The Big Moo: Stop Trying to Be Perfect and Start Being Remarkable vs. Grapevine: The New Art of Word-of-Mouth Marketing

I got both books through BzzAgent, which has a connection to both books; BzzAgent founder Dave Balter is co-author, with John Butman, of Grapevine, which chronicles the site's development, how the site works, how word-of-mouth marketing works in general, and how others can use word-of-mouth to promote their product, even when the some of the word is negative. Balter is also one of the 33 business authors who contributed a chapter to The Big Moo, edited by Seth Godin. (The title is a reference to Godin's previous book Purple Cow.)

I don't run a business of my own, unless you count renting a booth at a craft fair once or twice a year. I work for a small business, but I don't have anything to do with the marketing there. So I don't normally read business books. The Big Moo wouldn't have changed my opinion, but Grapevine was far more to my taste. Why? Well, Grapevine actually talks about specific things; it explains how word-of-mouth campaigns work at BzzAgent (and occasionally how they don't work out so well); how word-of-mouth differs from "buzz" marketing or "viral" marketing or "shill" marketing; who the target people for the word-of-mouth are; and it uses real-life examples as well as following a hypothetical company's product launch from beginning to end). This genuinely interested me, and not just because I'm one of the company's "agents."

The Big Moo, on the other hand, didn't hold my attention. This may be because it has 33 different authors, and despite my copy's front cover calling it "a collaboration of 33 of the world's smartest business thinkers," it's really 33 separate and independent essays. Some go off in different directions, some cover the same ground and get downright repetitive. It's not a sit-down-and-read-a-lot books; maybe the busiest business leader who doesn't have a lot of time to read prefers it that way. But I don't.

The other reason I wasn't thrilled with The Big Moo is that it wasn't about anything specific. It its attempts to apply to all types of businesses, it didn't apply to anything in my life at all. Again, this could be different for someone more interested in running a business organization. The Amazon.com reviews are generally more positive about the book than I am.

Grapevine, however, doesn't require a business position. We're all involved with marketing, as the recipients if not the originators, and so this book is likely to appeal to a wider audience. At least, it appealed a lot more to me.

A lot of sexual abuse survivors (quite possibly the majority of them) face disbelief when they tell their families what happened to them -- particularly if the abuser is a family member. But Martha Nibley Beck had an even larger amount of disbelief to face than most. Her abuser was her father, a Mormon theological writer so widely known in the Mormon communities of Utah that strangers would come up to Ms. Beck in public and say how much her father's work had meant to them. Coming out as an abuse survivor under those circumstances had to be like announcing that the U.S. President had molested you. And though lack of support from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is far from the only thing that led Beck to leave it, it seems to have been the trigger that led her to take note of all her other dissatisfactions with the church in which she was raised.

It amazes me that she managed to hold on to any faith in God at all, but actually it seems from her story in Leaving The Saints: How I Lost The Mormons and Found My Faith that her belief in the goodness of God is what sustained her while leaving not only the church, but her denying parents and siblings and the communities she and her husband had grown up in. I myself am an agnostic and so religious faith has never been any source of sustenance for me in emotional turmoil, but Beck never preaches or says anything I found off-putting; I can only be grateful for her sake and for others' that at least for them, such a source of strength is available.

Beck's story will certainly not please members of the LDS church (as some of the e-mail posted on her Leaving the Saints website proves), because it talks about aspects of that church's practice that will probably seem at least odd to outsiders and sometimes laughable, sometimes downright appalling. But I applaud her bravery in speaking out to the world, even if those who would benefit most from hearing her story are the least likely to pick up the book. I hope others in situations similar to hers will gain hope and strength from her words, and that those who are not abuse survivors will gain some insight into the value of questioning dogma and hierarchy when those institutions shelter evildoers. There is no single religion and no single location that allows such abuse to go on; it can be in all kinds of places, faiths, or social classes.

The first chapter of Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner's Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explains the Hidden Side of Everything repeats that subtitle -- "The Hidden Side of Everything." Maybe not everything is covered in this 230-page book, but certainly a large number of seemingly unrelated subjects are, and not ones you'd expect an economist to discuss. But that's why the book is so interesting. Just that first chapter talks about the effect of Roe v. Wade on crime rates in the early 1990s, the influence of realtors on individual house prices, and the effect of candidates' money on election results. And the connections often aren't what you'd expect, a situation that continues throughout the book. (Of course, situations that fit the conventional wisdom are unlikely to be included in such a book -- who'd bother to read about them?)

And it's not just economics -- ethics often comes up, because statistics can be used (if anyone bothers) to unmask teachers cheating on standardized tests, or sports players' records, or even a company's rate of payment at a self-service bagel stand. Even analysis of how descriptions in a real estate ad correlate to the price the house sells for reveals a sort of deception -- that some terms sound complimentary to the seller but mean something quite different to the prospective buyer. So even if economics and statistics sound like the most boring subjects on the planet, you are still likely to enjoy this book because it covers the results, not the part of the analysis process that makes non-statisticians fall asleep.

