May 20, 2012

Short Book Review: “Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America, and International Terrorism” by John K. Cooley

April 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America, and International Terrorism

John Cooley knows his stuff and “Unholy Wars”  has a “been there, interviewed him” feel to it. While it, could use a little editing and organization, but by the end, I had a far better picture of how we got to where we are now.

When given the choice of a number of books to read for a class on the law of war and terror, I chose this one, and I was not disappointed. Primarily concerned with US action in Afghanistan and the rise of the Taliban and later Osama bin Laden in the mire left by the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.

Cooley has an incredible amount of information and relies on interviews he conducted with key players over the last 30 years. He sees the rise of terror in that state as largely a result of the unchecked flow of weapons and money to the mujaheddin from the United States to support the guerrilla war against the Soviets. With the exodus of Soviet tanks from Afghanistan, the US left also, closing, almost overnight, intelligence operations and diplomatic presence. The result was a disastrous civil war between warlords and religious fanatics that allowed the rise of the Taliban.

Citing the US as a culprit in the quagmire, a significant amount of responsibility is placed on the actions of the Pakistani intelligence services. Controlled by religious ideologues, the Pakistani intelligence services operated nearly autonomously from other Pakistani government branches, and often in opposition to stated policy. Its ostensible purpose was create a religiously friendly state on Pakistan‘s western border to take weight off of pressure created by the often contentious, and occasionally violent, relationship with India on its other side.

Eventually, it leads to the export of the “holy warriors” around the world, and followed later by opium as a cash crop supporting the somewhat outcast Taliban government.

In short, a must read.

The book suffers from a lack of editing and a somewhat choppy organization. However, the sheer volume of information easily makes the difficulty of following Cooley’s occasionally scattered writing well worth the challenge.

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Book Review: “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine” by Michael Lewis

April 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

Michael Lewis can tell a story like no other.  In fact, even before I finished reading his “The Big Short,” I wanted to work the book into every conversation I had. The story was that interesting and compelling.  Anyone who can take the financial crisis of the last few years, find a story in it that centers around subprime mortgages and shorting the market (if you understand what that means and how to do it, you’re more than a step ahead of me and about anyone else I’ve mentioned it to over the last couple weeks), and then make it interesting to the lay reader deserves to be read.

In many ways (if not all ways), the stock market is a giant enigma to me, which suggests how Winston Churchill once described Russia: “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.” If there is a key to the enigma, with that riddle wrapped in a mystery inside it, that is the stock market, perhaps the key is found in the self-interest of the individuals participating in the market. Not just the stock and bond traders that made up the named characters of “The Big Short,” but even the home buyers and owners that took out second, third, and fourth mortgages, bought two, three, and four “investment” properties, the loan originators who sought them out and offered no interest loans, and the banks that sliced up the loans to fill tranches (there’s another cryptic word for you) for trading as bonds to and between the financial houses on Wall Street.

In other words, as Gordon Gecko might say: greed. Greed of bonds traders, floor traders, home buyers, loan originators, strawberry pickers, and house cleaners. Greed by just about everyone involved, from the top all the way down to the bottom.

Lewis, known for his writing in “The Blind Side” and in “Money Ball,” with “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine” returns to his original stomping ground covered in “Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street.” Finding the few who saw the crash coming, he pulls together a narrative about those who anticipated the crash and saw it coming. While so many were getting rich off trading subprime mortgage based bonds, a few individuals realized that the underlying assets to the housing bubble were not stable and predicted that as interest rates on adjustable rate mortgages became due, defaults would sky-rocket and the bonds’ values would crash.

And then they bet against it, cashing in lucratively when the predicted defaults began.

, author of the best-sellers Moneyball, The Ne...

Michael Lewis, author of the best-sellers Moneyball, The New, New Thing, Liar's Poker, and others at a Hudson Union Society event in 2009. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What makes the story fascinating, of course, is the attention to the often colorful and more than slightly eccentric personalities that comprised the handful of individuals in the story. The stock market is difficult to understand for a simple reason–its workings are data driven and few pay the price to understand the numbers and analysis behind the market. In contrast, those who did, and those who got lucky, were often driven by a narrow-minded focus the data. From a neurologist turned hedge fund manager diagnosed with Aspergers in the midst of the story to a couple of young college grads who all but lucked into it, to a loud mouthed malcontent who made a habit of sticking it to the big wigs on Wall Street who lost investors money to the crisis, the “The Big Short” is replete with Lewis’s deft story telling.

Whether you are interested in finance or just looking for a great story, “The Big Short” is worth the time to read. I listened to it in the car, and often found myself sitting in the driveway waiting for the end of a section. More, it introduced me to concepts and interests that I’m exploring further in other books. Read in conjunction with “Too Big to Fail,” which I read last year, it provides an up close look at what was going on and why our economy is dragging through the longest recession in a generation.

