HOTEL BABYLON by Imogen Edwards-Jones and Anonymous
Talk about being a fly on the wall! I expect we are all slightly voyeuristic about hotels and what goes on behind all those closed doors. And what about the staff? Are they really that polite and gracious and dare I say it deferential to guests, or is all that a big hypocritical facade? Do the hotels really love us, the guest, or are we just a means to an end.
The answer would appear to be yes and no to such questions! Being a business, the bottom line is all important, but to get the repeat business, the hotel does have to ingratiate ever so slightly to the guest, especially those at the top of the food chain such as sheiks, Madonna, Texan oil millionaires and so on. But the staff, being human, and thus in conflict with the business model, do find themselves, from time to time anyway, actually liking the guests and so do go out of their way to be, in a word, nice. Not always though, and generally the guest is the thing that keeps them in a job, and most importantly pays the tips, an incredibly lucrative part of being in the front line.
'Anonymous' is apparently a veteran of the England hotel industry, having started in the kitchens and now on reception, the hotel's face to the world. The goings ons and shenanigans are highly entertaining, very interesting and make for compelling reading. During the 24 hours the book covers, where the narrator is required to work a double shift, the reader is taken absolutely everywhere in the hotel, from the reception area, to the offices, restaurant, hotel kitchens, staff kitchen, service areas and of course the rooms from the suites down. Then there are all the staff - the management, front of house, chefs and kitchen staff, cleaners and housekeeping. Then there are the guests in all their glory! There is death, prostitutes, love, sex, rage, drunkenness, in fact a whole microcosm of life occurring in this building over a 24 hour period.
I don't think it is the most well written book I have read, but highly entertaining nevertheless and of course fantastically well captured in the BBC TV series.
CLEO by Helen Brown
What a little piece of magic this book is. Have your hankie ready, Cleo and Helen would melt the hardest heart. For 24 years, this little black cat was the one constant in the lives of Helen and her family. From the most terrible tragedy that can strike a family, and the various ups and downs that occurred in the years afterwards, Cleo kept them all looking forward and up. That is all the plot info that I am going to give because you need to read this for yourself!
However Helen has inserted plenty of interesting facts and anecdotes about cats, from being worshipped by the Egyptians to their uncanny therapeutic ability to make us feel better and do such things as lower blood pressure simply by purring. But any cat lover will tell you how good having a cat with you makes you feel.
I was working in the same department in the bank that Helen's husband was working in when their daughter Katherine was born. There was quite a bit of talk at the time about how Helen was some years older than Philip, how her family had suffered in the past, and also what a total energy force she was. I never met her, but having read Cleo I now know exactly what my work colleagues were talking about. She is definitely a cup half full person, although she has had plenty of cause over the years to be cup half empty!
The one criticism I had of the book was the complete lack of photos. I already knew what Philip looked like of course, so had a small advantage. If you go to http://helenbrown.com.au/index.html, you will see lots of family photos with Cleo.
If you are having a bad day, start this book. You will soon see that your bad day is really not that bad at all, and by the time you finish this book, your bad day/week will have dissolved away.
THE TIPPING POINT by Malcolm Gladwell
This is a book about epidemics. Not simply a widespread outbreak of an infectious disease as one would immediately think, but more encompassing than that, specifically a very rapid spread and growth of an idea, or a development or just simply a change. Malcolm Gladwell looks at this concept of change and why change can happen very quickly and unexpectedly. He looks at social epidemics rather than medical. Although Chapter 1 does focus on an infectious disease epidemic, I guess to set the scene and help us understand how an epidemic works, he uses the more widely understand meaning of epidemic in its medical arena which we, the reader, are more familiar with.
It is difficult to classify what type of book this is. It is about human behaviour and why we behave the way we do, and why small changes, sometimes very small changes, can affect very dramatically our response to a situation. Malcolm Gladwell sees this as a book about change, and how it is 'that ideas and behavior and messages and products sometimes behave just like outbreaks of infectious disease. They are social epidemics. The Tipping Point is an examination of the social epidemics that surround us.' (From http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint/index.html).
For example he looks at how Hush Puppies suddenly became the only shoe to wear, why Sesame Street and Blue's Clues were such phenomenally successful television programmes, how New York City went from being one of the most violent cities in the US to one of the safest, the three types of people that contribute to the success of these epidemics, and most importantly the three essentials of epidemics which make them happen. And how these same three essentials can be used to reverse epidemics such as smoking amongst teenagers.
Malcolm Gladwell's magic lies in applying all this theory to everyday situations and events, and historical figures, thus making it ridiculously easy to captivate the reader. He makes it oh so relevant to the man/woman in the street. We all understand being frightened of getting swine flu or another contagious disease; we have all watched Sesame Street at some stage; we all wonder how on earth did that particular fashion item become such a must have item eg Croc shoes, or low rider jeans; we have all been drawn to the allure of smoking at some stage whether it be through advertising such as the Marlboro Man, or the attraction of breaking school rules, or that it simply looked cool. These are things that we all have some knowledge or experience of. And this is what makes it such a good book to read!
Challenge yourself. In the same interview referred to in the web page above, Malcolm Gladwell hopes that we can learn to start positive epidemics of our own, so the book is also enpowering and motivating, giving us the power to change things in the world around us, hopefully of course for the better.
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