Also for a change, I regretted having a proof copy because it only has placeholders where the foreword, acknowledgements and author biography would be and as soon as I finished I wanted to find out a bit more about the author, specifically whether he has written any other books. (It turns out he hasn’t yet)

Anyway, here is what I wrote about it:

The subject matter is quite dark but written in a light way that lets the writer get away with killing women, children and pensioners without traumatising the reader. It is black comedy with just enough comedy to stop it just being depressing.

The comedy is laid on thickest at the start with some genuinely hilarious descriptions of young Geldof’s cringeworthy home circumstances, but done well enough to let later levity rely on references and memories of the pre-apocalypse situation when necessary.

Like all good apocalyptic stories it does make you wonder exactly how a government would respond to such events. Would they be better or ever worse? There are satirical undertones to this that do encourage such questions, but you don’t get to ponder them too much as the story keeps pulling you along.

I do have a small problem with the plausibility of some bits right at the end, but not enough to spoil my enjoyment of the book and to even mention the specifics would be a spoiler for anybody else so I won’t go into details. Having said that, the very last bit of political satire involved in the zombie interview is very tasty.

And do look out for the John Selwyn Gummer spoof. A fine example of very, very dark satire.

If you enjoyed the film Black Sheep (the New Zealand killer sheep comedy and not the German/Russian WWII film) then you would enjoy this. It is a similar topic but on a much larger scale.

It was another book that I got through Amazon’s Vince programme, which I might otherwise have missed out on.

Amazon don’t like the reviews on their site to be overly long so I’ll paste what I wrote there and then expand on it a bit because I can waffle on as much as I like here I found this to be a completely fascinating book. As well as presenting a theory about moral psychology it also covers the author’s journey to reaching that theory.

This does mean that it takes a while to actually get to the point of explaining ‘why good people are divided by politics and religion’ because, for example, it outlines a theory and then mentions how that theory turned out to have a flaw and then describes how the author revised it and then lays out the new version, so you end up with several iterations of the theory. This is a 400-page book with the last 100 pages being references, acknowledgements, notes and bibliography, so really 300 pages of the proper book and it is not until the last few pages that the question of the title is really addressed, but that is not a problem because you really do need to build up to it.

There are two main metaphors used in the book. One is to picture the mind as a rider (representing the logical mind) on an elephant (representing the emotional mind). By coincidence I have now started reading abook about decision-making processes which covers a lot of the same ground regarding the relationship between logic and emotions, and draws on some of the same references. I’ll admit that I found the metaphor a bit cute at first but eventually came to terms with it.

The other metaphor is the description on the human mind as being 90% chimpanzee and 10% bee to explain how we sometimes act for our personal benefit and sometimes for the benefit of the community.

This was where it got especially interesting as it picked up on some of Darwin’s ideas about social evolution and developed them.

Along the way the book provides a way to classify moral matters into six categories, which the author calls moral foundations, and presents the results of large-scale studies to show how people of different political beliefs possess (or use, or are guided by) different foundations in different proportions.

This is, of course, just a theory and in a field where absolute proof isn’t likely, but it is all plausible enough to be useful, and for a leftie like me a little bit depressing because I am used to seeing my side as being the goodies and the other side as being the baddies. Instead I have the challenge to consider that the other side might have valid reasons for thinking what they do (while still being wrong of course).

The religious aspect is also disturbing reading for a confirmed atheist like me, because the book makes a good case for religion having a positive impact on the development of human society – regardless of whether gods exist or not.

At the very least this book has made me think more about the relationship between my points of view and those of my political opponents. It has the potential to be life-changing if you totally buy into the theory and use it to guide some decisions. For example, the centre-left could make a careful study of the moral foundations to find ways that their manifesto could address all six and not just concentrate on two to make itself more appealing to more people.

Even without deciding to let this change your outlook completely, there is plenty to dwell on and it is very clearly written and summaraised at every step.

So why was it so challenging and potentially life-changing?

