Monk

“Do you believe that I triumph in Italy for the Carnots, Barras, etc…. I wish to undermine the Republican party, but only for my own profit and not that of the former dynasty… As for me, my dear Miot, I have tasted authority and I will not give it up.”

-- Napoleon Bonaparte

Another fine pick-up at the library. What can I say? I have a way with books. I just caress them on the spine and they fall open before me giving up all their charms and sweetness, until I have had my fill and I toss them aside for the next hawt thing.

Philip Dwyer only takes us up to Napoleon’s coup in 1799 in his “Napoleon: The Path to Power”. Dwyer is working on a follow-up volume, which is something to look forward to, but I suppose that could be a few years away. And one of the things about library affairs and three-week stands is that it can be hit and miss, but I’ll keep an eye out for the sister.

To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.

I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.

When I sat down to write my account of the experience in 1989—Liar’s Poker, it was called—it was in the spirit of a young man who thought he was getting out while the getting was good. I was merely scribbling down a message on my way out and stuffing it into a bottle for those who would pass through these parts in the far distant future.

Unless some insider got all of this down on paper, I figured, no future human would believe that it happened.

-- Michael Lewis for Portfolio.com

Here's a little something for those with a taste for the wild side of Wall Street in the midst of the great financial crisis that we are perhaps only beginning to feel the ramifications of. Or at least something for future reference. It's a nine-page article, and I haven't gotten past the first page myself. The book isn't going to the top of my list, but it's something to keep in mind.

What good timing. I recently discussed, in relation to a British ad campaign promoting atheism, the issues of faith and doubt and my own flirtations with the supernatural. Not long after that, I discovered the novel “John” by Niall Williams about the apostle’s last days with his small coterie of followers, and it is a much more dramatic background to highlight the tensions between faith and doubt looking at the first generation after the crucifixion of Christ, watching the schisms develop and seeing these early Christians facing the plethora of faiths competing for believers, which also fans doubt about the Christian faith, whether it really might be just another contrivance of an ambitious but utterly human being. Even though I’m not a Christian, I think it made for a happier story that the author made their faith true. Happy endings are sometimes nice.

And Williams brings such a poetic grace to this dance between faith and doubt. It pains me that this is a library book, as this is definitely a lifetime-rereadable for me, and I’m much more reserved about buying books these days, being more content to regard the books in my reading life as disposable. But if I didn’t go to the library, I most likely would never have come across it in the first place, just as I discovered the Nina Zero series at the library, and which I may have gone my whole life without knowing of it otherwise. Amazon’s algorithms for pointing out useful recommendations are obviously not perfect. I guess you really do have to leave the house to meet more interesting people as well as more interesting books. I may end up buying “John” anyway, in the likely event that I feel like rereading the story, in a year or so.

“Which brings me to the last part of my confession. I want Lava to stay alive. No matter how bad things get it's still better to be alive. I want to know he's breathing and leaping after dust balls and chasing imaginary enemies in his sleep. I want him to be alive, because then there's still hope that he'll make it here to California and get to be an American dog who runs on the beach and chases the mailman instead of strangers with guns.”

-- From Baghdad, with Love by Lieutenant Colonel Jay Kopelman

Pop came home from his shopping rounds last week, and said that he came across Mr. Kopelman at the BX, apparently doing a book tour, and he picked up an autographed copy of his book. I hadn't heard of it, and I probably wouldn't have come across this book on my own, and I'm happily surprised to have loved it as much as I did.

As much as I have been interested in the news and the Iraq war, and as much as I may be possessed of a certain testosterone-fueled imagination, I'm not one to seek out a book that gives an inside account of the military action, which I think is a bit intense in a technical sort of way. Now, the beauty of Kopelman's narrative is that, through the sweetener of a dog story, he actually affords one some vital, realist looks of the Iraq war from inside. Fallujah is the center of this man-meets-dog story, when Fallujah was the center of the action of the war. And it's hard to come away from this book without being impressed by these soldiers, to think that this is somehow just another job, and for rather modest pay. Sure, there's a darker side, but let's leave that for another story.

Below is an extended excerpt. The main concern here is that he is hoping to circumvent orders that require all dogs and cats to be killed, which is an elaboration of the standing order that soldiers are not allowed to keep pets. They are cracking down because stray dogs have been eating the corpses lying on the streets, and they want to maintain a better showing of order than this.

( excerpt )

What is it that makes me love life, even as it only mocks and punishes me, why do I always long to live another dismal year? In significant part, it's because I always learn of another book coming out that I almost desperately want to get my hands on. Today that discovery is H.W. Brands' "Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt", which should be coming out in November, a little something for the holiday season. I've long had an interest in delving into that presidency, and I think this volume will be my entryway.

"The Story of Edward Sawtelle" by David Wroblewski

The New York Times is giving the big love treatment to a debut novelist. If you love long, lush novels and dogs, and your reading tastes range from Shakespeare to Stephen King, this new book promises to carry you over the summer doldrums.

As for myself, it sounds like a perfect kind of read, and ten, fifteen years ago I probably would've pounced on it like a labrador retriever on a tennis ball, but my plate overflows with more urgent matters these days. Yet, I can imagine hunting this novel up some time down the road, when I feel like losing myself in eternal afternoons that lead nowhere but to a reader's paradise - just a boy and his dog.

If you’re a Democrat, your candidate won in Wednesday night’s presidential debate — that was obvious, and most neutral observers would recognize that. But the other candidate issued appalling distortions, and the news commentary afterward was shamefully biased.

-- Nicholas D. Kristof for The New York Times

Kristof gives us a more reflective, rather academic take on last night's debate, using studies that highlight the polarizing tendencies of our biases, in the way we receive and shape information, suggesting why rationality is not the primary basis on which politics turns. Well, duh!

( kristof )

"McMafia" by Misha Glenny

Would you like some rape with that?

"Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates that Defined America" by Allen C. Guelzo

Here is one that immediately gets placed near the top of the stack. The deal about this one is that I can count it as a 'serious read', since this apparently is not one of those more novel-like narratives, but is a rather academic look on the subject. I'm game for it. But I'm still not quite halfway on Taylor's "Secular Age", and after that, I may want to do Stanley Fish's book on Paradise Lost, before considering this one. And, of course, anything can happen in the intervening months, but we got to get to this one.

♠
"Blasphemy" by Douglas Preston

Scientists, working on the new and largest supercollider, make contact with God. And wouldn't you know it, the ones who are most opposed, and violently so, are our Christian fundamentalists, who see the Antichrist in this presence and believe the End Days are upon us.

I know. It's a bit rich in high-concepts and divine metaphysics, and even a gifted genius novelist probably couldn't really bring off such a storyline. And it's not like one hears a lot of buzz about what a great read this is, and Amazonians only give the novel mixed reviews.

Yet, I am interested. My mind has been a bit God-hungry lately, and this has some promise of still being a fun read. Another Koontz book is next on my stack of guilty-pleasure reads, but I think this novel may have the next place.

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