How The Net Generation Is Changing Your World: New Book Discusses Growing Up Digital

Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World

The world in which Don Tapscott wrote this book was rather different from the one in which it has appeared. A couple of years back, Britain, Western Europe, North America and most other large economies were still in the midst of a boom that some thought was going to last forever. For employers, one of the key issues was finding a way of engaging the attention of a generation of young people whom many social critics regarded as being almost unemployable – at least in the traditional sense.

As Tapscott relates at the beginning of this book, people aged between 11 and 31 have tended to be looked down upon by their elders (in other words, would-be employers) as ignorant, easily distracted, self-obsessed and work-shy – among many other none-too-complimentary things. He rebuts all these arguments, claiming that, just because the youngsters usually referred to as Generation Y behave differently to the Baby Boomers they are not necessarily undesirable members of the workforce.

On the contrary, he suggests that the people he prefers to label the Net Generation have the ability to transform the fortunes of organizations because they have an almost intrinsic understanding of the new technologies that their predecessors lack. While Baby Boomers and, to a certain extent, the Generation X-ers who followed them use technology to help them in their work and in their leisure life, the members of the Net Generation have "grown up digital" and are therefore totally immersed in technology and its possibilities.

He writes: "Sure, you're as cyber-sophisticated as the next person – you shop online, use Wikipedia, and do the BlackBerry prayer throughout the day. But young people have a natural affinity for technology that seems uncanny. They instinctively turn first to the net to communicate, understand, learn, find and do many things."

Tapscott is a Canadian, but he has the enthusiasm associated with people from the big country to the south of his own and has devoted much of it in recent years to chronicling the development of this tech-savvy generation. A Baby Boomer himself (he was born right at the beginning of the generation, in 1947), he has clearly been inspired by watching the development of his own children – who were aged 10 and seven in 1993, when he began the work that led to his 1996 book, Growing Up Digital. He has amassed a mountain of evidence to support his case. He is not afraid to spot trends, particularly when they involve technology. In 1992, he co-authored a book called Paradigm Shift, which was one of the earlier attempts to assess the growing influence and promise of information technology. For better or worse, this contributed to a popularizing of the concept of the "paradigm shift" – a term that had previously been restricted to describing scientific revolutions. Later, he collaborated on Wikinomics, which set out to explain how collaboration was changing everything.

Read more of Roger Trapp's review here, or get a copy of Grown Up Digitalnow!

A fascinating inside look at the Net Generation, Grown Up Digitalis inspired by a $4 million private research study. New York Times bestselling author Don Tapscott has surveyed more than 11,000 young people. Instead of a bunch of spoiled screenagers with short attention spans and zero social skills, he discovered a remarkably bright community which has developed revolutionary new ways of thinking, interacting, working, and socializing.

Grown Up Digitalreveals:

• How the brain of the Net Generation processes information.
• Seven ways to attract and engage young talent in the workforce.
• Seven guidelines for educators to tap the Net Gen potential.
• Parenting 2.0: There's no place like the new home.
• Citizen Net: How young people and the Internet are transforming democracy.

Today's young people are using technology in ways you could never imagine. Instead of passively watching television, the Net Geners are actively participating in the distribution of entertainment and information. For the first time in history, youth are the authorities on something really important. And they're changing every aspect of our society-from the workplace to the marketplace, from the classroom to the living room, from the voting booth to the Oval Office.

The Digital Age is here. The Net Generation has arrived. Meet the future.

Get a copy of Grown Up Digitalnow!

The White House and the Middle East: New Book Gives History to Current Conflict

A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East--from the Cold War to the War on Terror

October 29th, 1956, just days after the Soviet Union invaded Hungary with ground forces, the Israeli army swept in Egyptian territory. This action launched the first stage in an ultimately failed joint Anglo-French effort to regain its colonial possession: the Suez Canal and the $100 million in revenues each year their control over it produced.

To achieve this aim, British and French officials clearly used Israel's anxiety about its security and its ambitious expansionist goals in a region with regularly shifting frontiers, alliances and power blocs. In existence as a nation for just eight years, and having been recognized by the two major competing global powers – the US and the USSR – Israel came under attack by its neighbors. In the ensuing conflict, outrages and atrocities were committed on both sides with the intention of demonstrating power and resolve to whip the other into accepting their presence.

Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, however, was not satisfied with a stalemate or any efforts by the US or other countries to pursue a peace process. According to Patrick Tyler, in his new book, A World of TroubleBen-Gurion sought military supremacy, control of atomic weapons, as well as new strategic alliances that would help defeat Israel's neighbors.

Into this complicated situation stepped Egyptian dictator Gamel Abdel Nasser. Nasser had risen to power with the aid of the Egyptian Communists and the far-right Muslim Brotherhood, both of whom he subsequently rounded up and housed in what, to many people fresh from the experience of the Holocaust in Europe, seemed like concentration camps.

Nasser then sought to establish himself as the leader of the emergent Arab nationalist movement by challenging Israel's right to exist and by challenging the regional hegemony of the global powers that had helped Israel into existence – Britain, the USSR and the US.

