzer Prize winning Lyndon Johnson biographer Robert A. Caro, known for working on a meticulous schedule in his Manhattan office dressed in a coat and tie “so that he never forgets when he sits down with his research that he is going to work,” as one profile of Mr. Caro put it.

For the full review, see:
KATE BACHELDER. “BOOKSHELF; Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?; Yes, open offices cultivate camaraderie–among coworkers who all cringe as a colleague shouts at her soon-to-be ex-husband over the phone.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., Jan. 20, 2016): A11.
(Note: ellipsis added, italics in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Jan. 19, 2016.)

The book under review, is:
Newport, Cal. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016.

Regulations Slow Eradication of Cancer

(p. D3) . . . the triumph of chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s and then for many other tumors opened an interlocking series of dilemmas. In the clinic and the hospital, the new protocols demanded that doctors muster the courage to make their patients very sick in order to make them well. But how sick was too sick? The risks and benefits of the powerful treatments now needed careful, deliberate assessment at every stage of the disease.
Similar questions dogged those who developed, evaluated and regulated the drugs. How poisonous could these agents safely be? How assiduously should desperate patients be saved by their government from pharmaceutical risk?
Dr. DeVita stands firmly among those affirming cancer patients’ right to aggressive treatment. One particular exchange summarizes his philosophy: “Do your patients speak to you after you do this to them?” one skeptic asked him early on. “The answer is yes,” he replied, “and for a lot longer.”
The regulatory caution of the Food and Drug Administration has been a thorn in his side for decades: “I’d like to be able to say that as cancer drugs have become increasingly more complex and sophisticated, the F.D.A. has as well. But it has not.” In fact, he writes, “the rate-limiting step in eradicating cancer today is not the science but the regulatory environment we work in.”

For the full review, see:
ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D. “An Unbowed Warrior.” The New York Times (Tues., Dec.. 1, 2015): D3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date NOV. 30, 2015, and has the title “Review: Science and Politics Collide in ‘The Death of Cancer’.”)

The book under review, is:
DeVita, Vincent T., and Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn. The Death of Cancer: After Fifty Years on the Front Lines of Medicine, a Pioneering Oncologist Reveals Why the War on Cancer Is Winnable–and How We Can Get There. New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2015.

Madison Revised Notes to Aid Jefferson’s Attack on Hamilton

C-SPAN Book TV today played an extended interview with Mary Sarah Bilder about her book on James Madison’s notes on the constitutional convention. Madison revised his notes to share with Jefferson, who had not been present during the convention. Chernow, in his biography of Hamilton, reports how Jefferson criticized Hamilton for aristocratic tendencies. What is most surprising about Bilder’s comments is that Madison had made comments at the convention similar to Hamilton’s discussing whether there might be merits to monarchy. But in his revision of the notes, he deleted those comments before passing the notes to Jefferson, presumably as part of his desire to ally himself more closely with Jefferson and to join in Jefferson’s vilification of Hamilton.
This is not an earth-shattering finding, but it adds support to Chernow’s defense of Hamilton. Jefferson was the slave-holding aristocrat in practice, while Hamilton opposed slavery, and Hamilton’s intellectual speculations on the best form of government were not notably monarchist within the context of the time.

The book discussed on C-SPAN, was:
Bilder, Mary Sarah. Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.

The Chernow book I mention above, is:
Chernow, Ron. Alexander Hamilton. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004.

Was “the Naturally Aloof” Washington, an Introvert?

(p. C6) In “The Washingtons,” an ambitious, well-researched and highly readable dual biography, Flora Fraser has worked hard, despite the limited documentation that is available, to portray George and Martha, and their extended family, as fully rounded, flesh-and-blood people, freeing them from the heavy brocade of hagiography.
. . .
Her social graces, . . . , served the naturally aloof George well during his eight increasingly trying years as president. Martha had a way of keeping conversation flowing around her, Ms. Fraser says, while George’s “silences could unnerve the most confident.” An official dinner with the Washingtons could be an ordeal, since George was a terrible conversationalist and was known to sit silently tapping his spoon against the table, obviously impatient for the evening to end.

