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India’s Global Powerhouses 
By Nirmalya Kumar 
Harvard Business Press 
€25 ISBN 9781422147627

With the world’s eyes, if not raised eyebrows, on Tata Motors — with its pocket-money-priced Nano, and its capture of Jaguar and Land Rover marques — it is a good idea to whizz through the other nascent brands in India’s evolving economic story. We may be familiar with Infosys and Wipro, Reliance and Mittal Steel (although the precursor to ArcelorMittal is not technically an Indian company) but what of Bharat Forge, Hindalco, Mahindra, and Suzlon, who, Kumar says, will increasingly be making acquisitions and globalising their brands. This book is a great primer for anyone interested in moving East (Kumar is dismissive of the term ‘outsourcing’) or learning about multinationals heading West. However, the book’s limitations, in such a fast changing world, are obvious -Tata’s frenetic activities make even its Wikipedia’s archivists’ wrists ache, and several high-profile events, such as the accounting fraud at Satyam, India’s third biggest IT firm, are not mentioned. Nevertheless, the contextualising of industry sectors and the compare-and-contrast approach to company strategies is very useful. 

But the book’s final chapter is its most illuminating one. Here, the author (a marketing professor at London Business School) considers the advantages of Indian companies, which include being aggressive price-cutters and wily joint venture partners, all flowing from the ability to wear several different identities at once - a trick partly learned from the British.

The Armchair Economist 
By Steven E. Landsburg 
Pocket Books 
€10 ISBN 9781847395252

This is one of those slim volumes so packed with intricate knowledge and playful uncertainty that it needs to be sipped. The chapter on ‘Why Popcorn Costs More at the Movies and Why the Obvious Answer is Wrong’ is a case in point. The obvious answer is that the cinema has a monopoly and can charge what it likes. But the real reason is that it could charge less for the popcorn and more for the tickets, or less for the tickets and even more for the popcorn; the actual pricing attracts the most money from different customers, based on hard-won experience.

investing Against The Tide
By Anthony Bolton 
Prentice Hall 
€18 ISBN 9780273723769

Anthony Bolton, the UK’s most successful fund manager — dubbed, inevitably ‘Britain’s Warren Buffett’ — has finally published his philosophy, and by quoting Ben Graham he steps out, perhaps consciously, on to Nebraskan turf. The publisher’s come-on — and this book will surely sell in high numbers — is the consistently spectacular returns the contrarian Bolton delivered in his Fidelity Special Situations Fund over a 25-year period. Unleavened by Buffett’s witty fables, though, the anecdotal bits are left to the end, which is a shame.

The Mindgym
By Sebastian Bailey and Octavius Black 
€15 ISBN 9781847440631

A book to accompany a business venture of the same title, the authors have used simple applied psychology to come up with dozens of quick, high intensity lessons covering every aspect of workplace relationships. The biggest ‘mind’ workout probably concerns the awkward subject of how other people might perceive you compared to how you perceive yourself. Understand that, and you can manage your impact. At first sight just one more fad, the ‘small but often’ language of the gym has already won the authors many fans at blue chip firms.

Understanding Digital Marketing 
By Damian Ryan and Calvin Jones 
Kogan Page 
€25 ISBN 9780749453893

There is a certain irony about publishing an old fashioned book on how to sell your wares over the internet. But in doing so the authors — one a geek, the other a journalist, tasked with killing the jargon — demonstrate the extent to which the digital marketplace has matured. There’s a huge amount to learn, many pitfalls that can be easily avoided and a wealth of tricks to increase sales. Although written with a UK focus, this is surely one of the best volumes that has so far appeared, and worth every penny for its insight and plain language.

The Vanishing Face Of Gaia  — A Final Warning 
By James Lovelock 
Allen Lane  
€25 ISBN 9781846141850

Gaia theorist, scientist and now public figure, James Lovelock’s new volume (aged 90, his last?) continues a proud tradition of sticking his neck out on most issues to the delight and fury even of his most ardent fans.  

A prophet of doom, he believes that nothing can be done about global warming, which sets up a tension between mobilising readers to do their bit and deflating them completely. 