Read the rest of Martha Kramer's review here, or get a copy now!

New Book on the Life of Flannery O'Connor: Classic American Author

Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor

Flannery. She liked to drink Coca-Cola mixed with coffee. She gave her mother, Regina, a mule for Mother's Day. She went to bed at 9 and said she was always glad to get there. After Kennedy's assassination she said: "I am sad about the president. But I like the new one." As a child she sewed outfits for her chickens and wanted to be a cartoonist.

She reluctantly traveled to Lourdes and claimed she prayed for the novel she was working on, The Violent Bear It Awaywhich she referred to as Opus Nauseous. She referred to each of her novels as Opus Nauseous. Rust Hills, the fiction editor of Esquire, put her in the middle of the "red-hot center" in his Literary Establishment chart of 1963. Elizabeth Hardwick took her to dinner at Mary McCarthy's apartment, where McCarthy conceded that the communion wafer was a symbol of the Holy Ghost and a pretty good one, whereupon Flannery made her famous reply, "Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it."

Hardwick described her at Yaddo, the artists' community in Saratoga Springs, New York: "She was a plain sort of young, unmarried girl, a little bit sickly. She had a small-town Southern accent ... whiny. She whined. She was amusing. She was so gifted, immensely gifted."

Robert Lowell was her great champion, as were Robert Fitzgerald and Robert Giroux. Godmother to one of the Fitzgeralds' six children, she could never remember the child's name. Truman Capote and Tennesse Williams made her "plumb sick." As for Kafka, she couldn't read him through and was distressed when compared to him. She also did not care for Carson McCullers.

Although she was a devout Catholic, almost all of her characters, haunted, tested, and redeemed, are Protestant. In her avid reading, she found Protestant theologians superior to Catholic ones, though she was pleased to discover Teilhard de Chardin. She read a lot of theology because she believed it made her writing bolder. When she went to the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, she said, she "didn't know a short story from an ad in the newspaper." Yet she quickly became a star there and "scared the boys to death with her irony," as a teacher put it.

Read the rest of Joy Williams review here, or get a copy now!

Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Drug Cartel: An Insiders View of the Most Powerful Colombian Drug Lord

The Accountant's Story: Inside the Violent World of the Medellín Cartel

If you speak a little Spanish and recently have spent a bit of time anywhere near the border, you've probably heard a narcocorrido, a ballad sung to danceable Norteño-style music with lyrics that romanticize the drug trade.

It's a hugely popular genre, and embattled officials in the violence-ravaged Mexican state of Baja California have gone so far as to keep the songs off the airwaves there. The Accountant's Story: Inside the Violent World of the Medellín Cartelis the literary equivalent of a narcocorrido -- without the redeeming virtue of a catchy, polka-inflected beat. The book's cover bears two additional subtitles: one informing us that this is "the true story of Pablo Escobar"; the other that the author, Roberto Escobar, is his brother.

Pablo, for those who decline to retain the biographies of dead thugs among the brain's finite store of memories, was the most successful of the Colombian criminals who accumulated vast wealth and huge body counts supplying the developed world's -- particularly the United States' -- discovery of cocaine as a recreational drug in the 1970s and '80s. In 1989, at the apogee of his criminal enterprise, Pablo Escobar was listed by Forbes magazine as the world's seventh richest man with an estimated personal fortune of $25 billion derived from his gang's control of perhaps 80% of the world's cocaine trafficking.

According to Pablo's brother Roberto -- a onetime bicycle racer, who became the operation's chief accountant with a staff of 10 -- their biggest problem was what to do with all the cash. The cartel, which took its name from the lovely colonial city in the Colombian highlands where the brothers began their criminal careers, quickly exhausted most of the world's capacity for secure, numbered bank accounts through which to launder their profits. They ended up having to store the proceeds in warehouses, ranch buildings, buried chambers and secret compartments in the walls of gang members' homes. They spent, according to Roberto, an estimated $2,500 a month on rubber bands to hold stacks of bills together. Ultimately, rodents and mold took such a toll on their holdings that they simply wrote off 10% per year as spoilage -- sort of like the stock market.

Their smuggling operations were so extensive that they purchased jets from bankrupt airlines and built their own miniature submarines.

Read the rest of Tim Rutten's review here, or get a copy now!

The Kindly Ones: Winner of the Prestigious Prix Goncourt

The Kindly Ones

Originally published in France in 2006, "Les Bienveillantes" (The Kindly Ones) won the Prix Goncourt, that country's most prestigious literary award, as well as a prize from the Académie Française.

The novel, told from the point of view of an unrepentant Nazi and written in French by the American-born Jonathan Littell, was hailed by the weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur as "a new 'War and Peace."' It became an international best seller and the talk of the Frankfurt Book Fair, and its English-language rights, Publishers Weekly reported, went for "1 million-ish" dollars. A review in Foreign Policy magazine hailed the book as "one of the greatest accomplishments of postwar fiction."

The novel's gushing fans, however, seem to have mistaken perversity for daring, pretension for ambition, an odious stunt for contrarian cleverness.

