Book Review – Page 6

Review of Leading Change

Leading Change by John P. Kotter was published by Harvard Business School Press and is an action plan for achieving innovative changes in the workplace. Published in 1996, at the time when the 4^thIndustrial Revolution was just starting to whet the imaginations of investors and all things internet related were hot, the book presents a series of steps for business leaders to help their companies successfully adapt to the changing market conditions. With the increased pressure for efficiency and adaptability to the new market conditions which have increased the speed of business and shaken much of the business environment stability that previously existed.

It is based on John P. Kotter’s extensive research experience and conversations with major business executives that provides him with the crux on which innovation initiatives either fail or flourish: Ideating, enacting and sustaining cultural change in the workplace. It is not enough, he warns, to be aware of new pressures and possibilities for constructing value – to truly adapt requires a long-term view that many managers have been taught vie years of on-the-job experience to not consider. Because of the creation of what he calls a generalized “overmanaged, under led corporate culture” he states that a different type of business figure is needed to help instigate, inspire, and incite meaningful change within companies: a leader.

There is a significant difference between management and leadership, and those that have trained and worked for years in the former typically are unaccustomed to being able to accomplish the latter. They think in terms of weeks and months rather than months and years. They are accustomed to “following the book” rather than reviewing all of the available data that ought to influence future planning, engaging stakeholders on their perspectives and then writing a book. They are typically not very charismatic, but eminently practical. What follows is the book is a detailed overview of a successful change model; explanations as to why it is so important for the steps to be followed in order; examples of effective and ineffective solutions to problems that present themselves in the process considerations to be made to ensure that the change process is fully supported by the middle and upper-level executives; and approaches to ensuring that the cultural changes promoted are sticky.

Establishing a Sense of Urgency
Creatindg the Guiding Coalition
Developing a Vision and Strategy
Communicating the Change Vision
Empowering Broad-Based Action
Generating Short-Term Wins
Consolidating Gains and Producing More Change
Anchoring New Approaches in the Culture

Common errors to organizational efforts include the following: allowing too much complacency, failing to create a sufficiently powerful guiding coalition; underestimating the power of vision; under-communicating the vision; permitting obstacles to block the new vision; failing to create short-term wins; declaring victory too soon; neglecting to anchor changes firmly in the corporate culture. The appearance of these errors within the change effort has serious consequences. New strategies aren’t implemented well; acquisitions don’t achieve expected synergies; re-engineering takes too long and costs too much; downsizing doesn’t get costs under control; quality programs don’t deliver hoped-for results. Kotter also explains how it is that such process deformations can occur and accrues and how to watch out for them.

For instance, if there are no short-term wins built into the process it is likely that it will be abandoned. New forms of business intelligence guiding strategy may be ignored if there are secular reasons for non-performance that are not addressed by management. Interdependent processes that have been marked for change may seem excessive and leads to such an escalation that employees push back. Because of this, it is of the utmost importance that an effective innovation vision not just be presented, but also to be explained, talked about when appropriate in meetings by management, referred to when discussing the rationale behind a change in process that is not always adhered too, etc. These and more examples provide the basis for the specific order of the process described within the book and how to avoid getting off course. Following these steps allows a leader to truly anchor in the novel and innovative approach into the company culture.

Kotter’s depiction of an effective vision is it’s containing the following characteristics:

Imaginable: Conveys a picture of what the future will look like

Desirable: Appeals to the long-term interests of employees, customer, stockholders, and others who have a stake in the enterprise

Feasible: Comprises realistic, attainable goals

Focused: Is clear enough to provide guidance in decision making

Flexible: Is general enough to allow individual initiative and alternative responses in light of changing conditions

Communicable: Is easy to communicate; can be successfully explained within five minutes.

This model is somewhat similar to Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick model of marketing – Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Stories – and similarly emphasizes the importance of interpersonal qualities to gaining buy-in by those involved in the innovation-change process. Some people that don’t follow the new direction will have to be let go, especially those with positions of power whose hypocrisy (saying that they’re following the new direction but actually not) causes friction. The inverse can be said of those that are lone leaders working to assisting in a company’s innovation change project. Kotter tells a story about a General Motors division that had been a highly effective leader of a transformation program, but how after step 7 – Consolidating Gains and Producing More Change – he was immediately fired so that step 8 – Anchoring New Approaches in the Culture – didn’t have a sufficient amount of time to express itself. The result, within 6 months everything went back to the way it was and the gains that were starting to be seen were lost – along with the momentum in the right direction. Only after three stumbling quarters went on did the managers start to admit that they had slipped in their adherence to the structure that was to lead them to success!

Kotter’s cogent and informed book ends with a section that reflections on the modern business world with words that I resonated with given that I’m reading this as part of my doctorate program in Innovation and Technology Management at UPB. The last chapter of the book is titled “Leadership and Lifelong Learning” and in it, he describes how the prototype of the 20thto mid 21stcentury executive is no longer applicable to the modern business world. He shares several anecdotes of entrepreneurs and middle managers that he’s met who, with the combination of inborn ambition and helpful connections and executives who were able to radically scale their leadership skills and thus radically increase the competitive capacity of the businesses that they were involved with. Their willingness to seek new challenges and reflect honestly on their successes and failures leads not only to the expected knowledge and leadership skill increased but an uncanny ability to deal with an increasingly competitive and fast-moving economic environment. Given that this path and those goals were what motivated me to enroll in the program I’m now in, it was nice to read that someone like Kotter in a way confirmed that I was talking the best path to master the skills needed for the age of the 4th industrial revolution.