Well, as a rule we tend to read things that support our own opinions rather than challenge them. Wooly liberals don’t read the Daily Mail and mad right-wing plutocrats don’t read Socialist Worker. It can set off some serius cognitive dissonance if you find yourself reading something from the oppsite end of the spectrum, especially if you find yourself agreeing with parts of it, because contemporary politics has become very polarised and tribal.

This, however, is not a book written from a right-wing perspective that challenges some aspect of policy. It is worse than that; it is a mostly scientific but sometimes personal explanation of some theories that undermine some fundamental beliefs.

Just so we know where we stand, I’m a pretty staunch republican, atheist and averagely tribal member of the Labour movement, and this book gives very good reasons to not just do away with religions, the monarchy, and the Tories. Even more depressing, it gives some very plausible scientific reasons why liberals (in the broader American sense) are doomed to have a narrower appeal than conservatives (again in the broader sense).

Having said that, with some of this Haidt was pushing at an open door to an extent as I have felt for a while that politics is far too combative and polarised and that while gods may not exist churches (other religious establishments are available) have and continue to perform some useful services alongside the less appealing aspects like institutional child molestation, ritual suppression of women and perpetuation of inequalities.

I’m not going to, and can’t fully explain all that here because I’m not good enough at it and I would have to quote so much of the book it would qualify as piracy. As a rough approximation, there is some investigation of the way the mind works and the relationship between the emotional and rational parts of the brain. As a sort of side-challenge this undermines a lot of what Plato and Mill thought and I’ve always rated them. Anyway, it turns out that a lot of our opinions and beliefs are due to the emotional side of the brain and the rational part does not so much lead us to our answers but is used post hoc to rationalise what our emotions have come up with.

One practical reason why this is bad for us on the left is that we do tend to try and make our case by reason. How many times have you heard somebody at a Labour gathering complain that if only the voters read our well-argued wordy leaflets instead of being swayed by the tabloid heart-string tugging of the Tory leaflets they would realise who is right? We are getting a bit better but generally we try to win arguments (and elections) with logic while the Tories go straight for emotional dog whistles (and the Lib Dems, of course, have their dodgy bar charts). I don’t think we will ever get over this because it is Labour’s instict to think we are above that sort of thing, but unfortunately that sort of thing works because that is how human minds work.

The book closes with a decent argument for why both liberal and conservative attitudes are necessary. Without the liberal influence we would never make advances, especially social advances like equalities. We would still have women not allowed in pubs, homosexuality illegal, children up chimneys and so on. Without the conservative influence though, we would advance too quickly without letting society adapt and adjust to the changes. That clashes with the instictive attitude we are supposed to have that the world would be better if we won every election and won every seat. It may just be that it is better for the balance of power to change every now and then and for whoever is in power to have the other lot existing as a strong and viable opposition.

This is a lot harder to stomach these days. In the past the small-l liberals and small-c conservatives were spread around the parties more. There were socially conservative socialists and socially liberal Tories in far greater numbers. There were more shades of grey, but now we have become entrenched in ever more polarised positions.

I would still happily see an end to all religions, a fully elected second chamber and head of state and all the rest, but I can see how you can’t do that without identifying the useful functions they perform in terms of social evolution and make sure something else is in place to cover them first, and that isn’t an overnight task but one that could take generations – especially as even the concept of social or cultural evolution is still hotly disputed.

Maybe on its own the book hasn’t made me change what I think or do, but it has at least made me realise that perhaps I should. Really I can’t recommend this highly enough.

It is quite tempting to be dismissive of celebrity authors, especially comedians, as if they are not ‘proper’ writers. Maybe there are some who get poor books published purely on the strength of their name, with the story suffering at the expense of jokes, but that doesn’t mean they are all bad – Eric Morecambe wrote a decent short novel, Ben Elton has had considerable success, and there is no reason why Julian Clary can’t find a niche for himself.

