The Emperor. Ryszard Kapuściński (Writer), William R. Brand, Katarzyna Mrczkowska-Brand (Translation). Penguin Classics (2006)

A remarkable, engaging and astounding book about the way the Emperor of Ethiopia ruled and fell from power. After the revolution that removed Halie Selassie from power, Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński sought out the surviving staff from the imperial place to hear their stories about imperial life and its decline and fall.
Their description of a closed world is vivid, detailed and full of insight into the mechanics that sustained and finally doomed it. Halie Selassie never leaned to read or write and that was probably a strategic decision, it created degree of ambiguity which he exploited to the full to control and govern. The whole system of government was a series of interlocking pieces that all depended on him and kept those around him in a perpetual state of enmity and faction which prevented anyone combining against him.
The survivors understood deeply the mechanics of the Palace and how power was maintained, they agreed with the process and actively participated in it. They had to, their own position on the ice flow of the Imperial household depended on how successfully they engaged with and supported the process.
The description of the start of a regular day as the Emperor strolled about while being briefed by the three people who were responsible to finding out what everyone else was up to is a classic of managing power by ensuring that everyone was wondering what the other had said to the Emperor. By remaining the only one who knew everything, Halie Selassie kept all off balance and clinging to his favour.
The most extraordinary job in the household was held by the man who had to place the pillow beneath the feet of the Emperor when he sat on a throne. There were a multitude of thrones all over the country, one in every place the Emperor might visit, all were slightly different and so required a different pillow to ensure the imperial dignity was correctly maintained. This man knew the exact height of each throne and had a pillow ready for each one and the skill to put it in place at exactly the right moment. This was not done with any sarcastic intent or recollection, the absolute necessity of the pillow and the timing are explained and the joy in his expertise is evident.
The description of the effect on the neck of anyone honoured by the Emperor is a gem capturing the absurdity of seniors with humour and sharp detail, the impact of being thrown out of favour is equally caught with sharp wit.
The slow disintegration of the regime is detailed by those who knew it was happening and found themselves cling ever more desperately to the Emperor as they saw no future outside of the palace. They understood that the fatal problem was that the rule of the Emperor had to be absolute, it could not manage compromise or accommodation, the first crack was the last one. It would just be a matter of time and the details of the slow demolition are full of rueful hindsight and reflection.
There is very little nostalgia in the accounts, they miss the work and structure of their work, work they understood and took pride in. 
Ryszard Kapuściński places the interviews in the context of post revolutionary Ethiopia with deft skill and telling detail.The translation from Polish by William R. Brand,Katarzyna Mrczkowska-Brand is transparent, the voices of the survivors are individual and clear.
Simply put, a brilliant book.

The Secret Life of Cows. Rosamund Young. Faber & Faber (2017)

A deeply engaging, charming and thoroughly unsentimental book about farming cattle. Rosumund Young and her family run Kite's Nest Farm on the edge of the Cotswolds escarpment. It is a commercial enterprise, the animals on the farm are raised for food. The farm is managed using a very simple idea, that animals are sentient beings who flourish in freedom and proper attention. Animals raised like this produce better tasting beef or pork or chicken which is economically sustainable and rewarding. Based on her close up experience of rearing farm animals Rosamund Young takes aim at factory farming of animals on ethical and economic grounds and makes a very persuasive case.
Her main focus is on cows, pretty much the archetypal dumb beast, standing chewing a cud in a field, they are the picture of vacancy on legs. Without sufficient variety to stimulate them any sentient creature will be reduce to the minimum required to cope with very limited circumstances. They will shrink to fit, given access to water, shelter and food the same creature will expand to fit the circumstances. Rosamund Young writes form her observations of how widely cows will expand to fill the available space, respond to trust and careful attention.
Cows are herd animals, they communicate strongly with each other and anyone who interacts with them if they are willing to be communicated with. Anthropomorphism generally gets a bad name as a sentimental ruse to try and communicate with animals, bridging the gap by ascribing human attributes to animals. As anyone who has had prolonged contact with an animal,domestic or farm, will know that animals have individual characters, preferences and vividly expressed and felt emotions. This is not imposing a human facade on an animal, it is the exact opposite, it is observing them on their own terms. This is what Rosamund Young does and she writes about these observations with sparking wit and a deep appreciation for the animals.
She writes about the ways they respond to living, interacting with their own and with humans. The cows are named individuals because they are clearly individuals and it would be wildly insulting to treat them as anything else. The writing is never twee or cute, the fact that the background is commercial farming makes a considerable difference. There are no gentlewoman farming rearing pets in the guise of farming. This is straightforward observation based on close and continuous contact driven by the desire to produce better beef as cost effectively as possible.
Rosamund Young points out that they made a deliberate choice to stop being a dairy farm and concentrate on beef and this is fundamental to how the cows are managed. If the product is not milk it gives the cattle a very different life path and avoids operational and commercial problems that dairy production bring with it. The fact that these problems provide a very convenient cover for the agriculture industry to not directly engage with the concerns and ideas that are raised in the book is illustrated by a simple thought experiment. When reading the book replace the word cows with the word staff, the effect for anyone who has ever read anything about employee engagement is depressing. Units of farm production or units of headcount the view from the governing spredsheet is the same, cattle farm or cube farm it makes no difference.
The Secret Life of Cows is a pleasure to read, Rosanund has a great series of stories to tell and tells them wonderfully well.

