book reviews

We all love to read. We read all the time. We read at breakfast, sitting at long traffic lights... we read while we should be doing other things. Like working on this web site. But as long as we’re doing the reading, let us share a bit about some of the books we’ve got on our library shelves. Mostly they’ll be books that we would recommend. Sometimes they will be books we think you should avoid; those reviews are usually shorter, as we are not, by nature, unkind. If you have a review for a marketing book you’d like to share with our visitors, let us know. If we get tired of reviewing marketing books, we reserve the right to review other stuff here, too.

There's marketing theory, and then there's marketing theory. Heavy, dramatic accent on the last. And, usually, overly heavy, attempted dramatics in the text. But Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson's book, "The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes," manages to be both very cerebral… and very useful to hungry marketers on the make for tangible ways to strengthen a brand. (full review)

If you don’t think that chaos theory has anything to do with marketing, you haven’t read this highly engaging, often entertaining, surprising and accessible volume. Gleick takes examples from the animal kingdom, meteorology, cartography and modern life to show how seemingly random events and systems actually conform to patterns at the heart of our universe. (full review)