Patty, Walter and Richard are the key players in Freedom, friends from College.  Patty starts hanging out with Walter in the hope of seeing his friend Richard, one of those guys that defies society, is a musician, very attractive sex god type.  Walter is the safe, supporting his family while in college, environmentally friendly earthy type.  Patty is an elite college athlete who injures her knee and is unable to pursue her sporting career, but all she ever wanted was to be a mother anyway. There is strong unresolved sexual tension between Patty and Richard.

So Patty, Walter and Richard grow up.  Patty and Walter marry and have two children, Joey and Jessica, and Richard goes on to become a moderately famous musician touring and womanising his life away.  But he falls on hard times, and

through a twist of fate, Walter and Patty have a lake house that needs fixing up which Walter offers to Richard, rent free, if he fixes it up.  Eventually the sexual tension between Patty and Richard is resolved here at the lakehouse, one day short of Richard completing the entire renovation works.

Herein sets a deep depression of Patty, feeling guilty for betraying Walter, and anguished because she can’t be with Richard.  Richard also is tormented and leaves his music career to build decks.  Walter carries on with his political and environmental pursuits none the wiser, but suspicious nonetheless.

As we move forward, Patty has been a deep depressive state for 5 years, and Walter has a new 27 year old assistant Lalitha, of course in love with him, and when Walter wants Richard to become involved in one of his campaigns, Patty gives Richard a manuscript of her autobiography which explains how she feels about ‘everything’ and Richard leaves it for Walter to read.  Devastated that Patty could betray him in such a way, he throws her out of the house and sleeps with Lalitha and begins their relationship.

Patty moves in with Richard.  Walter is beyond bitter about Patty and Richard, but begins to find a true love with Lalitha. Patty eventually moves on from Richard and finds her skill in teaching.

Lalitha is tragically killed in a car accident and so begins Walter isolation at the lake house for 6 years, during which time not a word is spoken between Walter and Patty.

Patty completes her autobiographical manuscript and has it delivered to Walter, who refuses to read it, and Richard sends him a CD filled with songs dedicated to him.

Patty turns up at the lake house, waiting for him in the icy night and eventually becomes hypothermic.  Walter allows her inside the house and tries to bring her back from the brink, succeeds, and a deep understanding of all that has happened between them, passes over them, and they re-unite.

That is the bare bones of the storyline but it by no means does this work any justice at ALL.  There are several other storylines going on alongside, which illustrate the complex world we live in, in an acutely poignant body of work.

I laughed, cried, wept, despaired in the human race, the world in which we live, and the way in which we live in it, and yet walked away from this work, deeply moved for the human spirit, what drives it, how complex it is, how deep a man’s soul, and bottomless a woman’s heart.

Jonathan Franzen is utterly brilliant.  Even though you may just want the storyline to know what all the Oprah book club fans are talking about, if you can, read this work -  it’s a modern masterpiece.

And a video from the man himself – so eloquent as always

Another great written interview with Jonathan Franzen - have a cuppa ready – but it’s worth it

Blink is about the adaptive unconscious. The moment where we can sum up all the data that is before us and make an informed instant decision. Our brain is like a giant computer which processes data instantly to give the first impression.

Blink demonstrates this by looking at a study that can break a marriage down into core elements which will determine whether it will be successful or not. However even those observations can be thin sliced even further to just one core element – the presence of contempt.

Gladwell goes on to demonstrate that even though we need experience and infromation to thin slice deciions, too much information actually hinders this ability. He uses several examples to prove this, the best being the War Games and choosing jam.

The US staged a war game in 1999 with the home Blue Team having every conceivable source of information about the enemy, Red Team. Howevr the Red Team was led by a decorated war hero who defeated them in an instant. He summed up by saying “In chess i can see the whole board, but that doesn’t mean I’ll win because I don’t know what the enemy is thinking.”

When buying jam, consumers are more likely to make the snap purchase if there are only six jams to choose from rather than twenty. The more choices they are given, the more difficult the decision and the consumer suffer from analysis paralysis.

It’s this thin slicing of information that enables snap decisions. Our minds can collate all the history of our experience and thin slice it into the key information we need to make a decision. Yet in further experiments of subtle suggstion, it was found that exposure to certain words can influence behaviour so, our snap decisions are influenced by culture.

At this point Gladwell goes even deeper by looking at examples of how snap decisions go terribly wrong, by concentrating on a case where four police officers shot down an innocent black man, in seven seconds. They thought they saw a gun, they thought an officer had been shot down, they all opened fire. When they realised what they had done, they were all devastated.