I have read and enjoyed an earlier Clary book so I was expecting to like this and wasn’t disappointed. While Clary is sticking very much to situations that are familiar to him (gay showbiz culture) there is nothing wrong with writing about what you know, and it does expand into elements of ghost story and thriller. All the time it is, or course, extremely arch.

You just know Clary had fun writing this, especially with introducing himself as an unsympathetic character. I loved the throwaway line where somebody puts him down by suggesting he was busy rehearsing for panto in Crawley – he was actually in panto here in Crawley recently.

The book follows two stories and jumps between them. One is the story of Noel Coward in his country house, the other is the story of an actor who enjoyed some success playing Noel Coward who buys Coward’s old house from Julian Clary. Both stories are well told and the suspense is kept up by jumping to the other story at the merest hint of a cliffhanger.

Along the way there are some turns which are darker than the breezy cover would lead to to expect and it is probably that mixture of the predictable and unpredicable that made the book so much of a pleasure. Mr Clary has made a decent fist of writing and I look forward to the next one.

This book is set in a semi-fictional version of MIT as its very first intake of students gets ready to graduate, which is an interesting place and time. It was a time when the possibilities and exploitation of science were being realised while large chunks of society were still either afraid of science or just dismissive of it.

I say semi-fictional because although this is very obviously a work of fiction, a lot of the names are those of real students and staff at that time, and I think the author does a good job of integrating the real history with some major fictional events. All of which gives it a bit of a steampunk feeling even though the science involved is what you would expect at that time.

With the story concentrating on a group of students, it sort of felt like a Harry Potter for grown-ups, with MIT being like a Hogwarts of science. There is even a female within the group, which lets the story touch on the position of women in society at the time.

For all the historical detail, science and politics, the book is very much plot-driven and you don’t need to like or even really understand the other stuff to enjoy the story. As with any good thriller I spent a lot of the time trying to work out whodunnit, changing my mind several times along the way. By the time I was within sight of the end I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough.

Another book that could be turned into a very good film.

The Geek Manifesto by Mark Henderson

Over the weekend I finished reading an advance copy of The Geek Manifesto by Mark Henderson that Amazon sent me. The book is to be published in May and more information about it can be found at www.geekmanifesto.co.uk

Amazon don’t really encourage lengthy reviews, so what I wrote only scratches at the surface of what I thought about the book. I may expand a bit on my thoughts here, but this is what I wrote about it:

I found this to be a surprising book in many ways, particularly in the specific limitations of its demands and the willingness of the author to stir up some controversy towards the end, in unexpected directions.

The main demand is that the political system, dominated as it is by humanities graduates, should take a more scientific, evidence-based approach. The limitiation, or compromise, is the recognition that, having weighed that scientific evidence the politicians are quite within their rights to not follow it and to base their decision on other considerations – as long as they are honest about that and don’t try to mis-represent the science. This might be a step too far for some politicians and a step short for some scientists, but it strikes me as a step in the right direction.

For a change, this is a book evangelising science without specifically targeting religion. That is not to say it promotes religion, it just concentrates on the political system instead as that is where the real decision-making goes on. There are some scary statistics about how many elected representatives in the US and UK governments have any scientific background (very, very few) how many primary school teachers have a science degree (hardly any) how many secondary school science teachers teach the subject they studied themselves (fewer than you would think) and many more that can easily lead to despair.

Perhaps that is the worst thing about the book: it is too good at stating the scale of the problem, and then doesn’t offer a magic wand to wave in order to overcome them, but proposes lots of things which all sound like hard work – but if you want a miracle cure you should be reading the Daily Express instead.

The book is organised well, with manageable chapters concentrating on specific policy areas, and not always in the way I was expecting. For example, when I saw that a chapter was about education I expected it to be all about how few science teachers there are and how few students choose science, maths or engineering. Instead it launched into how policies are introduced without any way to reliably measure their effectiveness. I had not considered that before, so it was an education for me.

