Editors' book-shelf;

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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. •