Mark Gilroy

Bringing Books to Life!

Books

Mark has been a book man since he learned to read. Why did he get in trouble in elementary school? Because he was reading a book when he should have been doing his math. Mark shares insights on questions you might have. How are books written? How do books get edited? How do books get published and distributed? And what are some great books that have something unique and compelling to say?

The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan

The Man Who Would Be King by Ben Macentire

The American Who Became King of Afghanistan

I loved the Michael Caine and Sean Connery movie, The Man Who Would Be King, which came out when I was in high school. The John Huston film was nominated for four Academy Awards. Christopher Plummer played the role of a young journalist by the name of Rudyard Kipling – and the film was based on the Kipling’s short story by the same name.

But who knew that Kipling’s literary bon mot was inspired by a true story – and that truth truly is stranger than fiction?

In 1989, Ben Macintyre was sent to Afghanistan to cover the final stages of the 10 year war between the Soviets and the CIA-backed Mujahideen guerrillas. While there he read Kipling’s tale of Daniel Dravot (written in 1888 but looking back to the middle of the Victorian Age, the 1820s and 30s), who made it to the heart of Afghanistan disguised as a Muslim holy man to become king of a fierce tribal empire. It was several years later, while combing through stacks of books in the British Library that Macintyre first discovered the name of a man who “reputedly inspired Rudyard Kipling’s story, ‘The Man Who Would Be King.'”

So began Macintyre’s search for an elusive footnote in history – all his papers were assumed to have been destroyed in a house fire in 1929 – that culminated in The Man Who Would Be King, a fascinating slice of history that is relevant to today’s most pressing geopolitical hotspot. Following clues that led him from Britain’s war archives to the Punjab, San Francisco, and Pennsylvania, Macintyre was finally able to find a box hidden away in the basement of the archives in a tiny U.S. museum of this mysterious man’s birthplace. At the bottom of the box was a “document, written in Persian and stamped with an intricately beautiful oval seal: a treaty, 170 years old, forged between an Afghan prince and the man who would be king.”

The first American in Afghanistan had many titles: Prince of Ghor, Paramount Chief of the Hazarajat, Lord of Kurram, personal surgeon to Maharaja Ranjit Singh of the Five Rivers, King of Afghanistan … and many others. His highness Halan Sahib – who in 1839, enthroned on a bull elephant, raised his standard and made claim to the Hindu Kush – was known back home in Chester County, Pennsylvania, as Josiah Harlan. The man who followed Alexander the Great’s winding mountain path 21 centuries later and led an army made up of Afghan Pathans, Persian Qizilibash, Hindus, Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Hazaras who were descendents of the Mongolian Hordes, a pacifist Quaker of Chester County, Pennsylvania.

If you like history, biographies, and tales that seem too fanciful to be true, you’ll love The Man Would Be King.

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

 
Enders Game by Orson Scott Card

Card creates a brilliant and nuanced cosmology in the Ender quintet.

I like Science Fiction just fine but must not love it because there have been many years I didn’t read even a single SciFi title. I had read a few of the standards over the years without much prompting and recommend them all – Frank Herbert’s Dune Series, Philip Dick’s Valis Trilogy and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (became the movie Bladerunner), Asimov’s I, Robot, Ray Bradburry’s Farenheit 451, Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Arthur Clarke’s 2001: Space Odyssey, C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet trilogy, and I’m sure others.

My son Merrick introduced me to Orson Scott Card and his child genius Andrew Wiggin – Ender – in Ender’s Game. A slow start – probably because of my own low expectations – and an ending that was so unexpected that it made me want to read the book again. Immediately. I’ll leave it at that so I don’t even stray towards a spoiler. My reading of preferred genres goes in streaks I admit, but I devoured all the books in Card’s series as quickly as I could get to them: Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, Ender’s Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, and I’m sure I’m leaving something out. (Thanks Merrick!)

Ender grows up in a home with a cruel older brother, Peter, and the love of his life, Valentine, his older sister and the only one who doesn’t seem to resent his brilliance. Card does have an ability to see the future – his description of communication over the Internet before Al Gore had the thing really up and going is amazing – and in a world of overpopulation Ender wasn’t even legally allowed to be born. Peter and Valentine are both eligible to be selected for Battle School but Peter’s anger turns to lethal hatred when it is Ender who is chosen to train as a fighter to repel a hostile alien forces’s next invasion.

My description may make this sound trite but the psychological, moral, and physical conflicts are brilliant and emotionally exquisite. [Note: The movie was made after I read the novel. It just didn’t capture the psychology of the book.]

