"People Who Are Remembered Speak Differently" (Baek Ju-hwan, Snowfox Books) — "Why do we handle a company's words so strategically, yet invest so little effort in how we ourselves speak?" The author began his career in the management planning division of Chosun Ilbo, earned an MBA from Oxford, worked as a consultant at Accenture Singapore and EY Korea, and has served as head of public relations at OB Beer since 2015. In this book, he distills more than two decades of hands-on experience as a corporate communications specialist into a single practical guide. Drawing on crisis-communication techniques used by corporations, he translates them into everyday personal situations, offering real-world frameworks applicable to job interviews, presentations and unexpected hostile questions. Companies, he argues, can win over a market with a single sentence or defuse a crisis with a single answer. The book's central message: a response is not a technique but a strategy, not an expression but a judgment. Even in an era when AI churns out sentences on demand, he writes, it is ultimately human beings who must decide what to say and take responsibility for it.
"The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud" (Ernest Jones, translated by Jeong Myeong-jin, Bugle) — A biography of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, arrives in a doorstop volume of more than 1,000 pages. It is an abridged edition of the original three-volume biography published between 1953 and 1957, supplemented with additional material on psychoanalytic concepts where needed. The author, a British neurologist and psychoanalyst, chronicles the major events of Freud's life and examines how they shaped both the man and his ideas. The history of psychoanalysis, he argues, is ultimately a history of departures — key figures in Freud's inner circle leaving one by one. The reason, in the author's analysis, was Freud's insistence on defending the theory of sexual libido as the cornerstone of psychoanalysis. Freud regarded colleagues who broke with him over intellectual differences — among them Josef Breuer, Alfred Adler and Carl Jung — as "traitors" bent on undermining his theories. The book's willingness to examine both Freud's brilliant insights and his very human flaws ultimately proves an asset in understanding his work.
"What Does Art Do?" (Brian Eno and Bette Adriaansen, translated by Kim Hee-jeong, RH Korea) — Defining what art does is no easy task. Unlike a cup, it cannot hold water; unlike a chair, it cannot be sat upon. Nor does it communicate meaning at a glance the way a sign does. In that sense, art stands on the opposite side of everything that exists for utility. Inefficiency, superfluousness and uselessness are among its defining features — which is why discussions of art are always shadowed by the same question: why is it necessary, and what exactly does it do? The author, who has produced records for Coldplay, U2 and David Bowie, shares his reflections on these most fundamental questions about art. Using familiar objects — a hairstyle, a subway station — he expands the idea of art beyond the domain of a specialist few and into the fabric of everyday life, tracing how art creates emotion, forges connections with others and imagines new possibilities, making it what he calls a "technology of feeling." "Art is not some substance that emanates from paintings or symphonies," he writes. "The word 'art' is the name we give to a particular kind of relationship we have with certain things."
andy@heraldcorp.com