Blink discussed the many elements that affect our judgement, our culture, our experience, the data that is placed before us. So the very things that help us, also hinder us. So how can we make a good snap decision? Suddenly thinking without thinking has lost its power, because we cannot think at all with too much information.

Gladwell demonstrates the point by telling the story of a famous orchestra who decided to put up screens to audition their musicians, so they only heard the music rather than judge the contender by looks, attitutde, the way they held the instrument etc. They found that this was how they eventually began to choose women into the orchestra – by talent alone.

Gladwell defines blink:- “what all the stories and studies and arguments add up to – is an attempt to understand this magical and mysterious thing called judgement.” The key question that Gladwell has been asked about Blink is “When should we trust our instincts, and when should we consciously think things through?” and he turns to Freud for the short answer ” When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the imporant decision of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.”

And finally Gladwell sums up the ponderings of Blink beautifully by considering “I think that the task of figuring out how to combine the best of conscious deliberation and instinctive judgement is one of the great challenges of our time.”

Blink, as with all of Gladwell’s works, is a rich text of many stories and examples to illustrate the point, and reels you in ever so gently until you find yourself in the middle of a strong argument, which he gently brings you through to the end, to leave you pondering, why you think the way you do, how we can change it, and how we can harness it.

If you haven’t read the book yet, I do go into the ending in this piece so if you don’t want to know how Uglies ends, move along now.

Uglies is the first book in a four book series by Scott Westerfeld. It takes us into the future where society as we know it has disentegrated and our society as we live today is referred to as The Rusties.

Within this new world there are several divides. Ugly town, Pretty Town and the authoritative City which also encompasses Special Circumstances, a secret service of the new world.

The premise of the book is that when everyone turns sixteen they are given an operation which transforms them into a Pretty, someone who is of perfect dimension, based on their biology, so everyone is different, yet the same as they are given the exact proportions of what is determined to be pretty by the order of the City surgeons.

We meet Tally gate crashing a Pretty party to visit her newly Pretty childhood friend Peris. He has settled into life in New Pretty Town with all his new pretty friends, and as Tally is still an ugly she has broken many rules by even visiting him. During her escape from Pretty Town on her hoverboard, she meets Shay and they become close friends, pulling tricks while waiting to turn 16 on the same day. Tally is obsessed with turning Pretty while Shay is not so sure, and begins to talk to Tally about an alternative to the operation.

The Smokies are a rumoured group of rebels who refuse the operation and stay Ugly and live out in the wild in their own civilisation. They are highly sought after by the City as a threat to the order it has created.

On the eve of the operation Shay decides to leave the city to live with the smokies and leaves Tally a cryptic note describing how to find her and how to get to The Smoke. On the day of Tally’s operation instead of being taken to be transformed, she is arrested by the city and given an ultimatum by the ruling Dr Cable, to find The Smoke while carrying a tracking device and then to turn the tracking device on once she has arrived so the city can come and destroy the rebels.

Tally arrives at the smoke and meets David, a natural ugly who is 18, an age that Tally has never seen untransformed into Prettiness. They begin a romance which crushes her friend Shay who had her own romantic ideas about David.

David teaches Tally everything he knows about the wild, about his philosophy about the City and most importantly what the operation actually does. It not only transforms your body, but it transforms your mind as well so that you cannot think for yourself or question authority. The city injects nanos into your brain which keep you under their control through compliance. David’s parents have found what they believe to be a cure but it is untested on a Pretty.

Tally is convinced about the Smoke’s objectives and understands the controlling nature of the city and decides to stay in the Smoke and not to betray it to the City and throws the tracking device into the fire, inadvertently triggering the tracking device. The city Specials arrive the next day and destroy the smoke and Tally is exposed as a traitor. To try to prove her intentions, she volunteers to return to the city to be transformed into a Pretty so that they can try the cure on her. Shay is kidnapped by the specials and transformed into a Pretty.

This is where Uglies finishes.

Themes

If you’re studying Uglies as a prescribed text there are many themes to consider.

Beauty
What constitutes beauty and what benefits are there to being beautiful? What would happen if everyone was beautiful? In Uglies although everyone is created ‘the same’ there are still differences. The idea behind the transformation was to rid society of anorexia, jealousy, wars. If everyone was perfect there would be nothing to be angry about because everyone is wonderful. However, even within the Pretties, there are slight jealousies about clothes, eye colour, hair colour. The nature of the human condition has not been changed by its outward appearance.