Like Frank Herbert in the Dune books, as you read through Card’s series you find an author who doesn’t just create other settings or even worlds – but whole cosmologies complete with religions, races, histories, and complex moral dilemmas, including definitions of the soul and consciousness. (Yes, there are some slow sections, particularly in Xenocide, but the whole experience is more than satisfactory.)

Just a note or two about Card. He is a descendent of Brigham Young and graduated from BYU and the University of Utah, and did doctoral work at Notre Dame. He served as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While passing through Salt Lake City on a Delta flight I saw that he has also written the novels Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel and Leah, which are known as the Women from Genesis Series. The Internet says he lives in North Carolina now. I don’t know anything about his ongoing personal religious life but would simply observe that as with other author’s from a high identity religious background, there is a discipline and training of thought that seems to spawn a counter-intuitive imaginative freedom with the ability to dream up huge, comprehensive, and interconnected realities as he’s done in his Andrew Wiggin novels.

Murketing and the Fine Art of Sincerity

At its best, murketing is selling something you've sincerely bought into.

At its best, murketing is selling something you’ve sincerely bought into.

“Fast Times” just released their top 10 business books for the year and Rob Walker’s Buying In was second on the list.

Amazon’s starred review says:

Brands are dead. Advertising no longer works. Weaned on TiVo, the Internet, and other emerging technologies, the short-attention-span generation has become immune to marketing. Consumers are “in control.” Or so we’re told.

In Buying In, New York Times Magazine “Consumed” columnist Rob Walker argues that this accepted wisdom misses a much more important and lasting cultural shift. As technology has created avenues for advertising anywhere and everywhere, people are embracing brands more than ever before–creating brands of their own and participating in marketing campaigns for their favorite brands in unprecedented ways. Increasingly, motivated consumers are pitching in to spread the gospel virally, whether by creating Internet video ads for Converse All Stars or becoming word-of-mouth “agents” touting products to friends and family on behalf of huge corporations. In the process, they–we–have begun to funnel cultural, political, and community activities through connections with brands.

Walker explores this changing cultural landscape–including a practice he calls “murketing,” blending the terms murky and marketing–by introducing us to the creative marketers, entrepreneurs, artists, and community organizers who have found a way to thrive within it. Using profiles of brands old and new, including Timberland, American Apparel, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Red Bull, iPod, and Livestrong, Walker demonstrates the ways in which buyers adopt products, not just as consumer choices, but as conscious expressions of their identities.

Part marketing primer, part work of cultural anthropology, Buying In reveals why now, more than ever, we are what we buy–and vice versa.

I’m halfway through and enjoying the book tremendously. I would simply argue that murketing is not a new concept but is as old as commerce itself. Anyone else ever been asked by someone if they can bring over a pizza only to discover that the real agenda was not breaking bread but a sales presentation? My personal experience with that exact scenario, probably atypical, was as bad an example of murketing as you’ll ever witness.

But whether done online or as a door-to-door visit; whether done well (which probably means sincerely or with the appearance of sincerity) or poorly (you tricked me into thinking you cared about me but it sure appears that you only want to sell me something); whether the starting point is as a provider or purchaser of the goods or service; the blending of who we are with what we offer – murketing – is perhaps the most proven form of selling and marketing ever known.

A man known as the “greatest salesman in the world” (think of the Og Mandino classic by that same name) was also a great example of a murketer. St. Paul was nearly obsessed with defending his sincerity in sharing the gospel – to the point that he maintained his trade as a tent maker so that no one would accuse him of being a money grubber. A typical self-defining statement from Paul can be found in 2 Corinthians 4:2 (The Message):

We refuse to wear masks and play games. We don’t maneuver and manipulate behind the scenes. And we don’t twist God’s Word to suit ourselves. Rather, we keep everything we do and say out in the open, the whole truth on display, so that those who want to can see and judge for themselves in the presence of God.

The prevailing definitions of murketing in Buying In is “marketing that parades as non-marketing” – which sounds a lot more like something from Machiavelli’s The Prince than Paul’s letter to the Corinthians! At it’s best, murketing is selling something you have sincerely bought into.

But no matter what direction you tackle the concept of murketing – a technique to be learned, a ploy to be wise to, an interesting study of the Internet and emerging sales behavior or a “same old, same old” yawn – it’s hard to refute the notion that the best selling in life comes from those who have most bought into that which they are trying to sell.

That’s why we like our personal trainers to be fit, our dessert chefs to be plump, and our preachers to be holy.

Now, about that pizza I was bringing over!