One last observation: one aspect that this book noted that continues to shock me no matter how many times I hear it over the last four years is how people with little or no credit history or ability managed to get so much financing. From immigrant strawberry pickers in California with $750,000 mortgages to house cleaners in Brooklyn with four and five town homes, obtuse financial incentives to originators and investors alike distorted the market in ways that were dangerous to all of us. While I look forward to other financial histories for other perspectives, Lewis seems to make clear that it wasn’t so much the free market that failed, but the financial incentives that were built into it. In the end, the old adages “if it’s too good to be true, it probably is” and “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” seem even more relevant today than ever. Be careful when the snake oil salesman comes calling. He may not have your best interests at heart, and he may not even know it himself.

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Book Review: “1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created” by Charles C. Mann

April 3, 2012 By Leave a Comment

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” But what happened next?

More than just the discovery of the new world that we call the Americas, Christopher Columbus set off globalization of ecology, trade, biology, and nationality beyond anything that preceded it, argues Charles Mann in “1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created.” The discovery of America did more than just uncover lands previously unseen or mapped by Europeans. It set adrift the then current order of the entire world, changed civilizations from the Iberian Peninsula at the edge of Europe to the Ming Dynasty in Asia.

And the changes continue today, over five hundred years later.

Mann’s exploration of the world changed by Columbus’ discovery began in “1491: New Revelations of the America’s before Columbus,” a look at what the Americas were like before the 1492 discovery. In this new book, Mann steps off from the discovery to look at the effects.

Mann follows the trail of silver mined by the Spanish from Peruvian mountains as it travels across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, adding so much silver to the world market that it result in high levels of inflation in Spain and to the opening of trade with silver-starved Ming China (and indeed, may have also contributed to the Ming’s fall, too). In fact, more Peruvian silver may have been sent to China than to Spain. Silver would travel to Manila where it was traded for porcelain and silk bound for Spain and Europe. So great was the trade that the English privateer cum knight Sir Francis Drake would make his reputation marauding, mostly without success, Spanish silver caravans en route to the coast of South America for shipment to China and Spain.

In addition to that of silver, 1493 tells the story of other products that found their introduction the world after Columbus’ discovery, from tomatoes to potatoes. In fact, potatoes may have ended the perennial famines that plagued Europe (and contributed to the great potato famine in Ireland) and became a staple, along with manioc, across Europe and China. Rubber became so valuable that it defied usual economic laws of supply and demand as the price rose even when supply increased. Tobacco and sugar cane together brought plantation slavery to the Americas, as well as millions of Africans. Modern day cultures continue to bear the echoes of the assimilation of cultures and traditions amalgamated in the soup of escaped slaves, native American tribes, and Europeans.

If Mann deserves any criticism, it is that the story is just too large, too vast, and too complicated. The reach and the effects of the homogenocene–the period of mixing of insects, germs, plants, and every other biology through man’s action over the last 500 years–are perhaps too great for one book. Indeed, one associate complained to me that Mann just goes on and on about each aspect. “I get it already…” In his effort to be thorough, Mann cannot perhaps be sufficiently thorough to cover impact of the mixing of the Old and New Worlds.

Despite the vast scope of his effort, Mann succeeds in a fascinating tale that deserves a place among histories of the world. As Niall Ferguson might argue, too few histories look at the broad paths of history and ask “why” while too many look at the small pieces and tell what. Mann looks at the why, and he looks at a why that impacts us all. For that reason, I recommend it as important reading for the interested historian in all of us. Our world is not moved only by kings, presidents and generals, but also by the bugs, goods, trade, and cultures that mix as a result of our actions. Our ecology matters, if in ways we might not suspect or guess. After five hundred years, the effects are still felt and still changing. What might we find out tomorrow?

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Book Review: “Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order” by Charles Hill

March 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, And World Order

I’m always on the look out for new books to read (but what I really need is more time). Suggestions from friends, mentors, reviewers, blogs, and references in other books send me off on an endless cycle: hear about a book, find it on Amazon (or the library), purchase (or check out) said book, bring it home, put it on my bed-stand with great anticipation, read ten pages to a reference of another book, and…repeat. The result is a two-stack, five books per stack, “pile up” next to my bed that has resulted in a reading bottle neck. And, believe me you, it’s a bottleneck that affords me more enjoyable hours than I’ve ever passed in traffic.

That’s all really just a long way of saying that in reading Charles Hill’s “Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order” I constantly found myself adding new books to some real or imagined book list that I may, or may not, ever get a chance to read. Every chapter of Grand Strategies was full of new books that sounded interesting and fascinating. Some–like Mark Twain‘s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Salmon Rushdie‘s “Satanic Verses,” or Thucydides’s “The Peloponnesian War”–I had read and could quickly relate. Others–Xenophon’s “The Persian Expedition” or Marcel Proust‘s “In Search of Lost Time“–were new, at least to me. Worse, especially for my book list, Hill manages to craft his dialogue about each in such a way as to bestow meaning and insight beyond a cursory reading of the text.

For example, though I’ve often heard it referenced and cited as powerful piece of poetry, never had I seen John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” as a commentary on war and the modern polity. And yet, perhaps it is.

But far beyond the politics of the day ‘Paradise Lost’ is Milton’s comprehensive commentary on modern warfare, revolution, founding a polity; on strategy, leadership, intelligence, individual choice under conditions of modern statecraft; and on the justification of God’s ways to men.