The controversy becomes most apparent towards the end, in the chapter about the environment and the attitude of green pressure groups and the Green party towards scientific matters, especially in relation to nuclear power and GM crops. I can see that stirring up a few arguments.

The whole book is summed up in five pages at the end, with some specific points distilled from the earlier chapters. These points were too long to be snappy and memorable but too short to include any examples or re-inforcement and thus felt like a bit of an anticlimax after 245 pages of very strong argument, but that is a small criticism for a book that is, I am sure, destined to become a fixture on any self-respecting geek’s bookshelf, and besides that it is an impossible dilemma to resolve.

Following the conclusion is another 50 pages of references, many of which are URLs. Some of these are quite long and will be quite laborious to type in. There is no problem with having such a comprehensive set of references, given the subject matter it should be expected, but this book is crying out for an e-book version where the links can be followed easily or the use of shortened URLs – bit.ly, tr.im, or similar.

As somebody who has dabbled in politics myself, I found this inspiring even if it left me with all sorts of regrets that I didn’t know all this while I was still involved in the local council.

Quite early on in the book, about page 22 or 23, it raised an issue about politics which has bothered me for a while now. It is a fundamental problem with politics, possibly too entrenched to shift easily, quickly or at all, and one of the things that has increasingly turned me off of conventional politics and despite it bothering me immensely I had never really thought of it as anti-scientific but just bloody stupid and it is the inability to say “I don’t know”, to change one’s mind in the face of new evidence, or admit to ever having been wrong about anything.

The standout quote is “What science admires as intellectual honesty is seen in Westminster and Whitehall as the stuff of the gaffe.”

This isn’t even the fault of politicians as individuals, or not entirely. It is the whole system, including the media and the public. A scientist can carry out several experiments, and the ones that don’t work are not failures but learning points that eliminate bad hypotheses and in an ideal world lead towards the ultimately successful experiment. You can’t progress without acknowledging the bad results and building on them, but in politics that is unacceptable.

As soon as a minister admits that some new policy didn’t work he will find himself on the move at the next re-shuffle, after being held to ridicule by the media and probably branded a flip-flopper and accused of a U-turn. If they stick to their opinions in the face of very obvious failure they will be praised as a ‘conviction politician’.

I wonder where we would be if ‘conviction chemists’ were similarly praised, or ‘conviction doctors’? We would probably be treating common ailments with blood-letting and trepanning still.

The temptation to cherry-pick evidence is strong. Whenever there was an example of a Labour politician doing the right thing or a Tory politician like Nadine Dorries being an idiot I was lapping it up. When there was an example of a Tory being sensible about science or a Labour minister making up evidence I was metaphorically reading the book from behind the sofa and between my fingers, and by the time the Green party came in for a good kicking I was cheering, but the fact is that there is a failure of the political class and not of any particular party and the book remains admirably neutral.

I had that entire rant in my head just from reading a couple of pages, and on just about every page there was something similarly stimulating. This isn’t a book you can easily read passively.

Front Cover

The other day I finished a proof copy of a book called The Return Man by V.M.Zigo. It is due to be published in March and I can wholeheartedly recommend it.

It is a book set in a future where a mystery virus has created zombies, but the outbreak has been containe, albeit to a very large area. Basically the entire Western half of the USA has been evacuated leaving it populated only by the undead while the survivors cram in the the Eastern safe states.

One man hid from the evacuation teams and stayed behind to look for his wife with the intention of laying her to rest if she has been infected. In the meantime he takes commissions from people in the safe states to find their loved ones and ‘retturn’ them to a peaceful death.

It is an interesting twist on the whole zombie situation, making a change from the usual flight to safety. My only reservation was that it sounded like a good outline for a film and I couldn’t see how you could really capture the whole spirit of the films on paper, but it turns out you can and this bloke has done it!

The zombies are very much in the Romero tradition of shuffling slow zombies, which is the way I like them.

