Skip to main content

Make, Think, Imagine - John Browne ***

When you read a politician's memoirs you know that, nine times out of ten, it won't really quite work, because the message can't carry a whole book. It's reminiscent of the old literary agent's cry of 'Is it a book, or is it an article?' It's not that there aren't a lot of words in such tomes. It's almost obligatory for these books to be quite chunky. But it's a fair amount of work getting through them, and you don't feel entirely satisfied afterwards. Unfortunately, that's rather how John Browne (former head of oil giant BP)'s book comes across.

It's not that the central thread is unimportant. It used to be the case, certainly in the UK, that science, with its roots in philosophy and the pursuit of knowledge, was considered far loftier than engineering, growing out of mechanical work and the pursuit of profit. There is, perhaps, still a whiff of this around in some circles - so Browne's message that engineering has been crucial to human development and to our vast improvements in living standards is an important one.

However, the way that Make, Think, Imagine goes about expanding that article-sized content into a full book doesn't feel entirely effective. We get some interesting history, but it can sometime feel like going around a museum gallery - lots of information but often quite dull. To be fair, the book isn't all like this. A few parts shine, notably Browne's exploration of the history of our use of energy. With an oil background, he can't help come across a little defensive in places, but he can say proudly that he was in the (very small) vanguard of oil executives recognising that climate change is real, even if did make him something of a pariah amongst his peers. To some extent here and, for example, in a section covering artificial intelligence he takes on the negative impact of the products of engineering, but more often the book is a paean to the wonders of engineering achievement.

That being the case, a natural comparison is Bronowski's The Ascent of Man, but Make, Think, Imagine lacks Bronwski's humanity and writing style - and Bronowski's wider scope when examining human achievement. A part of the problem takes us back to the political biographies. It's hard to find one that doesn't (subtly or blatantly) underline the author's position as a 'great person' in history. Lord John Browne (the 'L' word is diplomatically largely missing from the book) can't help but do a bit of the same thing, whether it's casually dropping in his apartment in Venice, his former trusteeship of the British Museum or his calling in to see various places and engineering developments around the world in what feel more like royal visits than a writer investigating. Bronowski gives us a picture of human achievement from a position of humility - Browne from that of a leading oil man.

That all sounds a little negative - but I would say this book should be essential reading for politicians, who all too often have an arts background or in some cases anti-capitalist views. Browne does give us plenty of evidence for the dramatic benefits we've received from engineering. But it's more a matter of doing your homework than a highly engaging read.
Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more