Possessions and Status
In our modern world we revere beauty and there are many statistics to support that the more attractive a person is perceived, the better they will do in life in terms of material wealth and societal status. Pretty Town tries to eliminate this by providing everything a pretty could want, food, clothes, accommodation. Everything is taken care of and everything is uniform aside from some minute personal choices. However, it was also deemed necessary by the capital for the minds of the pretties to be altered to accept this as normal and not to argue or become overly jealous about the appearance or use of possessions of others. Providing beauty and goods alone does not quieten the nature of man.

The Power of the Human Mind

Throughout Uglies, the idea that a person can overcome brainwashing by the power of one’s own mind is a strong thematic concern and indeed runs through the whole series. The ability to take on learned knowledge, new ideas, and to find one’s own belief system are strongly demonstrated.

The Power of a Single Idea

The nature of society and government is examined and boiled down to the power of a single idea being enough to bring an empire down. This can be reflected through history in terms of communism, socialism, the Germans in WW2. It has only ever been a single idea, from one person, that has created great movements in society and this is demonstrated intensely in Uglies and throughout the series.

Summary

Uglies is a tricky read to begin with so give yourself at least the first 50 pages to get into the world and the use of language. Once you conquer it, it’s a great ride.

Westerfeld has written an accompanying book From Bogus to Bubbly which translates some of the language used in the book and also the technology and the hoverboards that everyone wants, but I wouldn’t recommend reading it until you’ve read all four books in the series otherwise some cliff hangers are totally ruined.

The series continues with Pretties, Specials and then Extras which takes up the story 3 years later. I”ll add further cliff notes about Pretties and Specials at a later date, as for those who haven’t read Uglies it can detract from the first book and also the whole series.

Westerfeld is a great writer and I’m currently reading the Midnighter series which will also have cliff notes soon once I”ve finished the entire series. Although the Uglies series is classed as teen fiction, it is a great read for any age group and each book leaves on a huge cliff hanger so you can hardly wait to get your hands on the next one. I can see it becoming a classic work as a prescribed text for the number of themes raised in the work for the teens but it is also thought provoking for anyone who thinks.

Highly recommended.

Update: Here is a link Extras book review I  hope you enjoy

Gary Vaynerchuk is about to get HUGE. Right now he is just big but he is about to go through the iSphere. But first the Cliffnotes on Crush It.

Gary migrated to the US with his parents in 1978 and showed early promise as an entrepreneur with franchised lemonade stands and then a thriving baseball trading enterprise. He entered his father’s business first part time while at college and then full-time on completion.

He was introduced to the internet in 1995 and could see the potential, but as he states so well in the interview with Scobelizer below, it wasn’t until video started to become popular that he finally found a medium which he could use to communicate his message.

Vaynerchuk is a visionary with his finger on the pulse of trends, all sorts of them from teenage tattoos to the lack of understanding of wines. On the basis of practice what you know, he spruked about wines, but it wasn’t in the normal high brow offensive manner that had been done before. He spoke to everyone as if they were a customer in his shop,

but he did so through video whcih spread across the web.

He has only a few rules, the first three are Love your Family, Work superhard, Live your passion. And the best marketing strategy ever – care. Sounds simple? Gary demonstrates it by telling a story of a delivery through the snow to an unhappy customer. It is not easy to care and be passionate every day unless you really really love something. Gary says if you can find what that is you are most of the way there. Passion will leak through all that you do and guarantee your success if you use the tools available to you.

Legacy is greater than currency. To explain this, if you’re happy for your grandchildren to find out how you made your living and all the details that went into every transaction and you can sleep at night, then you are doing the right thing. If not, then you need to re-examine your motives and reunite with your passion.

Vaynerchuk argues that any business that ignores the social networking phenomenon of the internet will be left behind – period. Twitter and Facebook are his favourite modes but by no means the only platforms you should use to get your message across to your customers or potential customers. As he states these platforms are “word of mouth on steroids”. Your success will depend upon how you use these tools to get your results. Have a clearly defined plan before you begin. Remember everything is out there so be careful what you leave behind for others to find.

A note from me here, I’ve been on twitter since November of its first year, using another avatar than the one I have now because I decided to brand all of my social networking across the web. I’ve seen twitter particularly go through many metamorphises and will continue to do so. Adapt or perish is the catch cry to adhere to.

