Archives for reviews - Page 34
Book review – Strategy Bites Back by Henry Mintzberg
Strategy Bites Back: It Is A Lot More, And Less, Than You Ever Imagined by Henry Mintzberg My rating: 5 of 5 stars I read this as pre-reading before studying Strategy with the Open University. It was very clear and easy to read, explained things ownderfully, made me laugh in places, and was genuinely useful in getting my head round what strategy actually is. The book is a series of short articles, put into language most people can read rather than the drier academic style or cringeworthy business speak that these sort of books are often written in. This is a plain english text that works. I'd certainly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand strategy, read this before trying anything else (and as a second reading I would go for Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why…
Book review – Casting Shadows Everywhere by L.T. Vargus
Casting Shadows Everywhere by Vargus My rating: 4 of 5 stars A dark and twisted coming of age tale with a satisfying conclusion. Told as a teenage boy's journal this breaks a couple of writing rules, it is mostly tell with little show, which works because this is a journal. There are stories through the journal of the protagonist's fevered dreams, and we get 'then I woke up' a couple of times. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, we get a good view of the inner psyche of the character (helped along by the fact that there is also a commentary on what he's learning in Psychology 101 that seems to mirror some of what is going on in his life). The basis of the story is that Jake has grown up in a single parent family. Lacking a…
Book Review – Flames in the Field by Rita Kramer
Flames in the Field: Story of Four SOE Agents in Occupied France by Rita Kramer My rating: 3 of 5 stars While this has lots of fascinating information about SOE Operations in France in WW2 it needs a better editor. The nature of the story, primarily of the secret operations in German occupied France in 1943 and the SD penetration of the SOE network, is one of many parallel threads and the uncovering of a mystery. So this makes it hard to just write a linear narrative, and the author has done a pretty good job of writing very readable prose that clearly explains what is going on. However there are a few places where the ordering of the material goes backwards within a few paragraphs and crucial pieces of information are given out of order. The book shows an…
Book Review – The Summer Isles by Ian R MacLeod
The Summer Isles by Ian R. MacLeod My rating: 4 of 5 stars An alternative history through the eyes of a gay Oxford don. The premise is that the Germans won the First World War, their March 1918 offensive succeeded and the war ended in the August with the defeat of France and Britain. The Peace Treaty strips Britain of a number of colonies and overseas territories in much the same way that the Germans were in our own history. Britain has a violent period in the 1920s and a former corporal, John Arthur, becomes the leader of a Modernist movement. The story starts in the early part of 1940 when the Empire Alliance has been in power for at least a decade. A number of short victorious wars has restored much of the Imperial prestige lost at the end…
Book Review – Memory by Linda Nagata
Memory by Linda Nagata My rating: 4 of 5 stars I very much enjoyed this and there is a real sense of both the characters and the setting developing over the course of the story. The back cover blurb describes it thus: "A quest, a puzzle, and multiple lives: On an artificial world with a forgotten past, floods of "silver" rise in the night like fog, rewriting the landscape and consuming those caught in its cold mists. Seventeen-year-old Jubilee knows that no one ever returns from the silver--but then a forbidding stranger appears, asking after her beloved brother, lost long ago to a silver flood. Could he still be alive? And why does the silver rise ever higher, threatening to drown the world? Jubilee pursues the truth on a quest to unlock the memory of a past reaching back farther…