Tag Archives: audiobook

Yes, Chef by Marcus Samuellson

by Rebecca

Yes-Chef-Marcus-Samuelsson-Random-House-Audio-booksYes, Chef
By Marcus Samuellson
2012
read by Marcus Samuellson

Now, Marcus Samuellson is a successful celebrity chef. Way back when, he was a toddler in Ethiopia dying of tuberculosis, and then a kid in Sweden determined to become a professional soccer player, and then a young man in Europe and America trying to get a job and work his way up the career path. This is the story of how he got from there to here, and it’s an excellent story.

One thing that really impresses me with this book is how he manages to not only tell about his actions and experiences in the past, but also to portray his perspective and thought process in the past. When he was writing about his childhood, he wrote as an adult recounting his childhood, but as he was writing about his experiences as a young adult growing into a mature adult, his writing also changed to reflect the change from being driven young man with an overriding ambition to being a much more socially aware adult who didn’t take family for granted.

I was really glad that I experienced this as an audiobook, not because it would have been at all bad as a standard book, but because the audio version is read by Samuellson himself. He doesn’t have the perfect elocution of a professional audiobook reader, but he does have real emotional connection to the story he’s telling. As an autobiography, it gains even more power by being told, literally, in his own voice.

Also, his descriptions of food make me wish that I was more of a foodie. I like food, but I also like simple flavors. Samuellson’s descriptions of the rich and complex flavors that he loves are tantalizing.

The one problem I had with the book is that some of the transitions are pretty abrupt, and a couple of times abrupt enough to be confusing, where I wasn’t quite sure what happened. Also, I got the distinct impression that he was living by the same parental advice I got, that “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” Not that all of his experiences were good by any means, or even that all the people were nice (not at all!) but no one and nothing is presented as unmitigated badness, and that is something I appreciate. Sometimes that might mean skipping over a period of his life, maybe, but for the most part Samuellson seems to genuinely like and respect people. Even the most difficult people (and there are apparently a lot of difficult people in the cooking community, good grief – I’m extremely glad that I don’t have to put up with that) have something good about them and Samuellson sees that.

Anyway, I enjoyed this book a great deal and I definitely recommend it so that you can enjoy it, too.

One Click

by Rebecca

One_ClickOne Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com
By Richard L. Brandt
2012
read by Neil Shah

Curiously, this kind of reminded me of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. It’s about a rather eccentric bookseller who isn’t actually interested in selling books so much as making a major impact on society. The fact that Amazon.com started by selling books is mostly a side effect of the fact that Bezos wanted to start a transformative online retail business.

Bezos seems like an interesting character. He’s presented as very analytical in his thoughts and emotions, as well as a visionary. I can’t help but compare him to Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook as presented in The Social Network (i.e., I haven’t actually read any nonfiction about Zuckerberg, but I’m still going to make this comparison.) They’re both very smart with a vision of using the Internet to revolutionize the world and somewhat out of step with other people socially. But where Zuckerberg comes across as trying a bit too hard to both fit in and to make other people fit to him and generally being an ass, Bezos comes across as being very comfortable with himself and honest about who he is and what he wants. He seems like a decent guy. Oddly, the author of the book strikes me as falling in between the two, trying rather desperately to model himself after Bezos (good for him) but still uncomfortable and nervous and trying too hard to casually use “nerd” as a descriptor rather than an insult.

In fact, Brandt come across in awkward in several says. First, he slants all the descriptions to show Bezos as being ultimately in the right, and all of Bezos’ questionable activities (standard CEO stuff: too demanding, too micro-micromanaging, too distant, too whatever) are presented in a lump in one of the later chapters rather than interspersed through the story.

Another oddity in Brandt’s writing is some of the rather lurid prose that occasionally pop up in a rather jarring fashion. I enjoy a certain level of purple prose: the grammar alone can add a pleasing complexity and richness to a description even beyond the subject itself. That said, “the stock prices fell like spit off a bridge,” “the stock was as sickly as a CEO with swine flu” and similar phrases gave me pause. The writing is generally fairly straightforward and even a bit pedantic, but it’d dotted with these WTF metaphors and similes that make me blink and go “huh.”

I’m really glad that I was listening to the audiobook version of this rather than trying to read it. There are long sections that strike me more like elaborated lists than any real narrative, and I’m fairly sure I would have bogged down in them if I’d been trying to read them. But with it read and simply playing out during my commute, I go at a steady pace and the information is fairly interesting.

Despite the rather lukewarm review, I enjoyed the book. I also found it a particularly timely read.

On Monday, I learned that Bezos is buying The Washington Post. He’s not even buying it as an Amazon.com acquisition, but rather through his personal wealth.

A while back, I watched Page One: Inside the New York Times, and despite it’s apparent intent to convince me that newspapers were still important, it mostly succeeded in convincing me of the opposite. Bezos has demonstrated a deep understanding of how online capabilities change retail. I very much look forward to seeing if he will demonstrate a similar understanding and sense of innovation regarding online capabilities in the information business.

