The House Of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty
Author: Julia Flynn Siler 2007, 452 pp.
My rating 2.5*
Started December 24, Finished December 28, 2007
An account of how immigrant pluck begat a leading producer of premium American wine, only to have the business destroyed through nepotistic incompetence and overreach. This reader’s conclusion after reading the book is that Mondavi was done in by the dynamics of a family business, where seat of the pant decision making ruled and each generation felt a greater sense of entitlement.
For me the story lacked drama, probably because the family members were almost entirely the instruments of their own fate – emotional self-indulgence and capricious decision making leading inevitably to collapse. Another reason for the lack of excitement is that the author seems too intent of moving the story along to pause and explore the more interesting parts of it, for instance when the retired Robert Mondavi, the driving force behind the family’s glory years, find that due to a sudden decrease in the company’s stock price, his charitable commitments exceed his net worth, the reactions of the family member to this potentially humiliating development are given no more play than any of the innumerable petty squabbles also chronicled.
The author seemed to have applied most of her efforts in interviewing all the participants, within and without the family so that almost every point of view seems fairly represented.
However, more effort could have been spent editing and polishing the manuscript which felt like a very extended magazine or even newspaper article. Examples of sloppy writing, editing and reasoning abound:
“Robert assuranced Adams he wanted to keep him whole.” The word should be assured.
“Construction overruns drove the final cost up to as much as $26 million, vastly more than what the architects had originally estimated.” The author would have made a much stronger point had she provided the original estimate and let the readers judge for themselves the scope of the overrun.
A perfectionist design decision leads to buying “specialized tractors that cost $150,000 to $200,000 apiece.” Those numbers are meaningless without knowing how much standard tractors cost, information the author does not provide.
The company provides surprise earnings guidance that “1998 results would be 15 cents below analysts consensus estimates”. No context provided as to what expected earnings were or how big a percentage shortfall this was. If estimates were $5 a share this is not nearly as big a deal as if they were $.50 a share.
“From its record high of $56.75 …., the stock lost nearly a third of its value, tumbling to below $30 a share …” Should read “nearly half of its value.”
[Around the year 2000] “ …, the Oakville facility was bursting at the seams. In the late 1970s, it had produced only about a hundred thousand cases of wine a year.” The paragraph ends here and no mention is made anywhere near this figure as to what the winery was currently producing – only half of the comparison is provided.
The book contains many pointless architectural and decorative descriptions of the buildings and rooms in which meetings were held.
Another gripe of mine is the assumption that the reader is versed in the jargon of the wine world. Terms such as appellation are used without being defined.Different types of wine are often mentioned in the broader picture of business development, without explanations of the differences between the types, e.g. the author mentions that Mondavi was one of the first American companies to concentrate on dry wines instead of sweet ones, without explaining how the two differ.
Friday, December 28, 2007
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
And Then We Came To The End
And Then We Came to the End
Author: Joshua Ferris 2007 389 pp
My rating 2*
Started December 19, Finished Dec 24
Hard for me to believe that e the New York Times named this one of the five best novels of the year. A study of new millennium, post 9/11 office life (though not necessarily office work) at a pay scale above that of the anti-productive drones of TV’s The Office, this novel offers much finely turned prose but little in the way of plot or three dimensional characters. The writing seems to deliberately evoke the unstinting irony of Catch-22 (“… everyone loved Benny which was why some of us hated his guts”) without emulating much of that classic’s pathos or hilarity. While most of Ferris’ book pointlessly smirked its way from one shallowly insightful apercu to the next, it did earn its to stars with a bravura first chapter that would have served the novel much better as a stylistically distinct prologue, rather than as a get-used-to-it prologue, a forma;ly clever narrative device that kept me guessing until literally the last sentence, but most of all, through a divergent centerpiece chapter detailing a character’s coming to grips with a cancer diagnosis that provided in spades the human dimension missing throughout the rest of the book.
Why is it so hard to write a decent novel about office work? I can’t remember one that really resonated with me, and those that I remember at all, Heller’s Something Happened, Max Barry’s Company, left me similarly empty feeling. (I remember among the Heller obituaries of a couple of years ago, one that championed Something Happened as the neglected classic of the genre, so perhaps it’s due for a reread.) And then We …epitomizes the following basic flaw of the genre with its sense that white collar work consists primarily of coffee breaks, goldbricking, gossip and golden age angst; the depictions of office work as portrayed in print, on film, over the airwaves or across a wire would lead their audiences to believe that virtually no meaningful work gets done, let alone that such work might be challenging, engaging and even meaningful to those engaged in it.