All the usual elements are there but with some extra depth and background. The hero is not a typical survivalist, but a surgeon who has had to teach himself how to survive in that environment and how to hunt. Thanks to satellite connections he is able to communicate with a relative out East who hooks him up with clients and provides a link to what is happening outside. The descriptions of how society has reacted and coped is not overdone but is enough to make you think seriously about how the world would adapt – not well, with the far right taking control of the remaining states.

Doctor Marco gets persuaded to take on a mission to find a specific corpse in California and on the quest he hooks up with a Chinese soldier sent from outside and here is another twist as the soldier’s Chinese cultural attitudes towards the dead make him more ready to kill live people than to re-kill corpses.

All of this means that there is a proper story arc with an objective more complex than just trying to avoid being over-run, and it is written in a decent, direct style without being trashy, and there are some spectacular set pieces in it. To go into too much detail would constitute major spoilers, but I will say that there is a sequence on a stalled train and a another where the hero wants to break into a prison crammed full of thousands of ex-con zombies who have been trapped there in order to find one specific ex-person.

All through the book, while enjoying it immensely, I could not stop myself wishing there was a film of it too so I was quite pleased to see that a company has already taken out an option on the film rights. Even so, I’m glad to have read the book because it contain a lot that a film would understandably miss out.

Best of all, the book comes to proper resolution that is satisfying enough while still leaving lots of scope for a sequel, which I will be first in the queue for when it comes out.

One of the many little pleasures of Vine is that I get to read things I would not normally have the chance to. There is no way I would fork out over £20 on a text book in a field I am neither studying nor working in, so getting these does broaden my horizons a little.

I don’t get carried away though. Also on offer was a Beekeeping for Dummies book. I don’t think I need to broaden my horizons quite that much, although seeing it on the list did make me wonder just how much of a market there is for such a book. Just how many budding beekeepers are out there?

But I digress… here is what I thought about the book:

It may be that, not being a designer or a design student, I am missing the point, but I found this book to be a bit light on hard information at the expense of filler.

Don’t get me wrong, it is a beautiful book to hold with some gorgeous pictures in it, and it is extremely well presented as you might expect from Smashing Books, but it was too lacking in substance for me. For example, of its 402 pages, 32 are taken up with the index, contents and pages that are either blank or chapter title pages. On top of that another 274 pages are just image galleries: mostly screenshots of websites or photos taken from Flickr. That only leaves 99 pages of text – and many of those pages only have a paragraph or two on pages that are otherwise blank or full of pictures.

Most of the book tells you that you need to look at things for inspiration and then gives you lots of examples of things without giving much of a clue about how to do that practically. Along the way at times the book treads a fine line between getting inspired and copying other people’s work. In fact it more or less tells you to copy from enough different places so that you avoid obvious IP infringement.

Suddenly at chapters 6 and 7 the book does what I spent the best part of 350 pages wanting it to do – giving two practical demonstrations of how to use inspiration from other websites or from more abstract sources. Up to that point I was thinking that it was all a bit ‘emperor’s new clothes’.

And yet…

I guess that if you are in the design field and the book gives you just one idea that makes a project work or gets you a commission then it is all worth it at twice the price. Just because it didn’t do what I wanted doesn’t mean that it won’t work for somebody else.

I realise this is all subjective but personally I would have welcomed a lot more chapters like 6 and 7 because I already have a source of thousands of images. Its called the internet. Having said that, the clue is in the title. It is a book of ideas and not step-by-step instructions so it actually does what it says.

Where I would quibble with the title is that it is not clear that this is a book squarely aimed at people designing websites. While somebody designing, say, fabrics, might get an idea or two it is not really aimed at them and anybody designing things other than websites would be better off with something else.

I do wonder if I am being a little unkind though. I have an architectural source book that is very similar, being little more than lots of pictures to show different aspects and styles which I find fascinating even if it is of no practical use to me. I just think that somebody who designs websites will, by definition, have access to the internet and a whole world of different pictures already.