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

by Rebecca

gulpGulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
By Mary Roach
2013
Read by Emily Woo Zeller

This was excellent, but…

That’s pretty much my review of this book. It was excellent—funny and informative—and yet, there are so many warnings necessary before I could possibly recommend this to anyone else.

I read Mary Roach’s Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers some years back and enjoyed it a lot. It was funny and educational and oddball and also kind of gross but mostly that just made me get all picky about what I want to have done with my body after I die. I had not expected adventures in the alimentary canal to be significantly grosser than a recounting of the things that can and do happen to bodies after death. Oh, how wrong I was! Gulp got incredibly gross, and I am now hyper conscious of my bowels. I can only hope that awareness disperses after I move on to another book.

Second: I have to warn about animal harm. So. Much. Animal. Harm! You know how people have learned about the digestive track over the centuries? Largely by doing really unpleasant things to animals. Do you know what vivisection is? If you don’t, then count your blessings and don’t ask.* If you do, well, if you read this book, you’ll know a lot more about it. The people at the dog food factory loved their dog taste-testers and treated them extremely well. I cling to the fact that there are people here who love their animals. Because all the other animals mentioned in this book came to gruesome ends.

Moving on, I was surprised about how Roach didn’t spend much time on the intestines. She started at scent and taste and swallowing, moved on to the stomach, and then dealt with digestive juices, but then moved on to the colon (and stayed there for a really long time) but I didn’t really think the small and large intestines got their fair share of time. On the other hand, this isn’t exactly intended as a textbook. Maybe she just couldn’t find the same number of stories—horrifying and hilarious—for that particular section of anatomy as she could for the rest.

Finally, while I listened to this in audiobook format, I think it probably works better read in a traditional book format. There were a fair number of footnotes that discussed tangential issues and it was occasionally difficult to track the divergence and subsequent return to the regular text.

So, if my various warnings haven’t put you off too much, then I do recommend this book. It is hilarious and I have learned things that I never would have expected.

* I first learned of vivisection from a book in which the bad guys did it and the good guy was Jack the Ripper. Let that give you some perspective.

The Art of the Steal by Frank Abagnale

by Rebecca

The-Art-of-the-Steal-Abagnale-Frank-W-9780786121373The Art of the Steal
How to Protect Yourself and Your Business from Fraud, America’s #1 Crime
By Frank W. Abagnale
2001
Read by Barrett Whitener

This book is enthralling and funny and useful. I definitely recommend it.

I just started a new job (yay!) which comes with an hour-long commute (hmm), so I’m starting to look at audiobook options. I started listening to this one when my hour-long commute (which would be half an hour if it weren’t for rush-hour traffic) turned into a two-hour-long commute due to construction. I give this audiobook full credit for saving my sanity. It’s not only well-read, but the reader is well-matched to the author. I have no idea what Abagnale actually sounds like, but in my head, he sounds just like Whitener and not much at all like Leonardo DiCaprio.

The DiCaprio reference is not as random as it might at first appear. The character of Frank Abagnale was played by DiCaprio in the movie based on Abignale’s autobiographical book, Catch Me If You Can. He was a con-artist for five years, from age 16 to 21, and then managed to grow up and started to understand consequences. Since being released from prison, he has made a career out of helping businesses avoid being conned in one way or another. Interestingly, this book is apparently his first effort to reach an audience of small-businesses and private individuals. The Art of the Steal goes over a lot of the major methods of fraud, how they are perpetrated and how they can be avoided or at least dealt with.

I think the part that I found funniest was Abagnale’s suggestion on what to do to embezzler’s. Since embezzlement is really difficult to prosecute, and often has more major consequences for the victim than the perpetrator, most companies just cut their losses and let the perpetrator go with no reprisal. Abagnale suggests filing an IRS form letting the IRS know that the company “paid” the perpetrator the amount that was embezzled. The criminal and civil court systems might not do much to embezzlers, but the IRS is not at all nice to tax dodgers. The thought of using the IRS as your personal attack dog just cracks me up.

There were also a lot of descriptions of awesome and interesting science projects and social science experiments that I would love to try out if only they weren’t both illegal and malicious. (Is it really that easy to set up an entirely new identity? I kind of want to try it and see! But I won’t. Because I am moral, I am lazy, and I don’t want to deal with potential consequences.) But there are all sorts of interesting ways to forge different types of documents and it’s fascinating to hear what they are and what their various strengths and weaknesses are.

The book contains eleven chapters, nine of which were excellent. The chapter on online and digital fraud was necessarily severely dated: this book was published twelve years ago and the digital/online landscape has changed a lot in the interim. The chapter on counterfeit objects too clearly highlighted the fact that Abagnale’s normal clients are big business: he conflates the issues of (a) getting high-quality goods without the expensive middleman with (b) getting low-quality goods with counterfeit expensive branding. These are different issues and should be treated differently.

Anyway, with those caveats, this was a fascinating book and kept me well entertained on my daily commutes. I definitely recommend it as being well-done, interesting and useful.