Review of Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation

Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation by Tim Brown, CEO of the celebrate innovation and design firm IDEO, is not a book by a renowned designer for other designers. Instead, this is a guidebook for leaders – in the creative field and those outside of it – for how it is to bring design thinking into all aspects of a business enterprises’ products and services. Design thinking is a unique approach to creative problem solving that can result in powerful, effective solutions to abstract, multifaceted problems. Throughout the book, Tim Brown cites examples of this from his worth with multi-billion-dollar manufacturing companies; recently founded start-ups; NGOs in the developing world; and health care centers seeking to ensure that they are on the front lines of innovation in order to ensure that the quality of care given to their patients is the best in the world.

Defining design thinking in a paragraph allows to give an overview of what it entails, however, it is best viewed as a set of approaches to problem-solving that includes prototyping early models; testing variations of product or service; scripting improvisational interactions; surveying and anthropological research, and all around obtaining a better contextual view of those involved in a given service milieu. After all, “By testing competing ideas against one another, there is an increased likelihood that the outcome will be bolder, more creatively disruptive, and more compelling” (67).

While engaging with a company that uses design thinking as part of their design process means that deliverables will takes longer to arrive than traditional companies, it’s this sort of divergent thinking that is the route, not the obstacle, to innovation.

While Brown provides a simple set of guidelines for creative leaders, which I’ve copied below, he is more focused on showing how design thinking can be applied to improve the quality of the interpersonal dynamic between companies and their customers.

The 6 Rules for the Best Design Approach

The best ideas emerge when the whole organizational ecosystem – not just its designers and engineers and certainly not just management – has room to experiment.
Those most exposed to changing externalities (new technology, shifting customer base, strategic threats or opportunities) are the ones best placed to respond and most motivated to do so.
Ideas should not be favored based on who creates them.
Ideas that create a buzz should be favored. Indeed, ideas should gain a vocal following, however small, before being given organizational support.
The “gardening” skills of senior leadership should be used to tend, prune, and harvest ideas. MBA’s call this “risk tolerance”. I call it the top-down bit.
An overarching purpose should be articulated so that the organization has a sense of direction and innovators don’t feel the need for constant supervisions.

Brown believes, like many others within the current design and marketing field, that there has been a qualitative shift given the internet. For Brown, we now live in an “experience economy”. This shift is described as one people are no longer mere passive consumers of products and services, but are now more likely to actively participate in some manner – whether it be writing an online review; joining a groups related to a product or service online; or even becoming an advocate of the company in some way. Functional benefits alone are no longer enough to capture customers or create the brand distinction to retain them. Because of these new customer needs and demands, companies must not just innovate their products but also their services. This means that management must sometimes follow the lead of those on the front lines of customer service – after all, the best experiences are not scripted at corporate headquarters but delivered on the spot by service providers

With service-oriented design thinking implementation is everything. An experience must be finely crafted and precision-engineered as any other product, something that is illustrated in the anecdote he provides about Snap-On Tool’s engagement with IDEO. Wanting to ensure that they had a larger place in the market during the upcoming revolution in mechanically-oriented computer technology, IDEO helped craft a narrative of the company’s growth that highlights the strong sentiments of product loyalty automobile mechanics felt for their tools. By designing an interaction, something that allows a story to unfold over time, they were able to better visualize themselves continuing to be a market leader in an age of electronic diagnostic tools.

In the course of his narratives, we are provided many examples as to why Tim Brown thinks that we should think of a designer as “a master storyteller whose skill is measured by his or her ability to craft a compelling, consistent, and believable narrative. It’s not an accident that writers and journalists now often work alongside mechanical engineers and cultural anthropologists in design teams.” Whether it was in IDEO’s work for the European Union to determine how it is that the elderly might use technology to ward of loneliness and build community; helping Gyrus ACMI develop new techniques and instruments for non-invasive surgery; or Marriott to improve the experience of their customers – it’s clear that design thinkers view the world in a radically different manner.

What sort of divergent thinkers should be searched for? Both on the side of those that are on the creative teams and the extreme users of products and services.

Extreme users because they “are often the key to inspirational insights. These are the specialists, the aficionados, and the outright fanatics who experience the world in unexpected ways. They force us to project our thinking to the edges of our existing base and expose issues that would otherwise be disguised. Seek out extreme users and think of them as a creative asset.” (232).

As for those on the team, Tim has a lot to say about the kinds of abnormal people that should make them up. Citing findings from The Opposable Mind by Roger Martin he states that “thinkers who exploit opposing ideas to construct a new solution enjoy a built in advantage over thinkers who can consider only one model at a time.” Integrative thinkers know how to widen the scope of issues salient to the problem. They resist the “either/or” in favor of the “both/and” and see nonlinear and multidirectional relationships as a source of inspiration, not contradiction.” Reading this felt like personal validation, as in my work experiences I’ve frequently felt like the odd person out for the conclusions I’ve reached on issues and how I get there.

In the last section of the book, Brown states that a number of commercial trends convergence points to an inescapable realization: that design thinking needs to be turned toward the formulation of a new participatory social contract. While I agree with him to an extent, I found it interesting that despite his multiple laudatory references to William Morris, founder of the English Crafts movements, there’s no comment made on his socialist orientation.

To me, one of the defining characteristics of avowed socialists is their ability to use what Brown calls design thinking to see that another world is possible, that the conditions of misery in which many people live need not be so and that with collective human action this is malleable. I think it would have been interesting to explore this given the nature of the digression from how to apply design thinking in the business world to the world at large, but that’s better suited for another book.

Review of Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming Obstacles Between Vision and Reality by Scott Belsky, productivity expert and founder and CEO of Behance, is a guide to developing execution skills on an individual and organizational level. The book is in large part about how to use design principles to organize projects. While PMP is the standard for approaching project management in the United States, the reality is that often times the smaller scope of projects for companies with under 50 workers and start-ups don’t require someone with this specialization. Furthermore, the reality is that creative environments are no conducive to such organizational demands for specific procedures, restrictions and processes. The creative worker’s generalized rebellion against these is part of their recognition that there is no one best process for developing ideas. This does not, however, mean that chaos should reign but that other methods must be developed.