To Pixar and Beyond. My Unlikely Journey with Steve Jobs To Make Entertainment History. Lawrence Levy. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. (2016)

A very engaging and enjoyable story about the way that Pixar overcame three very serious problems to launch Toy Story and the company on to huge , deserved, success. Success can look pre-ordained after it has been achieved, this story shows the deep uncertainty that existed before Toy Story was released and Pixar became the brand it is today.
 The three problems that had to be solved were, having the money to make Toy Story, a lopsided contract with Disney that posed a problem for money in the future to make more films and Steve Jobs.
Lawrence Levy was asked by Steve Jobs to join Pixar to help develop the company, actually get the company fit and ready for an IPO so that Steve Jobs could realise the value of his investment as the owner of Pixar. Lawrence Levy took the job for the challenge, without realising the actual scale of the challenge, became deeply enamored with the potent creativity contained in Pixar and set about resolving the problems.
Lawrence Levy has a talent for explaining business in a way that is clear, direct and engaging. He always places the people in the context and the context  in terms of the business. Pixar was a problem for Steve Jobs, his plan for the company had not developed the way he had intended and he was looking for a way to get what he wanted. The staff at Pixar were committed and creative and felt deeply that they had been severely shortchanged by Steve Jobs.
The contract with Disney was an industry standard, Steve Jobs signed it without realising how restrictive it would be for a company that was making hugely time consuming and expensive animated films, the contract would only provide sufficient money to Pixar to continue to make films under very limited circumstances.
The story of how these problems were resolved is engaging because Lawrence Levy  shows how much any business is reliant on the people involved, their decisions, attitudes and engagement. The hard slog of identifying the problem, scoping a solution, getting agreement and implementing it is described with care and detail, enough explanation for those unfamiliar with the processes, not so much to drown everyone in details. The subtle creativity of top flight business managers is demonstrated with delicate care, there is no chest thumping, no macho declarations of dominance, there is patient and thoughtful considerations of how to solve a problem.
One of the most striking aspects to the story is the way that Lawrence Levy consistently highlights the work of others and lets his own work rest in the background. It pulls the reader into the story as they get to feel the tension and  understand the stakes, although the outcome is established the process is fascinating.
This is not a business book, it is a story about a particular business at a particular time, superbly told and pleasure to read.

Untold Stories. Alan Bennett. Faber and Faber. Profile Books (2005)

A very engaging and enjoyable collection of pieces that cover a wide range of topics. Alan Bennett refers to the book in his introduction as an album, a collection on unrelated written pieces that are collected under various headings. The lack of a unifying theme makes this large book easier to read, there is no necessity for the reader to maintain any continuity when reading the sections, they each stand for themselves. Whatever the topic, they range from an autobiographical piece about his parents and a piece of hidden family history, lectures on painting, extracts from his dairies and a wonderful dramatic monologue, the consistent aspect is the voice of the author.
While this could be a problem in the monologue in which the speaker is an elderly woman in a nursing home, reading it in the middle of other items shows the depth of Alan Bennett's talents as a writer. The character emerges vividly from the words, the woman is old but in no way feeble and at the same time very clearly an Alan Bennett character.
The same is true of all the pieces in the book, in particular the autobiographical pieces, Alan Bennett explores Alan Bennett the character with the same care and attention to detail as the writer devotes to his fictional characters in his plays. This is a really good thing, no one's life is really interesting to anyone else, in an unedited, unformed shape it is just a series of mundane events more or less interrupted by something that can be packaged up for the interest of others. The difference is the skill with which it is packaged and in this volume Alan Bennett displays a rare and astonishing skill.
The portrait of his parents is both heartfelt, unblinking and deeply sympathetic to people who would have squirmed at the attention. The details of his mothers steady loss of personality but not physical health and the significantly messy reactions it creates are thankfully not undermined by guilt or structural demands for sympathy from the reader. By casting himself as a character, the writer can develop a required distance from the events to capture the tangle without loosing sight of the fact that the reader is in fact a stranger.
This is true also for the piece about being diagnosed with cancer and his struggle not only to live with it but to manage the eternal aspect of living with cancer without becoming a victim of cancer. The dynamic struggle between an innate reticence and the push for communication inherent in being a writer is nicely made explicit.
The tone of the pieces, including the lectures on delivered as a Trustee of the National Gallery in London is conversational. Alan Bennett is emphatically talking directly to the the reader in his own voice, they are all monologues delivered by a master of the art. The pieces rarely follow a straight line, they turn and wander and return as a conversation might as the performer tries to maintain the interest and attention of the audience. Alan Bennett is conscious that he is requesting something very valuable from the reader, time and attention, and lacking a clear dramatic structure and pay off to reward this has to do so another way. The superbly constructed pieces draw in the reader and reward the time and attention with strong, considered views, excellent jokes and interesting company from a man who is interested in others. 

The Book of Heroic Failures. The Offical Handbook of the Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain. Stephen Pile. Routledge & Kegan Paul. (1979)

While success is rightly celebrated, failure is much more common if rather overlooked. This glorious volume celebrates some of hard won failures that represent a far greater share of all human activity than succeeding does. Stephen Pile has assembled a wonderful array of truly heroic failures, ones which took dedication, hard work, persistence in the face of the obvious and a significant element of luck to pull off.
Stephen Pile divides the book into sections and provides compelling and utterly hilarious evidence that there is nothing that cannot be done really badly, from crashing a a space probe due to a minus sign being omitted from the instructions, to the Indiana General Assembly legislating in 1897 that the the value of PI was four, an error that would mean that a pendulum clock would gain fifteen minutes every hour to a bank robber who gave written instructions that the money should be put in a paper bag and fled the bank when the cashier wrote back that he did not have a paper bag.
The book is written without malice or sadistic glee, Stephen Pile does not list failures that have lead to death or destruction, the failures rooted in geed or corruption. This is a very deliberately light hearted book that delights in absurdity and pomposity and the unintended consequences of the best of intentions. It is fantastically funny and quietly comforting, an enduring pleasure.