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'ZflOTI&RS' •Mm: II3H? SHELF 21 Among other functions, books serve to inspire, to inform and to amuse. Without intending any official Firm endorsement, the editors of HirS Reports invite readers' attention to the titles on this page as candidates for their time and attention. Your Sight: Folklore, Fact and Common Sense, by Bernard Seeman. Little, Brown and Company, 1968, 242 pages, $5-95- Accountants are among those professionals who can least afford to neglect their eyes, yet some may be giving their eyes less than the full protection and care their value merits. How many accountants, for instance, submit to periodic eye examination? How many put off a visit to an ophthalmologist until repeated tearing or headaches force them to go? A regular eye checkup (yearly for people past age 40) is just one piece of practical advice offered in this colorful and explicit book, written for laymen by a veteran medical reporter. With the help of an extensive glossary of medical terms, drawings and photographs, Mr. Seeman succeeds in making clear the nature of human sight, the diseases that affect our eyes, the steps we can take to protect them, and, finally, what laymen should know about such aids to sight as eyeglasses and contact lenses. The author points out the hazards of direct sunlight in summer and winter, and suggests wearing optically ground sun glasses to protect the eyes from strong sunlight or its reflection, on the beach, the water or in snow. And he cautions against reading under the high-intensity lamps that have come into vogue recently. Parents are told that a child's first examination by an ophthalmologist should come no later than at age four. They are alerted to possible eye difficulties in children by a series of questions such as: "Does the child rub his eyes excessively?" and, "Does he seem to be doing badly in school, or have difficulty learning to read and write?" Mr. Seeman's book discusses recent advances in eye-saving techniques, and the hope for even greater progress offered by current research. It points out to would-be donors of eyes for corneal transplant a message that bears frequent repeating: do not think you can "will" your eyes, but rather let your family and physician know that you wish to donate them in order that others may see. For those looking for an agency serving to prevent blindness or to help the blind, there is a list of public agencies and private organizations working in this field. The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong, by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull. Morrow, i969, 179 pages, $4.95. This is humor and satire in the spirit of Parkinsons Law, but it cuts deeper than that highly successful book of the 1950s. Dr. Peter's principle holds that: In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. If he does his work well, he is promoted. This continues until he has risen too high for his abilities. He has thus reached his "level of incompetence," and there he stays. The temptation is to visualize the other fellow as we read; but occasionally the open-minded will find himself taking a healthy look in the mirror. The Innovators: How Today's Inventors Shape Your Life Tomorrow, by the staff of The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones, 1968, 110 pages, $1.85. The popular image of the inventor as a determined loner, created by the history books a generation ago, has been replaced by that of the corporate "groupthinker," a faceless figure in a large organization. The Innovators is a fascinating paperback packaging nine recent articles published in The Wall Street Journal. It shows that while group-thinkers in large R&D departments of companies are responsible for a large measure of America's industrial and technical progress, they are not the entire show. Loners—both highly practical, successful inventors and kooks— are still much in evidence. Sometimes the big corporation has a work-alone type on the payroll and lets him think and tinker without being regimented. And sometimes the supposed kook has the last laugh as he comes up with the big one. The chapter on Big Daddy (the federal government) as employer of 190,000 scientists and engineers poses the challenging paradox of the future of research and development funded by taxpayers' money. Do basic patents held by the government, and available to all competitors, always work in the public interest? Or do they stifle initiative by removing the profit incentive from those in private enterprise who might develop them further? The role of the university as a patent holder is illustrated with a fascinating case history, that of the mechanical tomato picker that now harvests most of California's tomato crop, while the University of California reaps royalties from the machine. It is not generally known that corporations now pay millions in patent royalties to universities that undertook R&D work from which companies benefit. It was a fortunate set of circumstances that made Peter Carl Goldmark of CBS Laboratories, a lover of fine music, so annoyed with the cumbersome 78 rpm records that he invented the long playing discs and the equipment to handle them. Had he been an independent inventor in a one-man shop, the story might have ended differently. In stressing the importance, even today, of the lucky accident in innovation, the book quotes Louis Pasteur: "In the fields of observation, chance favors only minds that are prepared." It closes with a warning that in the push for specialization many companies may suffer a "generalist gap." Too many specialists, too many precision-ists cannot translate ideas from one field to another. •
Object Description
Title |
Editors' book-shelf |
Author |
Anonymous |
Subject |
Books -- Reviews |
Citation |
H&S Reports, Vol. 06, (1969 summer), p. 21 |
Date-Issued | 1969 |
Source | Originally published by: Haskins & Sells |
Rights | Copyright and permission to republish held by: Deloitte |
Type | Text |
Format | PDF page image with corrected OCR scanned at 400 dpi |
Collection | Deloitte Digital Collection |
Digital Publisher | University of Mississippi Library. Accounting Collection |
Date-Digitally Created | 2010 |
Language | eng |
Identifier | HSReports_1969_Summer-p21 |