The book begins with a discussion of the Action Method, which is a set of general principles and means for organizing workflow such that there is a bias towards action rather than reaction. According to Belsky: “The state of reactionary workflow occurs when you get stuck simply reacting to whatever flows into the top of an inbox. Instead of focusing on what is most important and actionable you spend too much time just trying to stay afloat. Reactionary workflow prevents you from being more proactive with your energy. The act of processing requires discipline and imposing some blockages around your focus.”

In order to prevent this, he provides a number of techniques – such as breaking processes into elementary, actionable steps; maintaining a backburner of low-priority items; and keeping up a daily practice of journaling to ensure that there is as little as possible that is interiorized and thus likely to be forgotten about or causing sub-optimal work due to stress.

There are a large number of actionable insights from the first third of the book as it relates to personal workspace within a company as well as hiring and managerial practices. Some of the takeaways can be summarized as such:

Generate ideas in moderation (more is not always better).
Act without conviction to keep momentum and rapidly refine ideas.
Encourage productive conflict within your teams to refine ideas.
Seek competition; it will boost accountability and strengthen your approach.
Reduce bulky projects to just three primary elements.

The second part of the book focuses on the social, community elements within which creative enterprises occurs. The section on Dreamers, Doers and Incrementalist posits that there are three archetypes for those within the creative business world. The Dreamer is the one that is full of ideas and able to come up with solutions from a wide range of knowledge. These are the people that relish in ideas, but have trouble managing clients, staying organized or accountable, etc. The Doer is the inverse of this. They are able to help Dreamers translate the ideas through a series of specific processes and steps, as well as ensuring that the stakeholders are informed of what is going on and that the bills are paid. Belsky cites a number of famous businesses where such pairs were able to lead their companies to great success. Tim Cook & Steve Jobs of Apple; Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight of Nike; Barry Schwarz and Calvin Klein are some examples of these. The Incrementalist archetype is the combination of Dreamer and Doers. These are rare people that because of their independent attitude and capabilities must learn to work together – as the Doers and Dreamers seem naturally inclined to do – lest their projects falter due to being overwhelmed by the fact that they don’t trust other enough to help them.

The third part of the book covers how to be a respected and effective leader of creative teams.

Incorporating fun into projects whenever possible to keep minds fresh is one of the many pieces of advice that he gives. Citing his interview with Ji Lee, the creative director of Google’s Creative Lab, he illustrates how it is that a number of his personal projects have seen themselves applied in various ways into the professional field – which explains why it is that the company famously allows for 20% of the projects worked on by their workers to be personal projects. After an excessive focus on trying to solve problems, after all, an intellectual plateau can be reached – which is damaging to a creative enterprise.

Additional insight includes picking an appropriately balanced creative team. While it’s understandable that those with a “creative background” would be chosen, the variety of insights gained from having informed perspectives that are vastly different in their composition is also important. This is also why it’s suggested to involved potential end-users of products and services into the development process – something which many companies’s now practice.

Sharing appreciation is also important for managers. Most of the creative workers surveyed cite their rationale for departing a particular enterprise as stemming from a poor work environment wherein compliments towards good work is rare. Belsky cites an instance of going to a storytelling workshop in order to see how it is that merely focusing on the positives within a first edit/prototype story can lead to changes that are encouraging rather than covertly critical.

The section on self-leadership I found to be particularly engaging. In my interactions with a number of team leaders, I’ve frequently seen people acting in emotionally detached, mechanistic manner. Many of them did not seem to have psychologically developed themselves enough to direct their emotions as it relates to work situations in a positive manner, and so did not make the sort of decisions or communicate in a manner with their employees such that it garnered respect and confidence in them.

Review of The Way of the World

The Way of the World by Nicolas Bouvier is an autobiographical tale about the author and his artist friend, Thierry Vernet, at the age of 24 heading out in 1953 from Geneva to the Khyber Pass. Erudite, multi-lingual and modest in disposition but curious by intention – the journal encompasses a year and a half of their explorations, work, reflections and travels in a jalopy decorated in the script of whatever foreign language was dominant in the nation they found themselves in that was meant to elicit sympathy for travelers. With no steady work with which to pay their way, the two find themselves hustling as teachers, artists, lecturers, traders, writers, buskers and other assorted odd jobs and on the receiving end of gracious hospitality many times in the many tongues that they’ve just recently picked up the rudiments of. The journal is filled with anthropological observations about the behaviors and customs of the people he meets, extended descriptions of scenery, humanistic observations, historical asides, and of course many descriptions of car trouble. By the time that Nicolas has arrived at the Khyber Pass, having crossed through Yugoslavia, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan and looks up at his destination – you too can feel a sense of accomplishment, as if you were there with them.

Being a Voyager myself, it’s no surprise that I generally enjoy travelogues. This particular one had been on my Amazon reading list for quite some time, so finding it as I did made me quite pleased to pick it up. Starting in Beograde a cast of characters are introduced, both biographically and geographically. The way that cities, villages and their inhabitants are described by Bouvier are all the product of an erudite and artistic eye. The levels of details have their moments of slowness, for sure, but on the whole

I found Bouvier’s insights into how the local cultures was affected by the larger political struggles that were then going on in the world to be impressive. In The Lion and the Sun chapter Bouvier gives a brief history of why one particular Iranian town bazaar is not nearly as vibrant as it once was by sharing the story told to him by a chain-smoking French Father near the Persian quarter.

