But Love

The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, North Point Press, 1998

We Are Our Choices

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

Hardback:  When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made.  In the end, we are our choices. - Jeff Bezos, commencement speech at Princeton University, 30 May 2010.

Amazon is increasingly a daily presence in modern life.  Millions of people regularly direct their Web browsers to its eponymous website or its satellite sites, like Zappos.com and Diapers.com, acting on the most basic impulse in any capitalist society:  to consume.

Amazon.com started off modestly as an online bookseller but its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content with simply being a bookseller.  He wanted Amazon to become 'the everything store', offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices.  To achieve this end, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that's never been cracked.

Until now.

Today, it is a smorgasbord of selection, offering movies, garden tools, furniture, food, toys, music, electronics, jewelry, software, clothes, apparel, sporting goods, automotive parts - you name it - and the occasional oddball items like an inflatable unicorn horn for cats and a thousand-pound electronic-lock gun safe that is available for delivery in three to five days.  The company has nearly perfected the art of instant gratification, delivering digital products in seconds and their physical incarnations in just a few days.

Amazon cleared $61 billion in sales in 2012, its seventeenth year of operation, and will likely be the fastest retailer in history to surpass $100 billion.  Even the name has informally entered the business lexicon, and not in an altogether favourable way.  To be Amazoned means "to watch helplessly as the online upstart from Seattle vacuums up the customers and profits of your traditional brick-and-mortar business."

In writing this book, Brad Stone has enjoyed unprecedented access to current and former Amazon employees and Bezos family members, to give readers the first in-depth, fly-on-the-wall account of life at Amazon.  Even compared to tech's other elite innovators - the likes of Jobs, Gates and Zuckerberg - Bezos is a very private man.  He stands out for his restless pursuit of new markets, leading Amazon into risky new ventures like the Kindle and cloud computing, and transforming retail in the same way that Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing.

The Everything Store (2013) is the revealing, definitive biography of the technology juggernaut that placed one of the first and largest bets on the Internet and changed the way we shop and read for ever.  It is the tale of how one gifted child grew into an extraordinarily driven and versatile CEO and how he, his family, and his colleagues bet heavily on a revolutionary network called the Internet, and on the grandiose version of a single store that sells everything.  It is a long-anticipated, honest account of the company of our age, and a deeply personal look at the iconic entrepreneur who founded it.

The Everything Store is the winner of the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Awards 2013.

About the author:  Brad Stone has covered Amazon and technology in Silicon Valley for such publications as Newsweek and the New York Times.  He is a senior writer for Bloomberg Businessweek and lives in San Francisco.

One Day You'll Understand

Note To Self #1611

Within Yourself

Everywhere

Death Under A Tuscan Sun by Michele Giuttari

Hardback:  For me, justice for the individual, be he the humblest, is everything.  All else comes after. - Gandhi

In his dark and fetid prison cell, serial killer Daniele de Robertis plans his retribution.  The betrayals he has suffered haunt his dreams until, one night, he escapes.

In a small, beautiful village in the Tuscan countryside a prominent lawyer and his wife are murdered.

As the police inspect the scene they find nine terrifying photographs:  nine women, slaughtered.

It is Florentine Police Chief Michele Ferrara's worst nightmare:  a case involving the untouchable men and women at the top of Italian society, a dark and powerful cult which knows no bounds, and mounting victims.

Amongst a web of obsession, manipulation and violence, Ferrara must face his demons.

Death Under a Tuscan Sun is an incredibly gripping and atmospheric work of detective fiction, written with incomparable authenticity by former Florentine police chief Michele Giuttari.

Death Under a Tuscan Sun (2015) is the seventh book in the clever and fast-moving Chief Superintendent Michele Ferrara series set in Florence and translated from the Italian into the English by Isabelle Kaufeler.

About the author:  Michele Giuttari is former head of the Florence Police Force (1995-2003), where he was responsible for reopening the Monster of Florence case and jailing several key Mafia figures.  He is now a special advisor to the interior minister in Rome, with a remit to monitor Mafia activity.

Rating:  5/5

#Paris

When The Light Comes

Pope Francis: Untying The Knots by Paul Vallely

Paperback:  From his first appearance on a Vatican balcony on 13 March 2013, Pope Francis, the 266th Pope of the Catholic Church, proved himself a Pope of Surprises.

With a series of potent gestures, history's first Jesuit pope - the first pope from the Americas, the first from the Southern hemisphere, and the first to take the name of Francis - declared a mission to restore authenticity and integrity to a Catholic Church bedevilled by sex abuse and secrecy, intrigue and in-fighting, ambition and arrogance.  He declared it should be 'a poor Church, for the poor'.

But there is a hidden past to this modest man with the winning smile.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio was previously a bitterly divisive figure.  His decade as leader of Argentina's Jesuits left the religious order deeply split.  And his behaviour during Argentina's Dirty War, when military death squads snatched innocent people from the streets, raised serious questions - on which this book casts new light.

Yet something dramatic then happened to Jorge Mario Bergoglio.  He underwent an extraordinary transformation.  After a time of exile, he re-emerged having turned from a conservative authoritarian into a humble friend of the poor.  He changed his leadership style to allow consultation and participation, particularly among the poorest people.  He quadrupled the number of priests in the shanty-towns and earned himself the title of 'Bishop of the Slums', making enemies among Argentina's political classes in the process.