For the full review, see:
FERGUS M. BORDEWICH. “Domestic Tranquility; Martha kept conversation flowing at dinner; George’s silences ‘could unnerve the most confident.'” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Nov. 14, 2015): C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Nov. 13, 2015.)

The book under review, is:
Fraser, Flora. The Washingtons: George and Martha, “Join’d by Friendship, Crown’d by Love”. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.

Key Roman Institution Was Citizenship for All

(p. C5) . . . , early in the fourth century B.C., everything changes. Somehow Rome’s wars began to escalate in scale, their victories turned into conquests, their victims into allies, and Roman expansion became a bow wave rolling across Italy. Exactly how this “great leap forward” was achieved remains unclear. There are fragments of laws, a tradition of civil conflict leading to political reform, and the tombs of the first generation of great military leaders. But, as Ms. Beard says, “the pieces in the jigsaw puzzle become hard to fit together.”
The best we can say is that, sometime in the early fourth century, consuls, senators and people emerge rapidly from the shadows, carrying all before them. By the time this was noticed by the other great powers of the day–Phoenician Carthage in what is now Tunisia and the Macedonian kings who had ruled everything east of the Adriatic since Alexander the Great–it was too late to stop Rome. Roman institutions did not drive this expansion, as Polybius had thought. In fact they played desperate catch-up for the rest of the Republic, trying to create ways of governing an empire that was not exactly accidental but certainly not planned. The one institution that Ms. Beard leaves in place as a motor of expansion rather than a response to it was Rome’s unusual capacity to absorb the defeated and redirect their arms and resources to its own ends. “SPQR” ends with the logical culmination of that process, the extension of full citizenship to almost every one of Rome’s 60 million subjects in A.D. 212.

For the full review, see:
GREG WOOLF. “Dawn of the Eternal City.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Nov. 14, 2015): C5-C6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Nov. 13, 2015.)

The book under review, is:
Beard, Mary. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. New York: Liveright Publishing Corp., 2015.

FDA Forces Child to Go to London to Get Drug to Fight His Cancer

(p. A15) How far would you go to get a drug that could save your child’s life? Across an ocean? That is exactly what the federal government is forcing some American families with dying children to do.
In 2012, when Diego Morris was 11 years old, he was diagnosed with a deadly cancer in his leg called osteosarcoma. Doctors at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., removed the tumor, but the prognosis was poor. There was a significant risk that even extensive chemotherapy after surgery would not prevent the cancer from returning.
Fortunately, a team of doctors at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City had developed a revolutionary new drug, mifamurtide (MTP), that can prevent osteosarcoma from coming back. A study by Dr. Eugenie Kleinerman of MD Anderson and Dr. Paul Meyers of Sloan Kettering showed the drug resulted in a 30% reduction in the osteosarcoma mortality rate at eight years after diagnosis.
The drug was approved in 2009 by the European Medicines Agency and is currently the standard of care in Europe, Israel and many other countries. In 2012 it received the prestigious Prix Galien Award, the gold medal for pharmaceutical research and development in the United Kingdom.
MPT was exactly what Diego needed. But there was one problem: The drug was not available in America because the Food and Drug Administration had rejected it, demanding additional studies. That meant that Diego had to travel from Phoenix to London to get the drug he needed to save his life–a drug that was available in almost every industrialized nation and should have been available in the U.S.

For the full commentary, see:

DARCY OLSEN. “Winning the Right to Save Your Own Life; As the FDA dawdles, 24 states pass ‘right-to-try’ laws giving terminally ill patients access to drugs.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., Nov. 27, 2015): A15.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Nov. 26, 2015.)

Olsen’s commentary is related to her book:
Olsen, Darcy. The Right to Try: How the Federal Government Prevents Americans from Getting the Lifesaving Treatments They Need. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2015.

Hawaiian Culture Changed Swiftly in Century After 1777

(p. C1 & C6) It’s startling just how swiftly change came to Hawaii after Capt. James Cook first sighted the island of Kauai in 1777: In little more than a century, Ms. Moore writes, “a closed and isolated culture, bound by superstition and religious ritual, with no understanding of individual freedom or private property,” had been transformed into “a society of thriving capitalism, Protestant values, and democratic institutions.”