In another section in the same passage he reviews the struggles going on in Tehran:

“One the ground floor, the political level, they were busy fighting the Communist threat by using traditional diplomacy – promises, pressure and propaganda – to keep a contemptible, corrupt but right-wing government in power. On the first floor, the technical level, a large team of specialists were busy trying to improve the living conditions of the Iranian People…”

And then based on his assessment from having just been in several villages that

“…recipes for happiness cannot be exported without adjustments, and in Iran the Americans had failed to adapt theirs to a context which puzzled him.”

More often than not, however, Bouvier has his eye on the people immediately around him. Such as the merchants that are hosting or helping them, the bureaucrat that’s ensuring they have all the proper papers, the other interesting people that they meet along the way.

Having lived multiple times in my life out of a backpack for long periods at a time, I can attest to the romanticism and reality of the nomadic life Bouvier describes. The wonderful chance encounters with others that change the way that you look at things. It makes you more sensitive to things in a way that only those that have done it could ever fully understand. And each time you move, you change, it feels you have to tear yourself away from a place where you have learned to live.

Once in Afghanistan Nicolas and Thierry meets a man whose communications are similar to several of those that I’ve heard travelers tell – one wherein the inner-self remains untouched by that which is encountered abroad. Responding with similar disdain to that which I’ve felt, Bouvier’s response was much like my own.

“Maintaining his integrity – remaining intrinsically the same simpleton who first set out? He couldn’t have seen very much, then, because there isn’t a single country – as I now know – which doesn’t exact its pound of flesh.

Yes, that’s what the world does to you when making your way out in it… And that’s what this books helps show – what’s given and what’s taken in a quest for internal development and external adventure.

Review of To Be a Revolutionary by Padre Guadalupe Carney

“The spirit of the Lord has been given to me,
For he has anointed me.
He has sent me to bring the good news to the poor,
To proclaim liberty to the captive
And to the blind new sight,
To set the downtrodden free,
To proclaim the Lord’s year of favor.”

-Jesus in Luke 4:18-19

Padre Guadalupe’s autobiography To Be A Revolutionary is dedicated to the poor people of the world and the biblical quote above opens his tale of transformation from normal North American youth concerned with finding the answers to the bigger questions in life to Jacobin priest in Honduras to Christian Revolutionary. Padre Guadalupe’s autobiography ends in questions as well, though not from his hand but that of his parents. They tell their story of trying to find out his last days.

They know that he joined a group of armed irregular troops protecting the border from attacks and theft by right-wing guerillas supported by America. They knew that Padre Guadalupe was captured and killed in a raid, but the exact events leading to his murder and where his body now lies is unknown. As for those that had previously been arrested that could speak to what happened? All have since been killed. Padre Guadalupe has become one of the many Latin American desaparecidos. As I think this book clearly shows, it’s due to his absolute commitment to helping make Honduras, and to a lesser extent all of Central and South America, a Christian Socialist Community.

The singular focus which Padre Guadalupe shows in his devotion to bettering the life of Honduran campesinos is incredible. After his expulsion from Honduras, over 30,000 people whose lives he has touched in a positive way sign a petition so that he will be allowed to return to the country which he has been naturalized in. But he did not start out with such single-mindedness.

When describing his youth, he frequently recounts his love for sports, his enjoyment of working outside, his gratitude for the blessings and privileges in his life as well as a puckish disdain for authority. Working as an engineer in the European front of World War II and the joy it gives him makes his turn towards the church seem somewhat unusual. However, because of the underlying humanism that he’s brought to his work and romantic relations, and that his brother did so as well, makes the decision to seem natural nevertheless.

Not having great familiarity with the Catholic religion and the training of its clergy, I found the anecdotes and histories that Guadalupe shared to be generally amusing. Especially given that it was occurring at a time when many changes were in the air that would later be codified in the Vatican II council and the 1968 Medellin Bishops conference. The conflicts he narrates about him with his superiors over rules and regulations takes on different tenor knowing that much of what he goes through will soon no longer be requirements. As interesting as these area, however, it was once Padre Guadalupe (he did not yet adopt this name) first begins his time in Latin America that his personality really gets the chance to develop himself in a manner contrary to that of the fake Christians, the violent and duplicitous land-owners, the various forms of vendepatrias and sell-out politicians. Conceiving himself as a clarion voice of truth and justice, he does not dogmatically reject collaboration with the “goddless communists” but sees them as important allies since they fight for the same thing – The creation of the Kingdom of God on Earth.

Because of his advocacy of the poor, even during his period of anti-communism Father Guadalupe faces slander campaigns in the press. It’s this’ along with meeting and interacting on the political level more and more with Marxists; and beginning to read the works of Marx that he starts to understand the traditional antipathy that the church had for such political activists as emerging from the churches defense of private property – the maintenance of which helped keep their coffers filled and clothes gilded with gold.

Whereas previously his work focuses on radio schools to help with literacy, creating workers collectives to better their labor and political conditions; fighting against land seizure; etc. individually – he comes to see this as an interconnected political struggle that must be lead by Socialists and leavened by Christians.

The chapter entitled The Birth of a Christian Revolutionary and other section towards the end Father Guadalupe begins to describe how all true Christians need also be Marxists. Since armed revolution seems counterintuitive to the mission of Christ’s Love, he first explains that Christ’s life cannot be properly understood without a historical, materialist (i.e. Marxist) understanding of the times, that it’s similarly imperative to understand the present in such a manner and then relates this to the Catholic Church’s Just War doctrine:

“Revolutionary insurrection can be legitimate in the case of evident and prolonged tyranny that gravely violates the fundamental rights of the human person and dangerously hurts the common good of the country, whether it proceeds from a single person or from evidently unjust structures.”
When all the other non-violent methods have been tried without success
When the war will no produce worse injustices than the existing ones.
Where there is a probability of succeeding.