What it reminded me of was one of those Tony Buzan memory-improving books I read ages ago. It was a 200-page hardback book. At page 33 I was thinking that it was interesting and possibly useful and then I turned the page and discovered that the book was effectively over: pages 34 to 200 were just lists of things to remember using the techniques in pages 1 to 33. Basically it was a pamphlet that had been stretched to fill a whole book.

In the same way this idea book could have contained all its information in 50 pages. But who buys 50-page books? Or 33-page books? Do we as consumers think that anything that short can’t be worthwhile and so the only way we can be persuaded to buy it is with loads of filler?

A more recent example would be Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan, another pamphlet pumped up to book size, in his case by labouring the point. If anything I think that the book’s main big idea was given far less impact by being restated umpteen different ways, something a few of these popular science bokos are guilty of, especially those in the behavioural economics field.

This is a very accessible book aimed more at the casual reader rather than an academic book. What it reminds me of most is the television programme QI as it is stuffed full of the sort of things ‘everybody knows’ that turn out not to be the case like Mussolini making the trains run on time, James Watt inventing the steam engine or the defeat of the Spanish Armada being a heroic victory.

Each chapter is very short, perhaps a little too short, and the selection of ‘facts’ to debunk is a bit idiosyncratic, with some being quite vague, and some being a little obscure – I have a feeling that few people have a fixed opinion of Philippe Petain one way or the other. For all that it is still very readable, and with enough surprises to justify its title.

For me, the biggest surprises were in some of the chapters about American history, like the hostility towards democracy amongst the Founding Fathers of the US. It seems that although democracy was a result of the revolution it wasn’t the objective but more of an accidental outcome. The chapter on Abraham Lincoln was the real eye-opener though.

I had known that Lincoln was against slavery, and that the civil war effectively ended it, so it was a bit of a shock to see quotes from Lincoln like:

I am not, nor ever have been in favour of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favour of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifiying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.

Amazing that they voted Obama in only 150 years after that!

I am not a designer. I have dabbled with knocking up logos for personal projects, but I know I will never do it as a business. As such, this book is probably not really aimed at me, but I thoroughly enjoyed it anyway.

Don’t read this expecting to be told how to come up with ideas though. Although the author describes a bit about how and where he personally finds inspiration that is not the sort of thing that can be taught: you either have some sort of creative spark or you dont. What this book does do is encourage that creative spark and provide practical information on how to apply it. There is no point being able to create beautiful and effective logos if you can’t persuade anybody to employ you to do that.

The sort of practicalities covered are what types of software to use (and why), what types of file format to use to provide the finished article, how to behave with clients, how to make sure you get paid, and so on. That makes it sound a bit boring, but this sound practical advice is in bite-sized chunks and interspersed with practical advice on techniques to use in the actual design like using vectors, aspects of typefaces or choices of colour schemes.

In the course of the book you are told the basics of writing a design brief and contract, how to avoid getting ripped off and what to include in your deliverables, including a section on writing guidelines for the use of the finished logo. Throughout the book the emphasis is on professionalism. It looks like a really good starting point for anybody starting off as a freelance designer.

You can tell while reading this that every paragraph has come from experience and is not just theory. I’m sure that every chapter could be expanded into an entire book in itself and the author recognises this, providing references to books or online resources that would expand on any topic you felt you wanted to explore more. Possibly the most important thing the book does is to make you aware that those topics are important enough that you would feel the need to learn more about some very specific things.

Of course there are lots of pretty pictures, and examples of designs not just from the author but from other companies and designers. As you would expect and hope from a book about design it is well laid out and attractive to look at in itself, but the content is also well-organised providing a logical structured approach to the process of design. Ironically the badly-designed bits (very useful examples of what not to do) are some of most interesting.

I’m sure this will be invaluable to sombebody in this field, but even for an outside it is fascinating and should be required reading for people who commission designers’ work!

Book cover

I recently read a book called I’m Feeling Lucky: the Confessions of Google Employee 59 by Douglas Edwards. No point explaining what it is about, the title sums it up quite nicely, but for what it is worth it is the erstwhile brand manager of Google telling the story of his five or so years in the company.