The author is cheerily optimistic himself, but partly because he takes the side of Gaia, a self-regulating Earth that may, like an angry landlord, evict all its human tenants to protect itself. The rest of the book fluctuates between such Gaia-centric views and the comparatively mundane business of what it means to be green. Including a revealing autobiographical note about his poacher-countryman father, Lovelock fluctuates unevenly between robustly scientific attitudes and the seemingly sentimental rejection of ideas and technologies, sometimes couched in intemperate language. For example, he calls wind turbines“terribly wrong” because they debase “some jewel of coastline or rural scenery.”  

Later, he gruffly concedes the value of tidal and solar energy. But if you only read the first chapter you’re confronted by the spectre of a lifeboat planet defined by a Darwinian fight for survival (“No voluntary human act can reduce our numbers fast enough even to slow climate change”) and an astonishing dismissal of renewable energy schemes, all sweepingly described as “an elaborate scam.”  

The book is better than that; his real fury is directed at biofuels, the environmental case for which remains absurd in his view. We learn that Lovelock hates Greenpeace, loves nuclear energy, and aligns himself in one instance with First Earthers, and thus a radical tradition of direct protest reminiscent of his Quaker origins, (where Greenpeace has apparently gone soft and middle class). He ill-advisedly praises Richard Branson in exchange for a massive freebie (his planned trip to space on the hugely carbon intensive Virgin Galactic space plane, which is given two full colour photos) and insists that his decision to plant 20,000 trees earlier in his life was an error because a plantation is not the same as a naturally evolving ecosystem.  

Lovelock insists, with perceptible smugness, that contrary to the rest of his thesis Britain will be spared the effects of climate change (p56), while elsewhere he implies that Big Oil is Gaia’s worst foe since exploitation of the last remaining fossil fuels under the Arctic could actually kill Gaia before Gaia can kill us. Driving a Honda Jazz 6,000 miles a year, he prefers pedestrians to cyclists and approvingly cites Churchill and Darwin. 

Lovelock is one of very few scientists who is willing to say that the problem is not carbon emissions but global population growth (p49), and that as such the imperative is that the earth survives, not us. Elsewhere, to placate eco-friends, he writes about the importance of living sparingly rather than greedily, reminding us though that such thrift was second nature to his generation, and historically wasn’t anything to do with being ‘green’. 

By aligning himself repeatedly with Gaia, a she, who “like God, helps those who help themselves” (p59), Lovelock will continue to infuriate the scientific establishment long after he has passed away. But for now, he is enjoying his moment in the sun. 

Possibly, the hype is unjustified. His position in the broader history of ideas connects to 18th century naturalism of the Gilbert Scott variety, with equal parts Romanticism and vitalism, the view that Life can be examined yet not finally explained, possessing its own, mysterious imperative. Gaia is in this sense nothing more than the 20th Century expression of a 500 year-old tendency to rail against glassy-eyed mechanism and the inherent atheism of the physicists and mathematicians.  

Lovelock’s present fame rests instead on the previous disparagement of his ideas at a time when the development of the atom bomb sealed the ascendancy of a physics-driven view of the planet. That this has gradually changed does not mean that he will be viewed as a towering figure in the future, only that the concept of Gaia coincides with climate change, which demands that we view the world as a single, interconnected ecosystem. Gaia is in this sense a species of globalisation for the sciences. Despite this temporary significance, it is too early to consider a sequel volume “The Vanishing Face of James Lovelock.”  

He Knew  He Was Right  — The Irrepressible Life Of James Lovelock And Gaia 
By John and Mary Gribbin  
Allen Lane 
€25 ISBN 9781846140167

The Gribbins have a superb track record of writing about science in an accessible way (the term ‘popular science’ does not do justice to the result, which an older generation would have called plain good writing). As such, this book is a huge contribution to the transmission of knowledge and much more than an excellent intellectual biography.  

The authors start with a thumbnail sketch of Gaia theory, immediately followed by a revealing historical context stretching back to early 19th-century figures such as Joseph Fourier, who had already grasped the concept of global warming as a consequence of massive industrialisation and man-made heating.  

The rest of the narrative unfolds as a wonderful mixture of personal detail, such as the day Lovelock tried to get the girls at school to eat deadly nightshade berries, to the intricate development of his theory of Gaia, the term dreamt up, via ancient Greece, by novelist William Golding. Massively invigorating, by the end of this volume you understand why the authors felt compelled to use the word ‘irrespressible’ in the title. Worth every penny.

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May 09

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