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Forget 'What are your strengths and weaknesses?' If you want to get the real dope on prospective employees, ask job candidates these seven questions.
When it comes to understanding consumers and what they will want, Apple is one of the strategically smartest companies in the world. And the recently reported deal to acquire music streaming start-up Lala is another indication that the company is planning to become the central cloud for consumers. That raises some interesting questions about what [...]
With so many college rankings and so many different schools rated No.1, it’s hard for parents to know whom to believe. An exclusive MoneyWatch.com analysis has the answer.
Princeton University Press, 448 pp., $29.95There's little ground in the field of ancient history that hasn't been plowed many, many times, and it's rare indeed for new books to advance our understanding more than incrementally. An author seeking readers, when there's little new to tell, must take a familiar story and retell it in a compelling way.
By "compelling," I do not mean "slangy" or "facetious," which is apparently what Adrienne Mayor thinks it means. In her hands, what should have been a fascinating study of Rome's most implacable enemy becomes a grating, wince-inducing example of how not to update an old story.
King Mithridates, for the record, ruled Pontus, a smallish kingdom in what is now Turkey, during the late second and early first century B.C. He built his kingdom into an empire, and then fought a long series of wars against the Roman Republic. For a while, it seemed he might prevail, but he was eventually forced off his throne and driven to suicide by the even more implacable Romans.
Mithridates is also remembered for his skill at poisoning his enemies, and in devising a universal antidote that he took every day of his life. No one knows exactly what was in it, but for centuries people have tried to replicate it, and it was still possible to buy "mithridatium" in Rome as late as 1984.
Mayor, a classics professor at Stanford University, takes this can't-miss material and misses badly. When she's not repetitious, she's unpleasantly colloquial.
Guessing that a youthful Mithridates might have visited the fleshpots of a town called Comana, she notes, "What happened in Comana stayed in Comana." One of his enemies is called a "Bithynian weasel." Various leaders go on a "power trip." At one point Mithridates is "foiled again!" At another, it "looks like curtains" for him.
Argh. By the time you finish this book, taking one of Mithridates' poisons doesn't seem like such a bad idea.
Jean Dubail is the on-line editor of The Plain Dealer.
PublicAffairs, 218 pp., $23.95 There is no shortage of punditry about the future of books. Will paperbacks endure in the digital age? Will every American have an e-book reader in their bedrooms by 2020? Oodles of ink and pixels have been devoted to this question over the past decade, with the pace picking up in this sour economy.
Readers wanting to catch up on this debate might begin with Robert Darnton's "The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future." Darnton is director of Harvard University's Library, a former history professor and newspaper reporter. Widely respected, he is an adroit writer, capable of explaining complex concepts with a light and friendly touch.
"The Case for Books" is not cohesive, though. It is a collection of previously published essays strung together. Many first appeared in The New York Review of Books; others are lectures.
The book is divided into three sections, Future, Present and Past, a clever backward construction. But the issues Darnton addresses -- Google Books, e-books, access to information and libraries -- are not so easily diced up. So within each essay he addresses past, present and future as well.
The individual pieces have great merit. "Google and the Future of Books" takes on the vexing question of Google's grand plan to scan and digitize millions of books. Authors have sued, protesting that the Internet giant infringes upon their copyright.
Darnton walks us through the thorny issues of access versus intellectual property, who owns knowledge and whether Google Books upholds or undermines the company's own "do no evil" mantra.
The entry called "Open Access" is a statement delivered to the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences arguing for a resolution that would require all faculty to make their research findings accessible and free to the public. (It passed in 2008.)
Unfortunately, many of the essays cover the same ground, and the book, read cover to cover, is repetitive. Some pieces are dated. Google Books Search is taken up repeatedly, with Darnton, to his credit, admitting to changing his mind.
Some simple revisions could have easily made these essays work together as a whole. Without that editorial work, "The Case for Books" fails to make a very good case. Ironically, as essays suitable for dipping into here and there -- not unlike, say, browsing a Web site -- the volume works better.
Trubek teaches rhetoric and composition at Oberlin College.
Crown, 275 pp., $26 For decades, Dominick Dunne entertained and informed readers with his books and his column in Vanity Fair magazine. He hosted a cable television show, "Dominick Dunne Presents." As a chronicler of high society, of the rich, famous and infamous, Dunne was witty, catty and frequently right.
After his daughter, Dominique, was murdered in 1982 and her killer received a light sentence, Dunne became an implacable advocate for crime victims. His appearance at trials, in his trademark beautiful suits and tortoiseshell glasses, was usually followed by a juicy account of the goings-on, with insider details that only he captured.
"People talk to me," he frequently said.
He wrote often about billionaire Edmond Safra, who died under what Dunne considered mysterious circumstances. That case is the barely disguised springboard for "Too Much Money," a novel Dunne finished before he died in August.
Its protagonist is Dunne's alter ego, Gus Bailey, who is featured in Dunne's earlier novels, and who is himself a celebrity journalist for "Park Avenue" magazine. He has a cable television series called "Augustus Bailey Presents."
As a fan of Dunne's work for decades, I wish he'd resisted "Too Much Money."
It's poorly written. It meanders. It's repetitive. It badly needed an editor who probably didn't like Dunne so much. As Dunne, that is Gus, wanders the pages, talking of tailors and kleptomaniacal escorts, a sort of plot emerges, wherein rich people are out to stop Gus from writing a novel about the murder of a billionaire.
Those readers who followed Dunne's work -- and those whose lives he wrote about --might have some, small fun guessing which
real-life characters are portrayed in "Money." But probably not, given that even those of us well out of the social loop can figure them out.
Much better to remember Dunne for his society dish and his books "People Like Us" and "The Two Mrs. Grenvilles." Let us raise a glass of something very expensive in thanks.
Michele Ross is a critic in Atlanta.
The Kings come through for the 3rd Battalion, 172nd Infantry Unit so the troups can travel from Camp Atterbury in Indiana to Maine for Christmas.