By a coincidence I finished reading it just before Google Plus suddenly appeared. One reason why I didn’t get round to writing the review on Amazon was that I was busy playing with Google Plus, but having just read about the behind-the-scenes decisions and debates around earlier product launches I looked at the new product launch in a different way. I couldn’t help looking at all the aspects of it and wondering what discussions and arguments might have gone into them.

Here is what I wrote about it on Amazon:

This is probably as close as we are going to get to the inside story of Google, for a good few years anyway. Douglas Edwards joined the company in 1999 just as it was starting to expand and was one of the first employees who was not an engineer. He recounts some of his experiences of the six years he spent there from his perspective in a clear way, making it interesting even for those who can’t remember the days when search meant using Alta Vista or Lycos on Netscape.

This will not be the whole story for several reasons. Firstly, there is the element of loyalty to previous colleagues and a company that still had a family atmosphere when the author joined it (at that time every new employee was still interviewd by either Sergey Brin or Larry Page). There is also the practical fact that employees from that long ago probably still have a significant shareholding and won’t want to say anything damaging or give way secrets, but on top of that it is still just one person’s point of view and maybe there are old office politics scores to settle.

Having said that, I get the feeling that the account is as honest as it can be, given those caveats. It is a shame that it is written by somebody out of the loop of the technical aspects, though that is a blessing as well in that it keeps the book readable because it doesn’t get bogged down in technical detail. Still, I sometimes found myself wanting to know just a little more, but on balance I think that the author’s status as a non-engineer makes him a bit more like the majority of us, viewing events through eyes more like ours than an engineers’ would be.

I do think that a result of all that is that Edwards downplays his own contribution and role somewhat. Towards the end, in his tales of contract negotiations with AOL he seemed to be blowing his own trumpet a bit, but otherwise I suspect a bit of false modesty. Google is a demanding employer that rewards success and probably doesn’t tolerate failure or carry passengers, especially not when it was a smaller company and waiting for its IPO. He would not have managed to stay there for six years without being more impressive than he comes across in the book. It is a bit like Nick Mason’s story of Pink Floyd where he hardly mentions his own drumming.

The other problem about the book is unavoidable – it only goes up to 2005 when Edwards left the company. By the end I was left wanting the book to go on and cover all those products that came along afterwards: Google Earth, Maps, Street View, Buzz, Wave, the instant search preview thing, the privacy controversies, Google Apps, Chrome, Android, the Chrome OS and now Google Plus. I am hoping that somebody will write the follow up.

One of the highlights was a frank (up to a point) discussion of the economics of working for a small start-up and the rewards if it becomes successful. It falls short of actually saying how much an early employee made from their share options when the company went public, but otherwise gives those of us who have always worked in stable, normal jobs a bit of an insight into that culture.

It might seem like I have just pointed out a load of bad things about the book, but they are just comparitive shortcomings – comparing this book to the perfect Google story which will probably never be written for all sorts of practical reasons. As it is this is a good read that is much more suitable to the general reading public than a standard story of a business. It has human interest, a history of a company in its infancy, as well as some background on an industry.

If you wait for the ideal Google book you will wait a very, very long time. This is more than good enough for now, and a lot better than you would expect.

A couple of things stick in my mind about this book. One is the job interview with Sergey Brin and I still can’t help wondering how I would cope with it. Brin basically said he was giving five minutes preparation and then he wanted a presentation explaining how to do something that he (Sergey) doesn’t already know. Talk about high pressure.

What is remarkable is reading about how close to failure the company came several times when it took on new contracts and had to scale everything up at extremely short notice and realising how easily things could have gone the other way at a couple of key moments – and then wondering what the online landscape would look like if Google had not won those early search wars. Would somebody else have come up with Android? Or Street View?

It is a good read: a business book for people not terribly interested in business and a computer book accesible to non-experts but which will probably interest computer experts and business geeks alike.