Vaynerchuk argues that branding is the number one thing that every single person should begin to visualise for themselves in the social networking sphere. You are the brand, even if you just play farmville and everything else on Facebook, that is a type of brand that you are presenting yourself as. Businesses need to formulate a plan to boost their brand online through all networks and interactions. Feedback is instant and potentially lethal to your business if not handled correctly. Gary foresees many businesses failing in this regard and gives a few case studies on how to and how not to handle certain situations in the social networking context.

Like many internet marketers, Gary recommends producing great content, staying true to yourself, and staying connected with your audience/customers. Know yourself and your limitations and don’t take yourself into a field for the money, you’ll get tired really quickly and you need stamina if you are to follow in Gary’s footsteps.

Is it for everyone? Yes and no. Is it possible to succeed on a perceived overcrowded internet? Yes and no. Will it happen overnight or in three weeks, a month? Uh No. Everyone has access to the same tools. How you use them to make yourself the cream that rises to the top is up to you and how much you are prepared to put in. But one thing Gary guarantees, if you put in the hours, you will get results – guaranteed.

Gary finishes the book with some great business ideas that he says he just hasn’t got time for. One of them was book reviews so I hope not too many people read that far )

Gary is sincere and generous and if you’ve seen any of his videos, you’ll hear his voice loud and clear throughout the text.

This book is filled with precious tidbits of gold and I would recommend it to anyone who is thinking about using social media, already using social media but not getting the results they want, or using social media and think that they are getting results. You will be surprised on the leverage that is available to you.

A side note here, I was cheeky enough to ask Gary Vaynerchuk for a review copy for this site and he was gracious enough to supply it, solidfying his ethos that no customer is too small, no deed unworthy of him, and nothing too much trouble. There are no affiliate links associated with this article as I’ve already been given pure gold in my copy of the book. Thanks so much Gary.

Below is one of the best intereviews I’ve seen between Gary and Scobelizer. I’ve tried to transcribe it, but the audio is a bit difficult for that, but quite OK to view. It’s lengthy but worh every single second. Gary gives some invaluable advice and tips and it is a great introduction to Crush It.

Just released Gary Vaynerchuk explains Social Media = Business

Tribes looks at the development of groups, especially niche groups which forms tribes – with or without you – and the value that is apparent in taking a leadership role of these groups.

Godin contends that people are desperate to believe in the elusive ‘something’ whether it’s animal welfare, software, tattoos, or orchids. But with this desperation, the despair is the collective sigh of all going nowhere believing in the one thing. This is where leadership enters the Tribes equation.

Godin looks at what makes a leader as opposed to a follower, what core values are needed and why so many don’t take up the challenge and why, it is essential that someone step up to the plate. He challenges our core fears of failure, apathy, discontent, the status quo and why all these fears need to be challenged and conquered – immediately.

Some of the core ideas include Leadership is Not Management, and with this, managers are not necessarily leaders. He cites examples of a single memo that changed the course of a company, written by an employee who rose to lead the company forward.

In these changing times, Godin warns that the market place is changing so rapidly that leaders need to rise to negotiate that change and in fact drive it forward. He demonstrates this with a study of Wikipedia, The Grateful Dead and many others, each filled with the smallest of golden tips.

He clarifies profoundly the difference between fans and followers. A follower is passive, who likes what you do and what you’re on about. A fan is an evangelist for you.

The balloon factory and the unicorn is one core example Godin uses to demonstrate how the status quo must be fought and why it is at times near impossible, but the key to hold onto, is that it is not impossible. With true leadership, someone who clearly demonstrates a mission statement and allows communication and activity between those who agree, can lead anyone, anywhere to do anything.

He talks extensively about the value of the heretic and how important it is to now listen to these people. Apart from this, Godin emphasises the need for these heretics to take charge of their own destiny and to lead. Sheepwalking versus tribe management and leadership is clarified. There are many sheep but very few shepherds.

In summary he looks at the key negators to leadership namely, timing and Not Now Not Yet, asks if Not Now When in such a way that you just can’t not disagree. By understanding care and charisma, elements of leadership including listening and mediocrity, he asks in conclusion Why Not You and Why Not Now?

There are no easy steps to leadership, no plan laid out or magic formula. But the totality of the information in this work equips the reader with a new outlook on what it takes to lead and who in fact you will be leading – but most importantly – WHY.

This is another one of those books to add to your collection if you’re a thinker or want to know more about the mechanics of leadership and social change.

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