September Book Reviews

Moral Mazes: Robert Jackall (free to read on archive.org)

(I can't tell you guys how exciting it is to see any kind of movement on the reading list after a whole year of almost nothin' TaT) 

The way I've been describing Moral Mazes to people is that it's a sociologist who infiltrates a corporation back in the 80's and reports back like it's a nature documentary on middle managers. :P  That's usually cheeky enough to get people either laughing, or asking more questions about it (or in the case of my work team, promising each other we'll read it and do a bingo game to see how many suits in the next town hall say the exact same sayings. luv my peeps).

It's not the most exciting book like some "reveal all" biographies about tech corporations can be (Walter Issacson's Steve Jobs is the quintessential example there), although the surprising humor has had me belly laughing on a greater than five times number - the corporations interviewed are straight up anonymous, so there's no specific tech dirt (Chaos Monkeys, cough). What makes this book unique is how many times I've caught myself going "oh my god so that's what happened in the 2018 coup and send krad to siberia reassignment" beat "ohhhh that's what this SVP meant with that compliment like, today :')" "oh shit that's what happened with mister boyband suit and his minion when they got fired earlier this year...." and so on. That one viral ticktock video of the guy (rightfully) and hilariously mocking why work emails Sound The Way they do is a very spiritually-cousins-to-this book.

Another way I've thought about describing this book, on a more cynical take, is this is what a upper-class parent who's a suit/VP would teach their kids, on a more unsaid/subconscious level, the soft skills stuff you learn in ivy/MBA school by dint of who survives and who doesn't, minus the boring numbers. There's a lot of, mm, class knowledge? that sounds so groady to say, but there is, buried in this kind of book, on the same level that knowing what Berkshire Hathaway is to some circles.

The fact that this book is from the eighties and still so relevant that I can pick out comparable workday examples from a totally different corporation ... I can see this being a valued back pocket read for somebody.


Short Reviews: 

• Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out how Type Works: Erik Spiekermann

Sometimes I'm masochistic enough as a design manager to read "graphic design how-to's" and usually end up swearing off the genre for another six months. This might be one of three design/type books that I'd actually recommend to other people for actually fucking answering the why question. Why this font over that font? What makes this font, this? Why are these visual patterns (eg, a grid) a thing? Why are they useful? Smart, witty humor, not afraid to BBQ design sacred cows that don't make sense, and hits all the right notes with the fundamentals. Surprisingly old and hard to find, though that's almost a positive in my book as it means it's aged well.

• Stone Hotel: Poems from Prison: Raegan Butcher (free to read on archive.org)

I wish I had read this book of poems back in school before I wrote off poetry as a medium as "boring". to be fair the kinds of poems we were reading were, well, boring. Prison poetry, really, survival poetry as I call it - hits hard. This is kind of art that sits you with powerful unplesantness and need.