Author: Joshua Ferris 2007 389 pp
My rating 2*
Started December 19, Finished Dec 24
Hard for me to believe that e the New York Times named this one of the five best novels of the year. A study of new millennium, post 9/11 office life (though not necessarily office work) at a pay scale above that of the anti-productive drones of TV’s The Office, this novel offers much finely turned prose but little in the way of plot or three dimensional characters. The writing seems to deliberately evoke the unstinting irony of Catch-22 (“… everyone loved Benny which was why some of us hated his guts”) without emulating much of that classic’s pathos or hilarity. While most of Ferris’ book pointlessly smirked its way from one shallowly insightful apercu to the next, it did earn its to stars with a bravura first chapter that would have served the novel much better as a stylistically distinct prologue, rather than as a get-used-to-it prologue, a forma;ly clever narrative device that kept me guessing until literally the last sentence, but most of all, through a divergent centerpiece chapter detailing a character’s coming to grips with a cancer diagnosis that provided in spades the human dimension missing throughout the rest of the book.
Why is it so hard to write a decent novel about office work? I can’t remember one that really resonated with me, and those that I remember at all, Heller’s Something Happened, Max Barry’s Company, left me similarly empty feeling. (I remember among the Heller obituaries of a couple of years ago, one that championed Something Happened as the neglected classic of the genre, so perhaps it’s due for a reread.) And then We …epitomizes the following basic flaw of the genre with its sense that white collar work consists primarily of coffee breaks, goldbricking, gossip and golden age angst; the depictions of office work as portrayed in print, on film, over the airwaves or across a wire would lead their audiences to believe that virtually no meaningful work gets done, let alone that such work might be challenging, engaging and even meaningful to those engaged in it.
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Copies in Seconds: Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox Machine
Author: David Owen 2004 306pp
My rating 3*
Started Dec 12, Finished Dec 14
The story of Carlson who overcame a childhood of extreme poverty to conceive the ingenious insights that would after many more years of struggle in his adulthood eventually result in the “killer app” of the 1960’s, the Xerox 914 plain paper copying machine. The book has two parts, the first and probably more engaging which details Carlson’s life from birth up to the point where he licensed his patents and primitive demonstrations of the real life applicability thereof to the Halloid (later renamed Xerox) corporation and the second which covers Halloid’s attempts to make a marketable product. The first part, characterized by Carlson’s unflinching determination to overcome a long series of obstacles is a more human drama and gives Owen more of an opportunity to express his natural humor; the second part is a technological and corporate drama centered more on a machine than any single relatable individual. The book has a fairly generous number of photographs and illustrations but could have used more to clarify the technical aspects of the story for the lay reader, particularly during a lengthy history of copying/duplication technology. Overall, Owen does an excellent job depicting Carlson’s unwavering commitment to his vision and demonstrating that photocopying, which we now take for granted, unleashed an enormous but unrealized latent demand for an inexpensive, clean and convenient way of copying documents; the extent to which the Xerox machine revolutionized office work, despite of the 914’s utter unreliability – machines often required daily visits from a technician and companies with a need for one often bought two or even three to ensure that at least one was always operational -- is driven home by Owens statement that “… five years before the introduction of the 914, the world made about twenty million copies, almost all of them by non-xerographic means; in 1965, five years after the introduction of the 914, it made about nine and a half billion, almost all of them by xerographically.”
Author: David Owen 2004 306pp
My rating 3*
Started Dec 12, Finished Dec 14
The story of Carlson who overcame a childhood of extreme poverty to conceive the ingenious insights that would after many more years of struggle in his adulthood eventually result in the “killer app” of the 1960’s, the Xerox 914 plain paper copying machine. The book has two parts, the first and probably more engaging which details Carlson’s life from birth up to the point where he licensed his patents and primitive demonstrations of the real life applicability thereof to the Halloid (later renamed Xerox) corporation and the second which covers Halloid’s attempts to make a marketable product. The first part, characterized by Carlson’s unflinching determination to overcome a long series of obstacles is a more human drama and gives Owen more of an opportunity to express his natural humor; the second part is a technological and corporate drama centered more on a machine than any single relatable individual. The book has a fairly generous number of photographs and illustrations but could have used more to clarify the technical aspects of the story for the lay reader, particularly during a lengthy history of copying/duplication technology. Overall, Owen does an excellent job depicting Carlson’s unwavering commitment to his vision and demonstrating that photocopying, which we now take for granted, unleashed an enormous but unrealized latent demand for an inexpensive, clean and convenient way of copying documents; the extent to which the Xerox machine revolutionized office work, despite of the 914’s utter unreliability – machines often required daily visits from a technician and companies with a need for one often bought two or even three to ensure that at least one was always operational -- is driven home by Owens statement that “… five years before the introduction of the 914, the world made about twenty million copies, almost all of them by non-xerographic means; in 1965, five years after the introduction of the 914, it made about nine and a half billion, almost all of them by xerographically.”
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