For Pope Francis:  Untying The Knots (2013), Paul Vallely travelled to Argentina and Rome to meet Bergoglio's intimates over the last four decades.  His book charts a remarkable journey.  It reveals what changed the man who was to become Pope Francis - from a reactionary into the revolutionary who is unnerving Rome's clerical careerists with the extent of his behind-the-scenes changes.  In this perceptive portrait, Paul Vallely offers both new evidence and penetrating insights into the kind of pope Francis could become.

About the author:  Paul Vallely is a writer and consultant on religion, international development, and business ethics.  He is the author of the internationally-acclaimed best-selling biography Pope Francis - Untying the Knots.  Its sequel Pope Francis - The Struggle for the Soul of Catholicism is published by Bloomsbury in September 2015.

He is Visiting Professor in Public Ethics and Media at the University of Chester and Senior Honorary Fellow at the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester.  He has worked in newspapers, broadcasting, with aid agencies, government and church organisations for more than two decades.  He has produced award-winning reports from more than thirty countries in the developing world.

The Revolving Door Of Life (A 44 Scotland Street Novel) by Alexander McCall Smith

Hardback:  The Revolving Door of Life (2015) is the tenth and latest book in the joyous and charming 44 Scotland Street series.

When I was a boy, not yesterday of course,
When life, I thought, was a whole lot
More certain than it is today,
I made a list of those I thought
Liked me as much as I liked them - 
For at that age we're loved
By just about everybody
Whom we care to love;  how different
It is in later years, when affection
Has no guarantee of reciprocation,
When we may spend so very long
Yearning for one who cannot
Love us back, or care not to,
Or who lives somewhere else
And has forgotten our address
And the way we looked or spoke.

The remarkable thing about love
Is that it is freely available,
Is as plentiful as oxygen,
Is as joyous as a burn in spate,
And need never run out.
And yet, for all its plenitude,
We ration it so strictly and forget
Its curative properties, its subtle
Ability to make the soul-injured
Whole again, to make the lonely
Somehow assured that their solitude
Will not last forever;  its promise
That if we open our heart
It is joy and resolution
That will march in triumphant
Through the gates we create.

When I look at Scotland,
At this country that possesses me,
I wonder what work love 
Has still to do;  and find the answer
Closer at hand than I thought -
In the images of contempt and disdain,
That are still there, as stubborn
As human imperfections can be;
In the coldness of heart
That sees nothing wrong
In indifference to want, in dislike
Of those who are different,
In the cutting, dismissive
Turn of phrase, in the sneer.

Love is not there, in all those places,
But it will be;  love cannot solve
Every human problem, but it makes
A start on a solution;  love
Is the only compass-point
We need to learn;  we need not
Be clever to know it, nor endowed
With unusual vision, love
Comes free, at least in those forms
Worth having, lasts as long
As anything human may last.
May Scotland, when it looks
Into its heart tomorrow
If not today, see the fingerprints
Of love, its signature, its presence,
Its promise of healing.

For seven-year-old Bertie Pollock, life in Edinburgh's most celebrated fictional street has just got immeasurably better.  The enforced absence of his endlessly pushy mother Irene - currently consciousness-raising in Bedouin harem (don't ask) - has manifold and immediate blessings:  no psychotherapy, no Italian lessons, and no yoga classes.  Bliss.

For Scotland Street's grown-ups, life throws up some new dilemmas.  Matthew makes a discovery that could make him even richer but also leaves him worried.  Pat makes one that could make her poorer and her father miserable - unless that über-narcissist, Bruce, can help her out.  And the Duke of Johannesburg, we discover, isn't exactly who he says he is.

From what happens behind Edinburgh Airport's luggage carousel to Machiavellian manoeuvrings at the Association of Scottish Nudists, Alexander McCall Smith guides us through the brighter, lighter, and frankly unexpected side of Edinburgh life.  As ever with his 44 Scotland Street series, his readers will make their own discovery:  that its blend of wit and wisdom mark it out as a comedic tour de force.

About the author:  Alexander McCall Smith is one of the world’s most prolific and most popular authors.  His career has been a varied one:  for many years he was a professor of Medical Law and worked in universities in the United Kingdom and abroad.  Then, after the publication of his highly successful No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, which has sold over twenty million copies, he devoted his time to the writing of fiction and has seen his various series of books translated into over forty languages and become bestsellers through the world.

The series include the Scotland Street novels, first published as a serial novel in The Scotsman, the Sunday Philosophy Club series starring Isabel Dalhousie, the von Igelfeld series, and the new Corduroy Mansions novels.

Alexander is also the author of collections of short stories, academic works, and over thirty books for children.  He has received numerous awards for his writing, including the British Book Awards Author of the Year Award in 2004 and a CBE for service to literature in 2007.  He holds honorary doctorates from nine universities in Europe and North America.  Alexander McCall Smith lives in Edinburgh.  He is married to a doctor and has two daughters.  Both he and his wife are members of an amateur orchestra, the Really Terrible Orchestra, in which he plays the contra-bassoon.

Discover the world of Alexander McCall Smith and his other books at AlexanderMcCallSmith.co.uk

Rating:  5/5

The Old, The Middle-Aged and The Young