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Mind Candy
Intelligence in 520 pages or less
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January 10, 2008 Broken Trust
By Samuel P. King & Randall W. Roth
[BOOK] Subtitled "Greed, Mismanagement & Political Manipulation at America's Largest Charitable Trust," Broken Trust is a brutal, rapid-fire book recounting the scandals that rocked Kamehameha Schools and the Bishop Estate, a charitable trust created by Bernice Pauahi Bishop. Amazingly, the Bishop Estate is the largest charitable trust in the U.S. If you're like me—too young to have been paying attention during the buildup of the scandals and away at school during the explosion—it's a great way to catch up on important events that are impacting Hawai'i today. It's a political/economic soap opera set in our own backyard. You'll recognize a lot of the characters from the local news; maybe you've even seen them in person, since some of the clowns who got egg on their face in this mess are still in the public spotlight. I guess a lot was going on while I was busy playing Steal Base and milk-covers… 324 pages. [Jordan Hart]
The Race Beat
By Gene Roberts & Hank Klibanoff
[BOOK] For American reporters in the 1950s and '60s, there was no more harrowing, gut-wrenching or important story than covering the civil rights movement. Black reporters had the added bonus of risking death as they tried to report on the calculated violence that surrounded voting and civil rights efforts in the South. What journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff have done with this magnificent work (it won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006) is nothing less than showing readers what it was like to try to ask questions and file reports while cracker sheriffs and white mobs savagely beat black men, women and children doing nothing worse than marching down a Selma or Birmingham street. We owe triumphs like the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act to activists like Martin Luther King, Jr., but also to the reporters who worked the story—were it not for the latter, it's doubtful anyone would have paid attention to the former. 518 pages. [Anthony Pignataro]
The Wisdom of Crowds
By James Surowiecki
[BOOK] In grade school, did you ever try to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar? I did, but I never won the jellybeans, which is probably why I'm writing this. According to James Surowiecki, in the great jellybean guessing game we call life, averaging the guesses of everyone in the class will give you a guess more accurate than the most accurate jellybean guesser in the class, the vast majority of the time. If you're interested in learning a little something about the collective intelligence of the people who walk past you on the street everyday, pick it up. The underlying theme examines how the collective answer of a group of random people will always be a better answer than an individual, even an expert. I know it's "common sense" that a group of people is just a mindless mob, and maybe so if they're poring through the doors of Wal-Mart at 7 a.m., but there appears to be a flip side to that very same group of ravenous consumers, under far different circumstances, of course. After all, everyone has amazing potential in the right context—even the mouth-breathers. I'm not advising that you get your medical advice at the county fair, but Surowiecki is clearly on to something. 336 pages. [JH]
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