The book Twenty Ads That Shook The World is probably required reading for advertising majors. It’s a retrospective of the past century of advertising, and focuses on particular ads that were paradigm shifts in the way commercial messages were crafted and received by the public.

My disclaimer is that I really don’t care for advertising, as I have a slight anti-corporate streak that believes the modern world is way too commercialized and monetized beyond what is healthy. I mean, it’s to the point where some of the most television-addicted among us discuss advertising as if it were entertainment on the level of the programs themselves.

 Read the rest of this entry (1512 words await you)

I was directed to this dystopian sci-fi novel by two bloggers, WinExtra and Engtech. Dystopian means it’s similar to many of the strange seventies sci-fi films I got caught up in a while back. So it proved to be an entertaining read that I polished off relatively quickly.

First, it should be noted that the Brunner uses a futuristic vernacular that at first I found a bit hard to get my head around, along with jumpy, extremely brief chapters that flit from subject to subject. However, I soon grew used to the quick, jumpy pace.

 Read the rest of this entry (839 words await you)

Hungry Planet is a gorgeous photography journal from the same folks who created Material World. The idea is simple: travel the globe and photograph families in different cultures posing with piles all the food they eat over the course of a week. Besides making for nice photographs, the book acts as an informative introduction to food variety and issues of scarcity, plenty, production, and cooking from around the globe.

 Read the rest of this entry (720 words await you)

The Number is yet another financial / retirement planning book that purports to help the reader figure out what their “Number” is: the amount of money needed to retire comfortably. It’s much less “how to” in favor of contemplating “why.” I found this approach alternately fascinating and frustrating.

 Read the rest of this entry (779 words await you)

The subtitle to this groovy, retro tome is “The Irresistible Appeal and Spiel of Ronco and Popeil”. You may not recognize these names at first, but if you’ve watched any television over the past thirty years, you’ll certainly know some of their products: Showtime Rotisserie Oven, GLH Formula Number 9 Hair System (spray on hair), Ronco Flower Loom, and The Pocket Fisherman.

 Read the rest of this entry (800 words await you)

I’m thinking about signing up with Blogcritics, a site that gives you stuff to review in exchange for reviews. They don’t pay for them. I poked around the site a bit, emailed an editor, and they seem welcomingly free form and open to different points of view.

 Read the rest of this entry (496 words await you)

During a recent library visit, I happened upon the book Sesame Street Unpaved, a detailed history of the PBS show Sesame Street, which pretty much every kid of my generation watched obsessively. It’s peculiar how a part of the brain is reserved for memories formed early on - that with a little prodding, come back to life and you’re transported to being a kid on a living room floor, sucking on an Otter Pop, staring at a tiny television.

 Read the rest of this entry (1279 words await you)

This unauthorized biography came out in 2001, after the return of Steve Jobs to Apple and the undeniable success of the iMac. It’s by no means a definitive book about Steve Jobs (the mercurial technology guru wasn’t interviewed for this book and had no part in it) and certainly not the best (it spends way too much time with amateur psychoanalysis and is at times frustratingly dirt-dishing), but it has a few things to recommend it: first, I found the writing of Alan Deutschman by-and-large entertaining, and second, there’s a parallel story about the early days of Pixar that at least to me, was new information.

 Read the rest of this entry (611 words await you)

I haven’t been much of a dead-tree flipper lately, but a week ago my wife took me to hear David Sedaris speak in San Francisco, and as a result, I decided to read his book Me Talk Pretty One Day.

 Read the rest of this entry (450 words await you)

As a treat, I picked up a copy of iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon by Steve Wozniak (and Gina Smith). Steve Wozniak (”Woz”) was one of the founders of Apple Computer (the other being Steve Jobs). Anyhow, Woz is commonly seen as the engineering brains and Jobs the business/marketing visionary behind the personal computer revolution.

 Read the rest of this entry (632 words await you)