The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves by James Tooley. Cato Institute. 2009. 291 pages. $19.95.
Growing numbers of the world’s poorest families are taking their children’s education into their own hands, according to education scholar Tooley. He tells the stories of low-income parents who, frustrated with the inadequacies of their communities’ public schools, sacrifice to afford private schooling for their children. Some parents even open up schools of their own, creating opportunities for their and their neighbors’ children to achieve better standards of living.
Tooley encourages global-development advocates to give these private-education ventures more credit and more support. He argues that these institutions are not the bastions of middle-class privilege or refuges of unqualified educators that many experts presume them to be, but indispensable sources of community enhancement and empowerment.
Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, Blackberry Moms, and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley. Pantheon Books. 2009. 221 pages. $24.
The unique economic and social conditions of our time have given rise to a “new breed” of American adult, the intravidualists, according to sociologist Conley. Unlike their individualist predecessors, who sought to live in accordance with their true selves, intravidualists each assume multiple selves and roles, often all in the same instant. They do not distinguish between work and leisure, office and home, public space and private space, or one conversation and another; the lines that used to separate all of these are increasingly blurred and permeable.
For intravidualists, Conley explains, work takes place at all hours, even those spent at home or on vacation. Daily life requires “split-screen” attention that navigates simultaneous streams of text-messages and real-time conversations. And people are constantly shuttling between where they are and where they think they should be. In all, it is a new cultural landscape with a new texture of everyday life. Conley examines where it came from, why it is here to stay, and what it means to be living within it.
The Genius Machine: The Eleven Steps That Turn Raw Ideas Into Brilliance by Gerald Sindell. New World Library. 2008. 152 pages. $19.95.
Your ideas are your most precious asset, asserts intellectual-property consultant Sindell. And as with any asset, you can maximize your returns on them with the right methods. Sindell spells out his method of choice, an 11-step process that starts with a rough idea and finishes with a polished end product. Whether you are trying to write a book, design a house, foster more communication and cooperation in your company, or teach a classroom of difficult students, Sindell’s text will provide you some insight into developing workable solutions and exciting innovations.
Grabbing Lightning: Building a Capacity for Breakthrough Innovation by Gina C. O’Connor, Richard Leifer, Albert S. Paulson, and Lois S. Peters. Jossey-Bass. 2008. 332 pages. $29.95.
Business leaders can—and should—make innovation within their companies the norm rather than the exception, according to O’Connor and three fellow professors of management and marketing. The authors profile 12 companies that they say exemplify a radical new approach to organization, the “breakthrough innovation management system.” This system supports innovators and their teams and encourages learning and experimentation even at the risk of mistakes and failures. Companies that learn this approach, the authors argue, they can look forward to innovation that occurs again and again, not as a rare flash.
How to Live on Mars: A Trusty Guidebook to Surviving and Thriving on the Red Planet by Robert Zubrin. Three Rivers Press. 2008. 205 pages. Paperback. $13.95.
In this humorous yet scholarly tour of a future human civilization on Mars, astronautics engineer Zubrin presents a how-to guide for successfully transitioning to Martian life. He begins with the process of booking a flight to the Red Planet and continues on to detail every facet of daily living and what a new settler should know: what to look for when choosing a home and equipping it with life-support and radiation-protection systems; how to spot a lemon when buying a new or used ground rover; securing a first job; which jobs to avoid; finding a spacesuit that both works and is fashion-friendly; dating on Mars—and how it differs from dating on Earth; designing a greenhouse and selecting the right crops to grow in it; the best places to shop for gear, including where to find the best bargains and how to avoid scams; and a list of the 10 best high-tech startup companies and real-estate deals.
Mars’s thin atmosphere, dry surface, frigid temperatures, and cataclysmic sandstorms make it a very dangerous place. As Zubrin points out, however, those who are smart, ambitious, and willing to look hard enough for the right publicist can look forward to fabulous fame and fortune on Earth’s next-door neighbor.
Innovation for Underdogs: How to Make the Leap from What If to Now What by David Pensak, with Elizabeth Licorish. Career Press. 2008. 224 pages. $19.99.
Anyone can be wildly innovative, says master innovator Pensak, creator of the first Internet firewall and holder of 38 product patents. He encourages us to be more like our childhood selves. Children have the key innovator qualities: constant curiosity and ease with exercising imagination. We tend to lose these qualities as we get older, complete our schooling, pursue careers, and get accustomed to looking to society for all the “right” answers. Drawing from his work and teaching experiences, Pensak shares “truths about innovation” that he hopes might help readers reconcile childhood curiosity and imagination with adulthood wisdom and experience to better define problems and market solutions.
