Social anthropology was a discipline I was fortunate to stumble into when I headed to university way back in 1996. My main motive for going was to read Development Studies, but at Sussex you couldn’t study it as a single subject.
“A History of the World in 100 Objects“ is a fascinating book. A joint project of the British Museum and BBC Radio 4, it uses objects of ancient art, industry and technology as an introduction to key events in human history.
This is the book I’ve been waiting for for years. And it’s been a revelation in the few days I’ve had it. Broken down into largely single page ‘chapters’ – making it an incredibly easy read – it debunks many of the myths of running a business, of entrepreneurship, of innovation. What’s more, it’s written by doers, not talkers. I have plenty of time for doers.
Here are just a few of my favourite snippets from the “Rework” book:
One of the things that always strikes me when spending some extended period in another country is how quickly one’s lifestyle changes and adapts to the local environment. Interestingly this includes many areas of life such as sleep patterns, nutrition, communication, etc. which are normally seen as being very ingrained and hard to change. Anyway, below is a list of areas where I consider my Vienna and Kathmandu lives to be (radically) different.
One of the things I’m generally pretty bad at when I’m at home in Vienna is reading books. While I have half a dozen books sitting on the shelf right next to my bed there never seem to be enough in the hours in the day to actually open and read them. I didn’t even manage to read more than 20 pages in my Lonely Planet Nepal guide before getting on the plane even though the book was actually lying next to my cushion for several weeks.
I had previously mentioned reading William Gibson’s “Pattern Recognition†during the Christmas holidays and today I finally managed to take a closer look at his Wikipedia entry. From there I was lead to his Web site where I stumbled across one of the greatest quotes I’ve seen in quite some time:
Occasionally, most often at airports and train-stations, I randomly browse through a book-store and buy something that sounds interesting. Seeing that I’m really bad when it comes to actually reading books - I spend way too much time reading stuff online and in magazines - I tend to have piles of unread books sitting next to my bed, on my desk and in my shelves.