I live in Tampa, Florida, and I'd like to think I've spent enough time in places like Lettuce Lake Park to have some idea what Florida looked like before human interference. (Which is fooling myself, given the boardwalks and roads that even let me into the park.) And I read the papers enough to have some idea about the constant battles between development and environmental preservation south of me in the Everglades, but local concerns understandably get more press here.

W. Hodding Carter's Stolen Water: Saving the Everglades from its Friends, Foes, and Florida provides an overview much larger than any continued-on-page-8 article, explaining the history of human alteration of the Everglades and connected water systems (which total up to most of the southern half of the Florida peninsula) and attempts to reverse the alterations. The difficulty here is people -- Miami and other urban areas on the southern part of Florida's East Coast; sugar cane farmers; mining; and even vacation-home owners whose properties are in the way of planned expansions to the Everglades National Park protected area. And, of course, disagreements between scientists and planners about what steps would actually work to fix the pollution, the lack of water going into the aquifers that humans draw on, and the lack of water reaching the wild areas. It ain't simple. But Carter makes it at least comprehensible. He also shows what there is in the Everglades and natural Florida that's worth appreciating and saving. The one solution that would make everything as pristine as humanly possible would involve turning huge farms and thousands of people's homes into protected parks, and they just aren't going to want to go, but this book does a good job of persuading the reader that as much toward that goal should be done as can possibly be done.

To modern Americans, it's difficult to imagine bearing a child and then literally putting it out somewhere for someone else to find and raise. Indeed, we find it realistic but reprehensible for kittens and puppies to be abandoned to their fate in that way -- for human babies, it's unthinkable. This is what makes John Boswell's The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance so mind-boggling. Despite encountering references from Oedipus Rex to the life of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau to children being left on hillsides or the doorsteps of orphanages, it never sinks in how truly unexceptional it once was to abandon a child with no idea what would happen to them. These days, it's difficult enough for people to give children up for adoption knowing that their child is going directly to a family who specifically want a child and have jumped through all the hoops necessary to adopt one.

But a Roman could leave a child in the marketplace and have a reasonable expectation that someone would take them into their home -- perhaps as what we'd consider a foster child or perhaps as a slave, but the evidence Boswell produces makes it clear that very few of these abandoned children died. A more common worry was apparently the risk of unwittingly committing incest with an abandoned relative.

The medieval world with its more spread-out, rural population continued the practice in slightly different ways, leaving children to be brought up by monasteries in such numbers that rules had to be made about whether these "donated" children were required to be monks or nuns throughout their lives.

This isn't a quick read -- many pages have as much or more space taken up by footnotes as by the regular text. But it makes Boswell's case all the more convincing that there are so many references. Quite surprisingly, though, I didn't think the book felt difficult or overly academic -- just a fascinating look into what seemed to me to be among the most alien aspects of the past.

I read a lot about women, and sex, and women's health, and sexual health, and all kinds of related topics. But even after Our Bodies, Ourselves and Woman: An Intimate Geography, I learned new things about my body from Elizabeth Stewart and Paula Spencer's The V Book: A Doctor's Guide to Complete Vulvovaginal Health. (Plus "vulvovaginal" is just so much fun to say.) Some things about anatomy (could you point out a woman's "vestibule" on a diagram?), and lots more about things that can cause itching, redness, sores, discharges, pain, and any other genital problem a woman might have. Lots of fascinating historical tidbits about how things used to be dealt with. Quotations from real women about all related matters. And the voice of the gynecology specialist ("V doctor" as she might put it) is easily comprehensible. Definitely something to read before going to the gynecologist, so you don't have to try and remember what you wanted to know more while your feet are in the stirrups.

I recieved a copy of Robert W. Fuller's Somebodies and Nobodies: Overcoming the Abuse of Rank from the Dignitarian Dialogues through their offer of a free copy on BookCrossing. This fascinating book argues that sexism, racism, ageism, and most other types of discrimination are subcategories of the main type of discrimination, "rankism," where people of higher rank, be that social, occupational, or financial, treat people they perceive as being lower-rank as nobodies, people undeserving of dignity. "The problem isn't that rank counts. When it signifies excellence, rank should count and it does. The trouble is that rank counts twice. No sooner is rank assigned than holders of higher rank can use their newfound power to aggrandize themselves at the expense of those of lower ranks." Whether this is the famous person who expects to get perks or the supervisor at work who orders everyone around, or even the lawyers or doctors who look down on the person at the party who teaches school, a lot of rankism exists and isn't usually thought of as discrimination. Fuller's book, though it gets a little repetitive toward the end, is a fascinating look at rank even in democratic societies such as the U.S., where the founders' intent was to avoid the aristocracies of older countries. One can hope that awareness of such discrimination will help people to avoid continuing to do it, but alas, the people who are willing to read such a book are probably not the worst offenders.