Investing in a Sustainable World: Why Green Is the New Color of Money on Wall Street by Matthew J. Kiernan. AMACOM. 2008. 300 pages. $27.95.
Now more than ever, businesses and investors who want to be successful must incorporate environmental and social issues into their decision-making processes, says sustainable-investment advisor Kiernan. He notes that, until now, most institutional investors have not given much thought to their investment portfolios’ sustainability quotients, but a gathering storm of worldwide trends is making it highly prudent for them to start doing so. Kiernan tells the stories of seven investors who did, and the immense benefits they reaped as a result. He also presents conceptual and practical steps for emulating them.
The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age by John Michael Greer. New Society Publishers. 2008. 257 pages. Paperback. $18.95.
All empires eventually fall, and our present-day industrial civilization will be no exception, says ecologist Greer. He foresees us going the same way of the Maya, Romans, and Victorian-era British, and by virtue of the same fatal flaws: We, like them, continuously overextend ourselves and consume more resources than our environments provide. Global warming, oil depletion, volatile economies, and other problems bear testament to this. Our current path heads toward an impending Dark Age of poverty, war, social strife, and system breakdown.
A new civilization that accommodates the global realities will, after several centuries, arise, but we should plan for a long transition, argues Greer. He presents the strategies and practices that will help. For instance, individuals can grow their own food, cut back on fuel consumption, take charge of their health, and help to build up their communities. Societies at large can downsize to local exchange and local governance, expand renewable energy and organic farming, promote spiritual awareness, and reallocate into human hands many tasks now done by machines.
The collapse of industrial civilization need not end in scenes of barbarian hordes storming city gates, reassures Greer. If we will it, there can be a peaceful exit of old ways and an emergence of new.
National Lies: The Truth About American Values by Charles Churchyard. Axroide Publishing. 2009. 442 pages. $26.95.
There is method in the madness of America’s economic, political, and cultural life, says sociologist Churchyard. He identifies distinct societal forces—veneration of individualism and egalitarianism, propensity for higher idealism over real-world logic, and dogmatic belief in future prosperity and social betterment—that have driven the nation’s ups and downs through the centuries and into the foreseeable future, coloring the way Americans approach business, politics, and most social problems.
These beliefs have engendered tremendous civic might and social affluence for much of the nation’s history, but now they are fueling widespread malaise and undue guilt. Churchyard summarizes the present state of American life and speculates on its future.
Problem Solving 101: A Simple Book for Smart People by Ken Watanabe. Portfolio. 2009. 111 pages. $22.95.
What do John the Octopus, a soccer player named Kiwi, and all four musicians in the rock band The Mushroom Lovers have in common? They all work out solutions to perplexing problems in Ken Watanabe’s Problem Solving 101. The author, an entrepreneur and former consultant of global-management firm McKinsey & Company, originally wrote this book as a teaching tool for Japan’s schoolchildren. But readers of all ages can enjoy, and learn from, the text’s many fun and accessible examples of what can happen when you apply “problem-solving-oriented thinking” to your problems: More—and better—solutions will become visible to you, you’ll be better able to accomplish the things that matter to you, and your lifelong dreams and goals will be within your reach.
Scientific Collaboration on the Internet edited by Gary M. Olson, Ann Zimmerman, and Nathan Bos. MIT Press. 2008. 406 pages. $45.
The distances between scientists around the world are shrinking fast due to media technologies that make collaboration across disciplines and across continents easier than ever, according to researchers Olson, Zimmerman, and Bos. Authors of these collected essays observe a growing trend of scientists from different fields, institutions, and nationalities linking by telecom and Internet services to co-author papers and jointly investigate grants.
In the process, these collaborations yield innovations at a never-before-seen pace. The essays examine collaborative projects, ongoing and past, in AIDS research, astronomy, biomedicine, earthquake engineering, ecology, and other areas of study to note the problems they encountered, successes they achieved, and ways by which future collaborations will likely build upon them.
Teens in Crisis: How the Industry Serving Struggling Teens Helps and Hurts Our Kids by Frederic G. Reamer and Deborah H. Siegel. Columbia University Press. 2008. 178 pages. Paperback. $22.50.
Hundreds of programs are diagnosing and counseling troubled teenagers suffering from learning or behavioral difficulties. Today, this massive industry is undergoing some growing pains, and not all programs are up to the task. Some operate without adequate training or certification. Others use ineffective—even dangerous—techniques that result in injuries and deaths.
Social-work professors Reamer and Siegel recall the struggling-teen industry’s history and map out its present-day landscape: prominent organizations, the services they provide, and some troubling scandals and tragedies. They conclude with an evidence-based blueprint for reform to make sure that society has the best means at hand to address the needs of young people, today and in generations to come.