In his own words, Father Guadalupe states “being a Christian demands being a revolutionary and a socialist, and to be a revolutionary and a socialist one has to use the Marxist-Leninist science of analysis and transformation of the world, then a Christian needs to understand Marxism.”

While there is little biblical exegesis here on these issues, Father Guadalupe provides the titles of the liberation theology books that have had the biggest impact on his transformation into a Christian Revolutionary – some of which I have linked to below.

More compelling than such hermeneutics the extensive autobiographical descriptions of the type of Christ-driven life Father Guadalupe lived, one defined by total commitment to organizing the poor so that their conditions are better rather than providing guidance to those that are already comfortable, i.e. the bourgeoisie members of the faith, this isn’t really needed. The priests in the book that argue against him, and on behalf of foreign financial interests or domestic juntas set up to protect illegally seized land, come off looking bad. After all, Christ certainly would not have defended those with pockets already bulged from wealth stealing heads of cattle from those that don’t even own a home.

Limited Bibliography

Juan Luis Segundo
Grace and the Human Condition
Our Idea of God
The Sacraments Today
The Evolution of Culpability

Bishop Proano of Ecuador
Evangelization, Conscientization, and Politicalization

Review of The Armies

One of the Colombian novels that I purchased to help acculturate me was The Armies by Evelio Rosero. It won the Tusquets International Novel Prize in Guadalajara, Mexico but nothing from me.

While the pace of the story made it a book I was able to quickly pick up and put down, I found a number of its literary qualities not to be to my taste. Interesting, yes, and I’m glad to have read it – but besides the few long descriptions of unimportant things that I found broke up the story’s pacing, the plot needed more to make it more engaging to my taste.

The story, in short, is of a perverted old school director named Ismael whose life of spying on the much younger female neighbor who enjoys sunbathing nude and being generally skeevy to the local female population is interrupted by armed forces – paras, guerillas and the army – coming to his town and killing and kidnapping several people including, we learn at the end, his wife.

This isn’t the first time such kidnappings and violence has it’s happened. In fact, it’s become an annual tradition for one of the widowed wives to put on a party on the day of her husband’s capture. But since this is happening at a time that Ismael is starting to feel the effects of his 70 plus years, his quest to ameliorate new health concerns causes him to avert meeting some and to encourage him to meet others outside his daily routine. This, along with the eventual realization that his wife is not coming back, gives him a new attitude toward death that causes him to stop caring for his appearance and informs his decisions in dealing with the aftermath of the battle in San Juan – such as picking up and throwing away a live grenade that hadn’t detonated outside the front door that he had “forgot about for weeks”.

Juan Gabriel Vasquez writes about the book in the following way: “The Armies has done what Colombian literature has been trying to do for decades: to chronicle the conflict without jingoism, sentimentalism, or empty rhetoric.” This to me, however, is its greatest weakness as a work of literature. Jingoism and sentimentalism are the organizing principles of the antagonists of the book – and their occlusion to focus on the age and trauma-induced perspective of the elderly Ismael strikes me as an opportunity missed.

Paras, Guerillas, and the Military are all described as having little to no regard for human life – the captain of the military is described shooting civilians in a moment of anger while his troops drug, rape, and assault others while; the guerillas gruesomely decapitate a collaborator and his dog in a way that is meant to highlight their inhumanity.

While the story itself is generally engaging – I find that in contrast to a work like Dona Barbara, which clearly uses the characters in the book to signify archetypes in the Venezuelan llanos and region immediately outside of it – Rosero constructs all his characters as individuals. This itself isn’t blameworthy, but I feel that so much is potentially lost.

As a voyeur and former teacher that appears to know everyone in San Jose, one would expect to have some sort of strong thoughts or opinions about the armed forces which occupy his town and disrupt his life, however he expresses largely only fear and helplessness. The principles behind the motive for violence – to support the state, to contest the state, to achieve bumper profits without the state’s interference – are never reflection upon.

I believe that all this that I perceive as a dearth in Roserio’s work is also a condition of the audience in Colombia as well as taboos limiting political speech rather than aesthetic neglect. In this way the work takes on a different significance other than a novel that missed some opportunities for interesting speech – it becomes an indicator of the type of worldview propagated by those forces limiting potential literary-aesthetic constructions. I this way the book becomes fascinating and the almost hallucinatory trance that Ismael enters into towards the end is indicative of the horror of “magical realism” as living conditions under which one must live and the tensions involved in choosing a political position.

Review of One River

One River by Wade Davis is one of the most compelling ethnographic, historical, biographical accounts I’ve ever read.

The book goes back in forth in time and place – though staying within the orbit of the Amazonian jungle – and covers a wide range of ethno-botanical history. From the great 18^thcentury German naturalist Alexander Von Humbolt whose writing would light a fire in hundreds of explorers to Richard Gill, who was the person responsible in 1938 for bringing to the University of Nebraska voucher specimens or moonseed tube curare that had the properties of increasing muscular relaxation and reducing nausea and vomiting in patients undergoing surgery – which would save countless lives – Davis shows just how much in debt modern medical and industrial science is to the curadernos of the various tribes of South and Central America. This is not just an account of how plants along with various innovations and technologies managed to revolutionize the automobile, health, and other industries but also contain brief accounts of important ethnobotanists that always manage to be fascinating narratives. While the main story is that of Wade Davis’ mentor and professor, Richard Evan Schultes, it is his placement in a tradition of a long line of previous explorers with fascinating stories and historical context that helps make the book so compelling.

