There’s another round of book reviews from some of the big business magazines. My personal favorite is from Business Week and Christopher Farrell. In an article entitled “The Squeeze on the American Worker,” Farrell takes a look at two books with similar themes, Peter Gosselin’s High Wire and Steven Greenhouse’s The Big Squeeze. This paragraph sums the books’ importance nicely:

Gosselin and Greenhouse are award-winning journalists with the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, respectively. Not surprisingly, both books are well-written with clear themes and telling anecdotes. Neither book is a revelation, of course, since much has already been said in recent years about America’s shredded social safety net, middle-class families’ ever-more-vexing economic circumstances, and the distressing working conditions faced by low-income employees. Instead, what makes the two volumes timely and important is their powerful, authoritative evidence that a lot of people are rightly anxious about their economic prospects–worries exacerbated by an election season and ongoing economic woes.

Next, we have Roger Lowenstein’s review of Steve Miller’s The Turnaround Kid for Conde Naste Portfolio. Oddly enough, there’s a line about the author in this review that relates to the theme of the books in Inc.:

Though a down-to-earth guy–one who never outgrew his lumberjack plaids–Miller cannot help sounding preachy when he talks about the great things he did for America by driving factory wages down near the level of those of Wal-Mart employees.

That sounds like quite a knock, but Lowenstein does go on to state that “Still, this is a highly engrossing memoir” and that “No one executive can fix all of corporate America’s problems, but Miller came close.” Kate wrote a post about the book upon its release. You can read that here.
The Economist has a tale of two Arvinds–Panagariya and Subramanian–and their respective books, India: The Emerging Giant and India’s Turn. I don’t believe India’s Turn is available yet in the U.S., but according to all reviews I’ve read, we’re not missing much (Subramanian is known to be a great thinker, but every review I’ve read bemoans the poor editing). India: The Emerging Giant, on the other hand, looks fascinating. From The Economist:

Mr Panagariya’s book is the capstone of a career, a sustained work of scholarship. It demands a lot of its readers, and amply repays the investment. The author’s father told him: “Take your time, but write a definite book on India.” The son did not disappoint.

Finally, we have Inc. Magazine‘s skimmer’s guide to the latest business books, this month featuring Tuned In by Craig Stull, Phil Myers, and David Meerman Scott.
Happy Reading!

Hopefully, some of you remember my blog listing about Payback: Reaping the Rewards of Innovation. Well, Harold L. Sirkin, along with 2 other of his colleagues from the Boston Consulting Group have put there minds together in the new book: Globality: Competing with Everyone from Everywhere for Everything. In the book, Sirkin, Bhattacharya and Hemerling talk about countries such as China, India and Brazil and how they are changing the face of business on a global scale in various ways.

Here’s how the book starts:

“Globality is not a new and different term for globalization, it’s the name for a new and different global reality in which we’ll all be competing with everyone, from everywhere, for everything.
We three, management consultants turned authors, are partners….and have been studying the change in the global business environment – and working with companies involved in it – for more than twenty years. The extensive research that we….have conducted over the past five years set us on a path that led to this book.
When we started out in our international travels, globalization was just getting under way. It was a cavalcade that traveled from West to East – big multinational companies center in Europe, Japan and the United States marching out from their corporate fortresses to foreign lands in search of low-cost manufacturing and low-end markets.”