Read Gleick first and then turn to this informative, ingenious book.
An exploration of the amorphous concept of uncertainty, “an essential part of the human condition.”
Uncertainty is another name for chaos, a fascinating concept largely unknown until the 1950s. Palmer, a professor of physics at Oxford, works hard to explain it to lay readers. He begins with Newton’s law of gravity, which can predict the Earth-sun orbit precisely into the distant future but only works with two gravitating bodies. After three centuries of searching for a formula to predict the positions of three or more, French physicist Henri Poincare proved that “no formula exists.” Planetary orbits are “chaotic.” Like weather or stock prices, “the system appears reasonably predictable until, out of the blue, it behaves unpredictably”—which means that it’s not impossible that the Earth will one day wander out of its orbit. One of Palmer’s main characters is meteorologist and mathematician Edward Lorenz (1917-2008). Before Lorenz, scientists believed that if you had enough accurate information about current conditions (temperature, wind speed, humidity), you could feed the details into a powerful computer and predict weather far into the future. Lorenz proved that this was impossible; tiny changes in initial conditions can blow up into huge errors. Chaos theory doesn’t make prediction impossible, only erratic over the short term. Weather forecasts have grown more accurate, but they’re now expressed in percentages. Palmer believes that embracing uncertainty might explain phenomena considered hopelessly complex, and he illustrates his points with densely argued chapters on financial crashes, war, climate change, pandemics, and brain function. The author is a fluid writer, but the sections on complicated areas such as fractal geometry and quantum uncertainty may overwhelm readers unfamiliar with college physics and calculus. They should prepare by reading James Gleick’s Chaos, still in print after 35 years—and which Palmer calls “masterful.”
Read Gleick first and then turn to this informative, ingenious book.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5416-1970-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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