After it’s translation into Spanish, it became an overnight sensation in Colombia. Since reading it I’ve had discussions with several people here about it, learned that there is a Colombian company that has ordered research and writing along these lines to be completed in detail about Colombia’s major rivers, and watch an excellent film loosely based on the travels of Schultes and Theodore Koch Grunber called Embrace of the Serpent, which is the source of the screenshots below. I’ve included them as they are excellent points to begin thematic discussions of the book.

Four years before Albert Hofmann accidentally ingested LSD and went on his famous bike ride – Richard Evans Schulte’s found its natural analog in the seeds of the morning glory plant – which was worshipped as a god incarnate of the peoples now living in Mexico.

The American Midwest and Mexico are the places where Schultes first cuts his teeth in research. It’s here that he has his first experiences with psychedelics and despite his Bostonian pride and semi-monarchical learnings comes to perceive the indigenous tribes of the Amazon as more worthy of his attention than the “modern” world.

Davis describes a large number of groups that Schultes, and later he, would encounter and the varieties of their bio-centric worldviews.

“They [the Shuar tribe] believe that ordinary life is an illusion: Everything you see – that mountain, this truck, your own body. The true determinants of life and death are invisible forces that can be perceived only with the aid of hallucinogenic plants” (Davis 147).

Davis drops from the near present to the Colonial past were almost all tribal customs and beliefs were seen as an antithetical to the Catholic worldview. The monks took great care to acts as enforcement agents and Davis covers the various attempts by priests and later politicians to place the responsibility for poor industry on the part of the indigenous.

To motivate their adoption to Western values requires targeted violence. The killing of shamans that know of the rituals to accompany psychedelic mushrooms; the prohibition of rituals considered sacred for eons; the attempted takeover and regulation of the coca leaf industry; the vicious butchery enacted at rubber plantations under the justification that this agricultural lifestyle would help them abandon their semi-nomadic ways and “demon”-worship.

While such colonial and evangelical endeavors was widely described as a means of “bringing Jesus to the poor savages,” the more God was attempted to be brought at the end of a whip the greater the resistance was. Yet such resistance was never fully successful, and hundreds of years later Davis recounts Schultes dismay at learning that a number of peoples had lost their ancestral connections to the plants and animals that they once formed their worldview around.

As time progressed and science advanced, scientific interests in the forest widened. While the focus is on the adventures and misadventures that Shultes takes – filled with tropical illnesses, fortuitous encounters, and major setbacks on government-sponsored expeditions – Davis always makes a point to highlight the various interests interested in exploiting the environment of the Amazon.

Britain’s conflict in India lead to a heightened need for more quinine, and a greater willingness to discipline those that lived in regions rich in it that did not want to work to send it to them. The mining of precious stones and metals, something which had gone on unabated since the Spanish first landed, completely changed the worldviews of the indigenous. People’s that once looked upon gold as sunlight made solid came to see it as something planted in their ground by devils to bring suffering to their people as so many died and were injured extracting it. Natives killed their children at birth rather than have them grow up in servitude.

And then there was the rubber boom, which made the prior inhumanities pale in comparison.

How big was the boom? Well in 1911 “at a time when New York and Boston still had horse drawn trolleys, Manaus had sixteen mile of streetcar tracks and an electric grid built for a city of a million, though the population had yet to reach forty thousand” (Davis 234). People flipped a coin to go seek gold in California, or to go to Brazil to enslave indigenes and have them supply rubber for the ever-growing automobile industry.

Davis shares a similar story about Fordlandia, written about in more detail by Greg Grandin, and other areas which have a quick boom which radically disrupts the local environment and peoples and the bust that leaves the area depressed.

The seizure of Singapore by Japan during World War II lead to the need for new sources of rubber and re-vamped extraction enterprises in South American – something which Schultes is tasked with.

Clearly, a recurring theme of One River is the contrast between Civilization and the Savage. In the way that Davis describes the effects to the land and people touched by industrial civilization, he is clearly no booster of unrestricted capitalism. Not only does capital’s deterritorializing logic lead to people being dispossessed of their traditional lands and ways of life, their profound knowledge as to the effects of plants is as well. His concern is not merely that “science” will lose from their loss, but in his descriptions of the horrors inflicted upon South American natives for quinine, rubber, coca and other plants that industrial civilization itself is a sort of cancer.

Quoting from Schultes’ own writing about his interactions with the Kofan people in 1942, Davis includes the following passage: “The naturalist, interested in plants and animals, both close to the Indian’s preoccupation, usually is immediately accepted with excessive collaborative attention… Until the unsavory veneer of western culture surreptitiously introduces the greed, deception and exploitation that so often accompanies the good of ways foreign to these men of the forests, the preserve characteristics that must only be looked upon with envy by modern civilized societies” (Davis 224).

In close, I just want to share that One River by Wade Davis is a great read and I highly encourage all with an interest in anything that I’ve written about thus far to pick up this incredibly great work.

Review of Doña Barbaba

Doña Barbaba is a compelling epic of the llanos – the easterly region of Venezuela – that translated into several movies and television series. In the backstory we learn that the settler progenitors of the protagonists of the story enacted horrors on the indigenous tribes from the Cunaviche to the Aruaca basin in order dispossess the natives. They were successful in doing so, but as a result of this the families involved were cursed. While something not spoken of, like Voldemort’s name, even generations later it still informs the behavior of those working at the Altamira ranch. There is on area on the property with a tree long ago struck by lightning around which nothing grows. The peons and the ranch hands all avoid this area.

Following the settlement of the area and the curse, the Luzardo family began to have internal conflict. When the family became rich and numerous, some of its members went to the city, and petitioned for parts of the land to be sold. This eventually happened, giving rise to two families in control of this vast region. Whether it was the curse of the indigenous or just the vanity of those engaged in the reprisals, a dispute between the two heads soon emptied nearly both branches of the family.

