On the reading table (mid Feb 2009)
I usually like to have five or six books on the go. Over the past few days, I have been shuffling between the following three books.
Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery by Garr Reynolds. I found this one in my college library’s new collection shelf. This book provides insight and inspiration for creating a new style of presentations characterized by simplicity, beauty, and visually engaging imagery. The presentation style advocated in this book is somewhat similar to the approach that I have adopted in my public academic presentations over the past two years. If you are stuck in a PowerPoint rut, this book might help you.
The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too by James Galbraith. The idea of a conservative predator state — that the operations of the state are used principally to further the profits of certain client corporations — certainly seems applicable to the almost 40 years of rule by my province’s (Alberta) governing party.
Galbraith argues that modern conservative governments are not interested in reducing the government and but are in fact interested in using the institutions of government for private benefit, to place them in the control of their friends and to put them to the use of their clients. That is, the purpose of government for modern conservatives is to divert funds from the public sector to the private sector.
The Rebel Sell: How the Counterculture Became Consume Culture by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter. I decided to buy this book after hearing the two authors on a TVO podcast back in May 2007, and I thought at the time that it was a brilliant line of reasoning.
Their argument is that counter-culture consumption does not undermine competitive consumptionbut is in fact the leading cause of it. As a result, mainy left-leaning political/cultural critiques have misdiagnosed the problems in western societies. These critiques, the authors argue, have focused on identifying and undermining an supposed repressive mass society oriented around consumption, when in fact the counter-culture actually feeds competitive consumption. As such, competitive consumerism is actually the outcome of a struggle by individuals to maintain or increase status. As they say, the problem isn’t someone trying to keep up with the Jones, but the Jones who started the consuming one-upmanship.
