In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As a tech blogger and journalist I've been following Google pretty closely since 2006, and I was using their products before that. But for the most part I've focused on the parts of Google that everyone sees: the finished products. Steven Levy took a peek behind the scenes and paints an intriguing picture of a company that's combined openness, secrecy, and innovation to create an empire out of products that work extraordinarily well... but which scare the pants off of some people who stop to think about just how much information Google has about all of its users.

I'm a big fan of Levy's skills at turning highly technical topics into engaging narratives by focusing on the people behind the products. But in Google's case, that's an awful lot of people. At last count the company had around 20,000 employees, and while Levy didn't interview them all, unlike some of Levy's earlier books, In the Plex feels more like a series of distinct articles than a comprehensive story.

But most of those articles are worth reading and I enjoyed getting a feel for the people behind the search engine, email system, book scanning product, and high profile decisions to enter... and then exit China, among other things.

There's no way to avoid the fact that this book feels like a work in progress. It was published in April, 2011 -- when Google's social tools included Buzz, Orkut, and Latitude, but months before Google Plus or Search Plus Your World arrived on the scene.

But In The Plex paints a picture of how the insiders at Google think and provides a framework for understanding some of the things that have happened since the book's publication -- and a picture of what happens when a startup out to change the world becomes the established player that already did.

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Force of Nature: How Wal-Mart Started a Green Business Revolution-and Why It Might Save the World by Edward Humes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There are a lot of reasons to hate Walmart, and while Humes skims over them he doesn't ignore them. The company puts smaller stores out of business, squeezes its suppliers so that it's tough to make a profit (but it's tough to say no to the biggest retailer in the world), doesn't pay its employees a living wage, faces more gender discrimination lawsuits than I can count... and the list goes on.

But over the past half decade Walmart has also made some astonishing strides toward greening its business.

The sheer economies of scale are astounding. Walmart has enough locations and employs enough people that simply turning off the lights in the vending machines in employee break rooms saves $1.5 million per year.

Any small change the company makes has a huge impact. So when Walmart decides to reduce packaging, make vehicles more fuel efficient, use organic cotton, or make other changes, it can generate millions of dollars in savings and/or have far-reaching effects on the environment.

Things get even more interesting when the company starts looking at ways to encourage suppliers to make their industries (dairy, fish, clothing, electronics, and others) more sustainable.

Of course, the fact that Walmart can have such an impact is also evidence that the company is by its very existence bad for the environment. Walmart and other national and international retail chains depend on shipping supplies and finished products across huge distances in huge quantities -- and many of those items are things that nobody really needs in the first place.

It's nice to think that the solution is to end the era of big-box retailers and go back to mom and pop stores, but that doesn't seem very likely given the current state of affairs, and Humes paints a pretty good portrait of a company using its clout to generate the next-best thing: a world where mass produced products aren't simply stocked on store shelves as if they sprung from the ground already finished. Instead, retailers like Walmart are taking an active role in determining the environmental impact of everything they sell -- and soon may be taking more steps to ensure that consumers also have access to that information to help make better informed choices.

I'm not sure that I'm any more likely to shop at Walmart after reading this book, but it does make me feel slightly better about the direction our consumption-based economy is headed.

My carbon footprint is smaller than most people's. I don't own a car. I work from home. I don't eat meat. And for the past year I've been buying most of my produce from local sources at farmers markets.

But it will take a lot more than my personal choices to change the world... and while Walmart and stores like it are certainly part of the problem, some are also starting to become part of the solution... to a degree.

Humes could probably spend a little more time in this book discussing the areas where Walmart has fallen short of its environmental promises -- and in other areas as well. But he does a good job of describing the process of Walmart's greening since 2004 by putting human faces on the story and profiling the people that are making things happen... or at least trying to... or at least saying they're trying too...

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A Princess of Mars: John Carter of Mars, Book One by Edgar Rice Burroughs
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

After seeing a couple of trailers for the new movie John Carter I was wondering what the heck I just saw... and decided to give the first book in the series I try.

It takes a hefty amount of suspension of disbelief to read a sci-fi adventure written a hundred years ago. There's a lot that Burroughs clearly gets wrong about gravity, energy, and of course Mars. There are also some baffling elements such as the idea that human-like species could have evolved independently on multiple worlds, but the Barsoom series is hardly the only offender there.

Burroughs doesn't offer much in the way of character development or even a very complex society. Really? Everyone on the planet speaks the same language and has the same telepathic capabilities?

The tale is also rather violent.

But you know what? It's still a fun read. If there's one thing Burroughs manages to do, it's to grab your attention and keep you wondering what happens next.

I wasn't sure at first whether I'd pick up the next book in the series, but after reading the last few pages I don't think I have much choice.

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The Deal from Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers by James O'Shea


O'Shea may think he's written a book about how profit-driven, ego-centric people ruined some of the nation's largest papers, but that's because his own biases are at work here.

Actually what this book does is paint a picture of why it's hard to run a newspaper as a for-profit business with the goal of constantly increasing revenue.

He belittles the bosses that want to print the stories "people want" involving celebraties and gossip rather than important news of conflict, politics, and holding government accountable. But he side steps the question of paying for that coverage.

In a perfect world, readers that want to support different types of news would pay for the publications where it exists. Or advertisers would pay to reach those readers. But one problem that people consistently ignore is that advertisers have long been throwing money away on traditional media because there's simply no way to gauge how readers are reacting.

Online ad rates aren't lower because they're less effective, but because they're more effective... but they don't pay enough to support the kind of journalism great papers have produced over the years.

Whether intentionally or not though, he makes a pretty strong case for a public broadcasting style form of member-supported public interest journalism.

Update: OK, I got to the end of the book, and it turns out O'Shea *does* realize that the problem is that journalism emerged as a profession with a non-profit ethos and a for-profit business model. He's now heading up the non-profit Chicago News Cooperative, which I hadn't realized when I started reading. It may very well be a model for the future of news.

That said, it still bugged me how much he belittled local news coverage and praised national and international reporting as a matter of course -- he also tended to paint all online news with the same brush as second class citizens, even though he's now heading up an online news outfit