The laws set up in the wake of indigenous dispossession was according to rules that encouraged many varieties of primitive capitalist accumulative behaviors by hook or by crook. Be it theft of animals by branding over another ranches mark, finding buyers that didn’t care what was what, or enacting lawsuit in the court of a judge that’s already in pocket, the llanos are are place where “the only way to get respect here is to kill someone.” This is because the llanos, like New York City for Carrie, is a place location with a life and personality all of its own.

TV series adaptation of Dona Barbara set in modern times

One of the compelling metaphors mobilized in the beginning is the reflection by the narrator that those that settled the llanos were not entirely men – but were centaurs. This is sensible given the amount of time that they spend on their horses and also the classical conception of them as half-beast half men. They are the ones between beast, or indigenous people, and men, as while they scatter them

Doña Barbara not so subtly represents the settler barbarism required to dispossess people of their historic rights. She has a daughter out of wedlock, Marisela, with Lorenzo, the cousin of the soon to be introduced protagonist Santos Luzardo, but leaves the child to him so that she can focus on accumulating her own ranch.

Illustration by Alberto Nicasio from the Peuser edition

Much like Rosario Tiejeras, which I read immediately preceding this, Doña Barbara was raped as a teenager. Barbara too is associated with magic and murder. Though she has no group of girls that seek to follow her ways, The Ogress as she is called, is also quite attractive and uses her feminine wiles to get what she needs done. Because of this she never needs to pull the trigger on someone who has something she wants or who has insulted her herself, but this is as she has a veritable stable of disreputable men on the run from authorities in other areas are willing to do anything for her should they think that it is what she wants. Doña Barbara’s dalliance with dark rituals is also more than a passing phase. She has a Dark Stranger, code for the devil, which helps her in her plans to enrich herself.

Santos Luzardo, a doctor by education, representing the purportedly calmer and legalistic side of civilization – ironic considering the criminality it took for his family to obtain the land – and seeks to undo the encroachment made on his families property by Doña Babara and her retinue of henchmen.

Romulo Gallegos’ includes a number of songs and poem fragments throughout the book. This impressed and surprised me, as having no real experience working as a cattle hand, I’d never have imagined the degree to which they laud poetry – as if to provide their inner refinement despite their outer simple appearance. In one of many similar passages connecting the cowboy to song and poetry, Gallegos writers the following:

“As evening came on, the cowboys came back in noisy groups, began to talk, and ended by singing their thoughts in ballad form, for if there is anything which must be said, the Plainsman always has a ballad or a poem which says it and says it better than speech.”

All in all I really loved this book, the narrative was compelling, the cast of color characters were lifelike and for a 400+ page book the pace of it was fast. I loved all that proto-magical realist elements in it which showcased the many superstitions and strong beliefs of the people in the region. I look forward to reading this again in a few years and finding new things to appreciate about it.

Review of Rosario Tiejaras

The story of Rosario Tiejaras so strongly resonates with the Colombian and Latin American audience that it has been made into a movie and a T.V. show much in the way that La Femme Nikita has in the United States. Except instead of there being a secretive government organization that uses wayward, attractive youth which was to be executed for their crimes to ensure the maintenance of American power through targeted assassinations by newly minted model-like merchants of death, Rosario has no such assistance other than her brother, Johnefe, a low level associate with the cartel that wants to rise in the ranks by taking risky jobs as a sicaro.

The novel opens in media res by her one-time lover and friend taking her to a nearby hospital in a cab. She is bleeding extensively after being shot and is badly injured. The first sentence is one of many that I find utterly compelling, so am sharing it here:

“Since Rosario has been shot at point blank range while she was being kissed, she confused the pain of death with that of love.”

With this frame narrative established, we then learn about the backstory of the girl that the narrator is in love with despite the many red flags.

Rosario is 15 years old mestiza. Her parents came from the country in search of work – but lacking connections and skills, they soon turned to scavenging the city garbage. Her mother later become trained as a seamstress and got security as a live-in maid, but after the pregnancy was discovered her father left.

Tijeras, or scissors in Spanish, is not a common surname. In fact, it’s not a last name at all. Rosario explains received this nick name after she’d castrated the man who’d raped her when she was twelve. She’d run into him a few months later, seduced him and then brought him back to her house. Once there, she gets her revenge and he fled the house screaming, leaving a trail of blood from between his legs. He’s never seen again.

This is one of the many men that Rosario kills. Rosario doesn’t shy away from violence when disrespected, shooting and killing several people at point blank range.

Jorge Franco’s fiction is so powerful as rather than simply writing a sensational, but true to real life story, he is able to connect the hyper-sexualized and hyper-violent Rosario Tijeras to the broader historic forces pushing her in this direction without it being preachy. In a number of little details sprinkled throughout, we get to learn about the places where she picks up the view that her actions are not just acceptable but necessary if she is to have any chance at a life that doesn’t replicate what she sees as her mother’s endless drudgery. She wants to win at life, however winning in her case is difficult given her conditions and dangerous considering what she decides to do to achieve this. Commenting on the latter, here’s what the narrator says:

“Rosario’s fight isn’t so simple, it has very deep roots, from long ago, from earlier generations. Life weighs on her with the weight of this country, her genes drag along a race of sons of plenty and sons of bitches who with the blade of a machete cleared the pathways of life… Once proud, we are now ashamed, without understanding how, why, and when it all happened. We don’t know how long our history is, but we can feel it’s weight.”

For Rosario, this weight takes on a number of forms.

For one, on her body. Whenever she kills someone, she puts on weight and isolates herself. Once back to her normal form, she is able to exploit her beauty and sexual skills to get what she needs. And what a beauty she is.