For the full review, see:
MICHIKO KAKUTANI. “Hard Truths in the Past of a Tropical Eden.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., SEPT. 22, 2015): C1 & C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date SEPT. 21, 2015, and has the title “Review: ‘Paradise of the Pacific,’ the Hard Truths of Hawaii’s History.”)

The book under review, is:
Moore, Susanna. Paradise of the Pacific: Approaching Hawaii. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

FDA Has No Right to Stop the Terminally Ill from Seeking Cures

(p. C4) Ms. Olsen notes that “today, about 40 percent of cancer patients attempt to enroll in clinical trials, but only about 3 percent end up participating. That means that the vast majority don’t make the cut, whether because they fail to meet the strict criteria, or a trial is thousands of miles from their home.” Many of those who don’t get these experimental drugs are the sickest patients because they are deemed “too sick to be useful for the study.”
Ms. Olsen argues that terminally ill patients should be able to access such drugs–at their own risk and outside the context of FDA-required studies–if the companies are willing to provide them, and the book’s title alludes to her proposed remedy: the state-by-state campaign the Goldwater Institute is leading to pass “Right to Try” legislation. The bills would allow terminally ill patients who have “exhausted all conventional treatment options” to access an experimental treatment if their doctors believe it is “the best medical option to extend or save the patients’ life” and “the treatment has successfully completed basic safety testing and is part of the FDA’s ongoing evaluation and approval process.” Insurers, critically, would not be required to cover the treatment–a significant hurdle, largely unexplored here, since such costs could be significant.
The think tank’s campaign has been incredibly successful, with 24 states passing Right to Try laws to date. Still, Ms. Olsen doesn’t present such laws as a panacea. She doesn’t expect experimental treatments to always–or even often–work for terminally ill patients. But she believes that some chance is better than the alternative. “If you have the Right to Die, you have the Right to Try,” Ms. Olsen writes. “And you don’t have to wait on Washington to secure it.”
Yet therein lies the book’s main shortcoming. Washington, it turns out, has a fair bit of say here. Courts have found that the FDA’s powers to regulate drug development are extraordinarily broad. Many changes Ms. Olsen champions won’t be possible without congressional action to revamp the FDA’s drug development process and find new ways of paying for experimental drugs that would make widespread access sustainable for patients, companies and insurers. These issues, though touched on, are not grappled with in detail.

For the full review, see:
PAUL HOWARD. “BOOKSHELF; Hail Mary Medicine; Patients spend their last days pleading with reluctant drug companies and the FDA to get access to treatments that could save their lives.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., Nov. 13, 2015): C4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Nov. 12, 2015.)

The book under review, is:
Olsen, Darcy. The Right to Try: How the Federal Government Prevents Americans from Getting the Lifesaving Treatments They Need. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2015.

Top College Football Programs “Do a Little Education on the Side”

(p. C7) When it is reported that the University of Alabama pays its head coach an annual salary of $6.5 million a year, or that the University of Oregon erected a $42 million academic support center for it players, or that the University of Texas assesses its fans as much as $20,000 in the form of “seat donations” for preferred locations, it is clear that college football is no longer just a game.
Gilbert M. Gaul contends precisely that in his persuasive new book, “Billion-Dollar Ball: A Journey Through the Big-Money Culture of College Football.” . . . the elite college football programs have become a (sic) “giant entertainment businesses that happened to do a little education on the side,” . . .
. . .
Given the revenue streams that winning programs generate year in and year out, it is easy to see why college administrators are drawn in by the siren call of football. But Mr. Gaul leads the chorus of those who are beyond dismayed by this juxtaposition of priorities. In the more than a decade that has passed since Mr. Gaul, who has won two Pulitzer Prizes, began collecting data on the economics of college football as a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, he asserts that the staggering revenues of the 10 largest football programs has come largely at the expense of the academic mission.
At Texas, Michigan, Auburn, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Penn State, Notre Dame, Louisiana State University and Arkansas, revenues have increased to $762 million from $229 million from 1999 to 2012. That is a whopping 233 percent increase. Mr. Gaul observes that during this period “profit margins had ballooned to hedge-fund levels,” generated by television broadcast rights, luxury suites, seat donations and corporate advertising. Mr. Gaul reports that the big universities “have netted 90 percent of all the new money that has flowed into college football the last decade or two.”

