A quick post on a quick book, I think, for this one.
I picked this little book in Barnes and Noble in Palo Alto (as one does... can you name-drop places?) nearly a year ago as a little light entertainment for a train or plane or something. Somehow, however, I never read it. Until last week, that is, when I scanned the "unread books" part of the shelves to see what was lurking there.
I didn't expect enlightenment, or philosophy, or gravitas, of course, just a few laughs. However, Sh*t My Dad Says turned out not only to be extremely funny, but also quite engaging and ultimately rather touching. So what is this book?
Halpern explains its origins at the outset. He was brought up with his brothers in middle class San Diego by a pair of hard-working parents, both of whom came from quite tough backgrounds. We only glimpse the mother occasionally, mainly because his father is the show stealer. It is his way with words, and an attitude to life you might summarise as no-bullshit-enlightened-macho, that single him out as the subject of this book. At some point, Halpern decided his father's earthy pronouncements deserved wider appreciation and created a Twitter feed (@shitmydadsays) to pass them on. It was only meant for friends, but spiralled quickly to a following of over a million, and ultimately a book deal was proffered.
It is with some trepidation, and a sense of novelty, that I click on "new post" to discuss my latest read. It is close to home in several ways.
First - and this is the trepidation bit - the author is a friend and a (former) colleague. She is also a prominent Facebook friend, which means she will definitely see this review. I considered not doing a review in this case, really out of some sort of quintessentially English embarrassment, but justifying this with the notion that I could not be expected to be impartial and objective in the case. But then it struck me that there is no particular expectation of impartiality or objectivity on this blog, and, besides, I promised myself that I would post on every book (well, proper book) I read. So I'm posting, that's that. Besides, I did at one point promise Paola that I would tell people about her book.
Second, lots of people who read this (yes, there are four or five who do, assuming they are not lying through their teeth when they "like" the related FB posts) also know Paola. So there is a kind of in-the-family feel about this.
In July 2013, I was fortunate enough to attend a Stanford Business School course. It's title was "Leadership and the Effective Use of Power". The term 'power' makes many uncomfortable. At the very beginning of the course, the professor put the question to the class: "Which of you wants power?" A couple of hands rather hesitantly went up, but everyone else looked rather uncertain. Then the professor asked a second question: "Which of you wants to change the world?" No problem this time, lots of hands up. Then the professor again: "So how are you going to do that without power?"
The course was about leadership, and far from being a education in the brutal subjugation of others, it was about things like building effective teams, influencing without direct authority, giving and receiving feedback, accessing resources, managing upwards... All rather Californian in fact. So it was something of a shock to the system when, on the penultimate day, a guest professor was brought in to stir things up a bit. His name was Jeffrey Pfeffer, and he had us out of our new Californian comfort zone in no time at all.
He started his class by contrasting the behaviour of two corporate leaders in broadly quite similar circumstances. The first was Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, the second Tony Hayward of BP. Both were testifying before Congressional committees following disasters their companies were responsible for, sub-prime lending based financial meltdown and the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. His point was that Blankfein, for all that his company was - in Pfeffer's view - even more culpable than Hayward's, came out of the process completely intact, having cowed the congressmen with a display of personal and corporate power, communicated in what he said, how he said it and in his general demeanour and body-language. Hayward, by contrast, was weak: he evaded questions, he hid behind lawyers, he stonewalled, he deferred to his questioners, allowed himself to be interrupted and, ultimately, he apologised. "Never apologise!"
I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that you can't go far wrong with Robert Harris. Not is the same way as you can't go wrong with, say, Sebastian Faulks or Paul Auster, because he is not that kind of literary genius, but because he is an infallible storyteller: sophisticated, super-well-researched and utterly gripping. He combines the merits of the instinctive thriller writer with those of the journalist, and for me it is no accident that his novels are almost always based on real and/or historical events, reported, adapted, extrapolated.
You never know where he is going next. He still has to complete a trilogy set in the political world of ancient Rome, he has famously imagined Nazi occupied Britain (Fatherland), recounted the extraordinary story of Bletchley Park's WW2 code-cracking (Enigma), related the eruption of Vesuvius (Pompeii), visited modern Russia (Archangel) and analysed the motivations of Tony Blair (The Ghost). However, it was, for me at least, something of a surprise that his latest novel, An Officer and a Spy deals with historical events which seem rather more arcane.
That is undoubtedly the consequence of my own ignorance and a certain cultural conditioning. As a Guardian review I read nicely put it: "the Dreyfus Affair is one of those moments of history that a lot people know of rather than much about". Yes, one is vaguely conscious that the Dreyfus Affair was a big deal in late nineteenth century France, yes, one knows it was a miscarriage of justice with a strong anti-semitic dimension and, yes, wasn't that the thing that Emile Zola wrote his J'accuse thing about..?
It's not often these days that I read a novel cover to cover in one day. And yet this is what happened yesterday, entirely unexpectedly, with this book, Stoner, by John Williams.
Stoner... who? you might say, as indeed I did. It seems to be a common reaction. I was given the book, in a nice hardback edition, by a very good old friend, but when I picked it up I couldn't remember what, if anything, she had told me about it or why she had decided to give it to me. Only after I had finished did I check online, to find that this was a widely-reviewed 2013 must-read, awarded the Waterstones Prize, no less. Strange though that, for all its eminence, every review of the book starts by remarking on the obscurity of the author and the slow-burning nature of this novel's success. It was first published in America in 1965, and in the UK in 1973. It seems to have been picked up by some critics, particularly in continental Europe, last year and to have enjoyed huge sales. Perhaps fittingly (as we shall see), this is all considerably too late for the author, who died in 1985.
However, I didn't need all those reviews and accounts of revival to register the quality of this book. For one thing, I read it in a day. For another, though I was at a concert in Bozar last night, I heard little of the music, as my mind was stuck on trying to work out how and why this book worked its peculiar power.