And also in her search for meaning in the world. When her prayers to the Virgin of Perpetual Help and Christ Child goes unanswered, she briefly dabbles with Satanism. This ends, however, after she kills one of the members of the sect – which leads to a number of rumors being circulated about her. The stories are a mixture of invention, reality and an admixture of the two – and soon enough a number of other girls start adding the words “Rosario” or “Tiejeras” to their name.

The narrator at several points describes Rosario, in fact, less as a human than as a divine figure, an avatar of Death and Beauty wrapper up into one person – a dark eyed whore in a mini-skirt with bare-midriff top. The incarnation of Fear and Attraction wrapped up in one person, Rosario is both human and symbol.

The Poetry of the Dispossessed

“Did you ever notice that death rhymes with breath?” Rosario observed.

I was dabbling in poetry those days, and since she was curious I get her a little involved with what I was reading. She related everything to death, even the explication of my poetry…

There was a time when the three of us would shut ourselves up for an entire Sunday to smoke marijuana and read poetry. We would find phrases that made us think we understood the world now, others that made us nod our heads, leaving us speechless…”

In a country where saying the truth can lead to death, it’s perhaps not surprising that the three characters here all feel an affection for poetry – with all its creative and innovative ways for expression.

In fact, with this in mind it’s worth noting something that Rosario says in the opening of the book.

“Nobody’s ever going to kill me. I’m a weed.”

Notice the “weed” tattoo on her right hand…

And though in the last pages we learn of her death, there is a deeper degree of truth to her statement. Jorge Franco’s character may have died, but the soil within which she grew still remains and there are many other similar stories just like Rosario’s. The Narcos, which sometimes take her away for a week or more from Emilio, never take only her but have a clique of bad bitches that are able to join her at a moment’s notice.

While not evident by the book, I’ve spoken with Colombianas who’ve watched Sin Tetas Sin Hay Paradiso and viewed it as a guide rather than a warning, and who see the video for Beck G’s Mayores as inspirational rather than a sad commentary on Colombian society. Which is sensible, in a way, as those that would morally condemn the values within such cultural productions and the behaviors described therein rarely look at the structural issues.

While it’s not related particularly to this book, it’s this fact that’s made me think that there’s a connection between consumption of trap and places where the informal economy is a large means for people to get their needs met. It seems an intuitive truth worth writing more detail about elsewhere.

While I found myself sometime cringing at the narrators repressed love for Rosario, I am quite a fan of Jorge Franco’s urgent narrative style and the manner in which he is able to make her and her story so compelling.

Review of Red April

By the end of reading Red April by Santiago Roncagliolo I was incredible upset. Not because of any other reason than the character of Chancaltana has gone through an extreme personality shift such that when his actions outside Ayachuco – population 1,575 – are described I wished that the author continued to describe his story there. I liked it so much, in fact, that I think I may use the name of the prosecutor in one of the passages of Unravelling so that he may continue to live and struggle.

In Ayachuco, a rural region of Peru on the outskirts of civilization, where Sendero Luminosa was once a major power against any sort of Government encroachment, in an area with a large percentage of indigenous people still live traditional lives, a civil war long announced in the press of the capital and its environs continues – though only at a simmer. Commenting on the state of things in the region in a nearby town, prior to an election to be held at gunpoint, one of the soldiers openly states: “There’s no law here. Do you think you’re in Lima? Please.”

The military government decreed by Fujimori is highly repressive, it’s ranks are paranoid should their crimes against the people in their zeal for Order come to light and despite the claim that peace has been brought to the region, they still control a number of police and civilian functions. In the interactions between anyone thought to represent the government and “normal people” there is a type of abject, terrified submission to the wishes of the officials that shows just how hard the brutality is against those who did not follow orders. Bolstering their presence are loudspeakers in all four corners of the town square wherein the writing of those that submitted to the government are read aloud, examples for how to behave for everyone listening.

Santiago Rancagliolo’s literary brushstrokes of the town of Ayachuco, its people and its environs is stark and desolate. Chancaltana has arrived in Ayachuco shortly after an usually corpse has been found – badly burned and missing a limb. Within a few days a number of other corpses are discovered. As Chancaltana seeks to uncover the perpetrator, he discovers a connection between the religious calendar, which will soon draw many domestic and international tourists to the tow because of the religious processions, as well as an ancient, indigenous prophecy and the military.

Felix Chancaltana Saldivar is an investigative prosecutor that arrives into the town following the death of the previous prosecutor. Electing to return to his town of birth following his wife’s divorce of him for having no ambition, he is an unusual fellow. While he has high-brow cultural aspirations evident in the fact that the meticulously writes reports that may only be read by one or two people. After one such creation, he looks at it and “…repeated to himself with satisfaction that in his lawyer’s heart, a poet struggled to emerge.”

By no means a sympathetic character, Chancaltana took a little bit for me to warm up to him. The government functionary type that is always relying upon legal formulas and precedence to guide him, it wasn’t until the end of the novel that his obsession with everything being by the book as well as his fixation with his dead mother finally made sense. It was a little infuriating to not know this aspect of his story for so long, but was a good tension builder for when the story is finally told it’s one suspenseful component among others that results in a crescendo of revelation. As for the romantic subplot, if one can really call it that, let’s just say that even with the norms of the place being what they are what transpires continues the trend of disdain for the character.

Civilians holding up photos of loved ones that were non-combatants killed by the Peruvian military.

I don’t want to reveal too much, as I don’t want to expose any more the elements of this suspenseful small p political thriller that should definitely makes its way to your reading list. Also, here’s a link to historical information on the civil war in Peru. If the book didn’t make you more curious as to the reality of Peru at the time, I’d be highly surprised. I, for one, just put The Corner of the Living: Ayacucho on the Eve of the Shining Path Insurgency on my Amazon wish list.