For the full review, see:
MARK KRAM Jr. “Books of The Times; A Sport’s Most Alluring Statistic Is Found on the Balance Sheet.” The New York Times (Weds., AUG. 26, 2015): C4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review was updated on AUG. 25, 2015, and has the title “Books of The Times; Review: ‘Billion-Dollar Ball’ Explores the Economics of College Football’s Top Programs.”)

The book under review, is:
Gaul, Gilbert M. Billion-Dollar Ball: A Journey through the Big-Money Culture of College Football. New York: Viking, 2015.

Do Entrepreneurial Results Excuse Entrepreneurial Arrogance?

(p. A1) Robert Whaley is a professor of finance at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management and the developer of the two major so-called fear indices — the VIX and VXN on the Chicago Board Options Exchange — that are used to make bets on market volatility.

READING Right now it’s “Becoming Steve Jobs,” by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli. It has a somewhat different take than Walter Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs.” I felt Isaacson’s version was a little negative. But what the books have in common is that Jobs was sheer genius. So what if he was arrogant? Consider what he’s done. We wouldn’t have iPhones and iPads if it wasn’t for his vision. I absolutely think that excuses his behavior. If everyone just wanted for people to look back and say you were kind, how would we move forward?

For the full interview, see:
KATE MURPHY. “Download: Robert Whaley.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., SEPT. 6, 2015): 2.
(Note: the bold above is in the original. The first paragraph quoted above was written by the interviewer Kate Murphy. The paragraph following the word “Reading” is the response by the interviewee Robert Whaley.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date SEPT. 5, 2015.)

The Steve Jobs books mentioned by Whaley, are:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
Schlender, Brent, and Rick Tetzeli. Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader. New York: Crown Business, 2015.

Quiet Author Founds Start-Up to Help Introverts

(p. 10) Last month, 50 executives from General Electric gathered on the fourth floor of a SoHo office building for a “fireside chat” with Susan Cain, the author of the 2012 book “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking,” which has sold two million copies worldwide.
. . .
A talk about “Quiet” she gave at a 2012 TED conference has been viewed more than 11.6 million times online. And she has delivered more than 100 speeches since then, sometimes commanding five figures for an appearance. (She also does pro bono work, she stressed.)
. . .
“Writing a book is rewarding,” Mr. Godin said he told her. “But it doesn’t change most people’s lives.”
And so Ms. Cain, who has been coached in public speaking, is now promoting Quiet Revolution, a for-profit company she has started that is focused on the work, education and lifestyle of introverts, which she defines roughly as people who get their psychic energy from quiet reflection and solitude (not to be confused with people who are shy and become anxious in unfamiliar social situations). Extroverts, by contrast, thrive in crowds and have long been prized in society for their ability to command attention. Many people share attributes of both, she said.
Ms. Cain and Paul Scibetta, a former senior executive at J. P. Morgan Chase whom she met when they both worked at the law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton in the 1990s, have set up a Quiet Leadership Institute, working with executives at organizations like NASA, Procter & Gamble and General Electric to help them better understand the strengths of their introverted employees.
. . .
Mike Erwin, a former professor of leadership and psychology at West Point who served in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, invited Ms. Cain to speak to cadets in 2012 after he finished reading “Quiet.” He didn’t understand students who were reticent to talk in class or who wanted to explore every risk before jumping into a task. “I’m an extrovert,” he said. “And, as I look back at my career, I wrote off a lot of people who didn’t speak up or want to be in charge.”
In May, he was appointed chief executive of the Quiet Leadership Institute, where he is helping project managers at NASA learn how to lead teams populated with introverts (a common personality type in science). At Procter & Gamble, Mr. Erwin said, executives in research and development are exploring, among other things, how to help introverts become more confident leaders.

For the full story, see:
LAURA M. HOLSON. “Instigating a ‘Quiet Revolution’ of Introverts.” The New York Times, SundayStyles Section (Sun., JULY 26, 2015): 10.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JULY 25, 2015, and has the title “Susan Cain Instigates a ‘Quiet Revolution’ of Introverts.”)

The Cain book mentioned above, is:
Cain, Susan. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. New York: Crown, 2012.