Willfully sensationalistic and deliberately repellent, The Kindly Onesis an overstuffed suitcase of a book, consisting of an endless succession of scenes in which Jews are tortured, mutilated, shot, gassed or stuffed in ovens, intercut with an equally endless succession of scenes chronicling the narrator's incestuous and sadomasochistic fantasies. Indeed, the nearly 1,000-page novel reads as if the memoirs of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss had been rewritten by a bad imitator of Genet and de Sade.

There are pages and pages in which the narrator, Max Aue, tries to rationalize the Nazis' anti-Semitism, and pages and pages in which he describes the dead bodies he saw on the Eastern front in Russia, and later, at Auschwitz, where he served as a kind of efficiency expert, worrying about the overloading of the ovens and the basic rule of warehousing: "first in, first out."

Although Aue contends that he is "a man like other men" and depicts himself as a cultivated intellectual who reads Flaubert and Kant, his story is hardly a case study in the banality of evil. Whereas the heroes of the play "Good" and the movie "Mephisto" were ordinary enough men who out of ambition or opportunism or weakness turned to the dark side and embraced the Nazi cause, Aue is clearly a deranged creature, and his madness turns his story into a voyeuristic spectacle.

Read the rest of Michiko Kakutani's review here, or get a copy now!

A Mother-Daughter Relationship: The New Memoir By Azar Nafisi

Things I've Been Silent About: Memories

Bestselling author of Reading Lolita in Tehranhas come out with a new book based on her memories of being a mother and daughter in Iran.

Oh eternally recurring Mother of women’s memoirs! In her preface to Things I've Been Silent About,Azar Nafisi promises us a family chronicle that, like her previous book Reading Lolita in Tehran, will reflect on "a turbulent era in Iran’s political and cultural history."

But we soon find ourselves so obsessively focused on a venerable staple of women’s writings — the tortured mother-daughter relationship — that socio-political concerns such as the rise of Mossadegh or the fall of the last shah fade from consciousness. There is no reason to complain: The author’s super-mom is as perplexing and fascinating as any we’ve met in contemporary letters.

That mother, the beautiful, elegant, notoriously outspoken Nezhat Nafisi, was a doyenne of Tehran society who briefly served as a left-wing member of Iran’s Parliament. As depicted by her daughter, she is a hysteric plagued by her perceived lack of fulfillment. A prodigious mythologizer, she constantly reshapes her past to aggrandize herself, often boasting, for instance, that she would have become a great doctor if she’d been allowed to attend university.

Mother of all mothers

As invasive as she is insolent, she forages shamelessly in her daughter’s diaries and personal mail. Yet this harsh, aloof perfectionist is occasionally capable of tenderness and generosity. In sum, what the author and the rest of her family find most frustrating about the intractable Nezhat is her total unpredictability: "Each person would pass her on to the next like a dangerous explosive, hoping she would blow up somewhere else."

Nafisi’s father, however, provides a safe haven from her mother’s turbulence. A genial civil servant, Ahmad Nafisi is also a man of formidable culture. He fires his beloved daughter’s literary imagination by initiating her into both Persian and Western literature, helping her to build what she calls her "portable home" — her literary career.

Read Francine du Plessix Gray's entire review here, or get a copy now!

The Best Business Books of All Time: A Single Source For All The Information

The 100 Best Business Books of All Time: What They Say, Why They Matter, and How They Can Help You

Business expert Harvey Mackay recently wrote a review about an interesting new business book. Entitled The 100 Best Business Books of All Time: What They Say, Why They Matter, and How They Can Help Youthis book proves to be a great resource in times like now. When everyone is rethinking their business plans - but are trying to save money in the process - this books brings together into one source the best of all the rest. Check out what Mackay has to say.

Peoples’ lives change in two ways: the people they meet and the books they read.


The late Charles “Tremendous” Jones, an inspirational and motivational speaker and author whom I have long admired, shared that important bit of wisdom with me many years ago. I’ve taken it to heart and passed it on in most of my speeches.

The natural result of preaching that philosophy has put me in a bit of a dilemma: I’m often asked to list my top 10 favorite business books. But when there are 11,000 business books published in the United States each year, it’s tough to find a gem that will unlock the solution to your specific business situation.

Believe me when I tell you that I have tried to compile such a list. Happily, I have found a new book that has delivered the goods. The 100 Best Business Books of All Timehighlights the important take-home value of all the business classics and several surprises too. The 100 Besteven features 25 works of fiction, including four parables, two fables, five novels, four children’s tales and 10 movies. These books will benefit anyone, from entry-level to the corner suite.

Authors Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten read and recommend business books to their customers at 1-800-CEO-READ, so picking the greatest hits of business books is in their DNA. Books have been divided into a dozen categories. What I like best about The 100 Bestis that it is not a book of lists. There is no numerical ranking. The authors review books that they believe contain the best available information on each subject. Then, if a reader wants more, there is a list of related books at the end of each review.

Read Harvey Mackay's entire review here, or get a copy now!