Things have been pretty heavy on this blog lately, with posts about my eye and my impending layoff. I thought I’d keep it a little lighter today.
It took me a little longer than usual to get through “The Economist” this past weekend at the bookstore. Apparently it was “Take Your Screaming Toddler to Barnes & Noble” night. I had no idea. That, combined with a guy in the cafe with an abnormally booming voice made it a little difficult. I don’t want to complain too much as it’s a coffee shop and not a library, so it’s fine to talk, but it was weird. When the guy left the rest of us actually exchanged looks and raised eyebrows. He wasn’t raising his voice or anything, the sucker just carried.
It’s normally fairly quiet in there. People peck away at research papers and dissertations on laptops, others play chess, groups of teens sit together at a table and…well, they just seem to text more than anything else. Many times the whirring of the cappuccino machine is about the only sound. Oh well, the appearance of a few loud kids wasn’t about to deter me.
Anyway, I have managed to knock a few things off my reading list lately so I thought I’d share.
“Dethroning the King”: I came across this one in the business section, but it turned out to be a story of a father and son whose dysfunctional relationship and clashing personalities led to the unthinkable – the venerable American icon Anheuser-Busch company being sold to Brazilian brewing giant InBev.
The father is August Busch III, who pushed is own father out of the top spot and proceeded to make Budwesier not just part of the fabric of St. Louis but also the dominant beer in the country. He also trusted absolutely no one, and created a free-spending and insular culture at Anheuser-Busch that made it vulnerable when the beer business began thinking globally.
Eventually, August III reluctantly hands the reigns over to his son, August IV (known either affectionately or derisively as The Fourth) and then spends the next year and a half undermining him. The culture clashes between the tightfisted policies of InBev and the open-checkbook style of operating used by Anheuser-Busch (August III flew his own helicopter to work every day) make for interesting reading. The story of how a hapless August IV tried to keep his father from pulling the rug from under him, but never really mustering up the will to get in the trenches of boardroom warfare show how the apple can sometimes roll very far away from the tree indeed.
What struck me was how close the company came to heading off InBev at the pass. Anheuser-Busch’s flirtation with Modelo (the makers of both Corona and Modelo beers) would have saved the company, but the castle walls had been built too high to see daylight. Soon after, InBev stormed the gates and one of the great American companies was sold.
This book isn’t as salacious as James B. Stewart’s “DisneyWar,” but it is an interesting story of how an American icon can fall, and just how fast it can all happen.
“Moneyball”: You don’t have to be a baseball fan to enjoy this book, which a movie studio is betting on as they’re doing a film version of it starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill. I saw a trailer for the movie and it made me want to go back and read the book again. Baseball is the setting for this non-fiction book by Michael Lewis, who has written some of the more engaging business books of the past few years. Lewis has a talent for taking the complicated numbers of baseball and the business world and making them more understandable. It’s less about baseball than a story of a maverick thinker who bucks decades of tradition. Moneyball focuses on Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane, who built a low-budget major league team that won by turning the conventions of baseball on its ear.
Beane didn’t invent the system, which he readily admits. That evolved from the sabremetrics movement led by Bill James, but Beane was the first to put it into practice in the majors. The force of Beane’s personality is entertaining too, as he comes off as a smart but annoyingly smug guy, always supremely confident that he is the smartest man in the room. Beane even has a fatalistic complex about himself as the poor tortured artist whose work is unappreciated. Still, his theories on why traditional baseball scouting and stats are inherently flawed, and what he did to ignore a century’s worth of conventional wisdom and succeed is an intriguing story.
“Front Porch Prophet”: This novel by Raymond Atkins tells the story of two friends in a sleepy Georgia town whose lives are altered in quick succession. A.J. finds himself unemployed, while his best friend Eugene finds out he’s dying. While it sounds like the setting of a tragedy, this book is actually very funny. Atkins writes in a breezy style, using narrative flashbacks to flesh out his characters, all of which have more depth than you anticipate at the beginning. These are generally likeable people going through some hard times with a sense of humor and a strong will. It certainly made me laugh more than just about any book I’ve read in the last couple of years, and that humor makes the difficulties the characters experience all the more heartfelt.
This is a strong first effort at a full-length novel from Atkins, who writes a humor column for a few regional publications in the South. I look forward to reading more of his work.
“Dead or Alive”: This is one of two Tom Clancy novels that have popped out in the last few months. It’s a bit of a surprise as Clancy hadn’t written a fiction book since 2003’s disappointing “Teeth of the Tiger” Both of these new books have co-authors, with “Dead or Alive” listing Grant Blackwood as Clancy’s collaborator. I don’t know how much was actually written by Clancy and how much was Blackwood’s work, but it’s a good story using the same characters that made Clancy a brand name (he got his start with “Hunt For Red October,” then went on a run with these characters that included “Patriot Games,” “Clear and Present Danger,” “Sum of All Fears,” “Debt of Honor,” and “Executive Orders” before the quality began to tail off). This book is better than his last couple of efforts, and follows a former president, his son (now a spy) and a network of top-level operatives as they attempt to thwart a series of simultaneous terrorist attacks.
Clancy can still plot out a solid political thriller and this one is a worthy successor to his earlier books. I breezed through this one and enjoyed it a lot. It’s good to have Clancy back.
Moneyball trailer
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