Neil Hopcroft

This is a really cheap book. Its almost like they didn’t bother to proof read it. When was the last time you read a book with two chapter 11s? The story itself is quite disposable, generic sci-fi, it doesn’t have anything to recommend it, but equally, its not totally appalling. It doesn’t seem to correspond […]

Theres something easy about reading Coupland. His work is quite disposable at some level but at another it describes people who are enough like me that I can feel myself being drawn into their world. This book takes us into the world of a games development company, with a small group of six developers stuck […]

“Failed states” is another fairly typical Chomsky book. I find his writing style quite an easy read, he has a kind of clarity that you rarely get with political writing. For this book he compares the actions of the United States government with their descriptions of countries they have attacked, and specifically the justifications for […]

It is interesting reading this book now that I’ve moved to the area in which much of it is set – the descriptions make it seem very much more rural than the sprawling commute belt I know. While the story is familiar, from the Jeff Waynes version, the book gives a very different feel to […]

This is a book that has been sitting in my in-queue for a long time, I’ve finally gotten around to reading it. Eric takes us on a tour of the fast food industry, from the origins of the modern hamburger, via the sweatshop kitchens and slaughterhouses, to where he thinks the future of the industry […]

Barton Biggs is not the kind of guy I feel I would get on with if I met him on the train. Or rather, he wouldn’t get on with me. He’s a money man, arrogant and brash. This is an autobiographical work, but there seems not to be any particular order to it. Like a […]

This book is a whirlwind tour through different sales techniques appropriate for different stages of a companies (or products) development. It is built around a tortured analogy of inventing wheels, developing them to be used in different ways, until finally they hit the FMCG end of spectrum. Some of the ideas are nice, we follow […]

This book is quite luminous – at least the edition I was reading, good job you can’t see that while you’re reading it, it’d be most distracting. I was a little disappointed with this book, I’ve read Red Robe, another of his books. Lucifers Dragon seemed far more near-future, with a lot of fairly minor […]

A winners tale of greed and glory in the internet wars. Charles Ferguson was a founder of Vermeer Technologies, the company that created Frontpage, technology now owned by Microsoft. This book is in two sections, first covering the rollercoaster ride of Vermeer, the second, smaller section an analysis of the potential future(s) of the big […]

You either love Chomsky or hate him, theres very little middle ground. This book is a collection of interviews with him over the last couple of years, covering many topics mainly around Americas empire and how they view the rest of the world. He gives the impression of someone who has a lot of information […]