Suddenly, the war in heaven, through Milton’s eyes, becomes a proxy for competing views of the world worked out during the Oliver Cromwell English Civil War.

In Hill’s eye, fiction is more than just a story. In literature, we see the great ideas and forces that move history worked out, argued, and recorded. The “international world of states and their modern system is a literary realm,” he argues. “[I]t is where the greatest issues of the human condition are played out.” Nothing may come closer to a thesis for his opus. He continues:

A sacral nature must infuse world order if it is to be legitimate. that order is not to be identified with a particular social system, but to legitimate, the system must hint at the underlying divinely founded order. The modern Westphalian system was conceived when such was the case, but with the Enlightenment’s addition of secularism, science, reason, and democracy, the system increasingly spurned , then forgot, its legitimizing sources of authority.[...] Revolutionary ideology radicalized secularism, science and reason into the task of erasing original sin, o perfecting humanity–all requiring terror to create “the New Man.” Modern efforts to create a sovereignty potent enough to fill the void produced the statist monstrosities of Stalin and Hitler. America became an empire but never gained the understanding to go with it. China is now on its own misguided course.

Thought provoking, insightful, and, of course, full of literature to read when you finish it (including a bibliography of primary and secondary sources that will keep you busy for several years), and reread, Hill’s “Grand Strategies” is a worthy addition to your bed-stand stack. Just make sure you put it on top.

(My rating: 5 of 5 stars)

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Book Review: “1421″ by Gavin Menzies

March 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment

1421: The Year China Discovered America On a scale of 1 to 10, this book is junk.

_______________

It’s rare that I would waste space blasting a book. Life is short and time is a scarce resource. I’d rather just drop a book unworthy of finishing and move on to a new one. This time, though, I think 1421 merits further explanation because of the sensational success it has experienced worldwide.

Simply put, 1421 is junk history posing as “real history.” Gavin Menzies has spun a fantastical and interesting tale out of the very real events surrounding the massive Chinese treasure fleets of 1421. His thesis–that the Chinese discovered the New World in the 1420s, mapped it, and that it was their maps that European explorers used when sailing for the New World (including, he argues, Columbus).

Built by a Ming emperor to gather in tribute from the ends of the Earth, the fleet was one of the last acts of imperial hubris. Shortly after it set sail, the emperor died. His son, in replacing his father’s policies, had the fleets destroyed upon their return, along with records gathered during the voyage. Starting with that sparse introduction, Menzies proceeds to gather bits and pieces of evidence stretching from China itself to the Indian subcontinent, from the Congo to Patagonia and beyond, and levies the evidence to tell a tale of the massive Chinese fleet charting the New World the greater part of a century before Columbus set sail in 1492.

It is an extremely interesting and, if it were true, a ground breaking discovery and thesis. Perhaps it is true. But likely, it is not.

As I started reading it, the first question that came to mind for me was this: in the almost six centuries since these events happened, why has no one else suggested that the Chinese arrived first? Menzies explanation is that historians generally lack the skill set necessary to uncover the truth, a skill set that he has as a former captain in the British Navy. Unlike most historians, Menzies argues, he can read a chart, understand what he’s looking at, and glean from these 15th century charts things that no historian would otherwise notice.

APROPOS: apparently archaeological information is coming up every day...but nothing about China

Yeah. It’s a bit of a stretch. I would be surprised to find that no historian has ever had the skill set to learn maritime charts and understand how to read them (heck, Theodore Roosevelt when only an undergraduate student at Harvard, researched and wrote a book of naval strategy — “The Naval War of 1812“–that became a classic and a text-book used by both the US and British navies for decades after it was published). That being said, I gave Menzies the benefit of the doubt. I’ve long been intrigued with China and its history, and I think I wanted to believe that history as we have been taught might not be true. How interesting would it be for America to have been discovered by the Chinese?  Nothing like a bit of sensationalism to sell books.

As I read, though, red flags continued to pop up. Out of only sparse details, Menzies would assert “conclusive proof” that his theories were finding relevance. Finally, over two hundred pages in, I decided to check into what critical review might have said about his methods and evidence. I reasoned that if Menzies is correct, or even has a good theory, then the academic community would support his findings with further research. I went to the internet.

Critical acclaim was anything but what I found. In addition to finding entire sites dedicated to debunking Menzies myths, I also found that historical lectures had been given explaining and demonstrating that what Menzies proposed was just that–a proposal. Be it even true, the evidence was not there, not was the reasoning clearly logical.

For example:

  • Menzies claims that Chinese anchors have been found off of the coast of California, but fails to document them.
  • 1421 says that Chinese DNA is found in North America natives, but fails to account for the influx of Chinese immigrants in the 17th century.
  • Menzies finds what he claims are chickens unique to Asia living in Peru, but fails to note that Peru exported millions of tons of silver to China and brought back silk and porcelain (and presumably other things, like, for example, chickens) throughout the heyday of the Spanish during the 16th through 17th centuries.

And that’s just to start.

Historian Kirstin A. Seaver says, in dissecting claims about the Chinese in Vinland:

The study of history is likely to reward anyone willing to undertake it in a quest for better understanding of who they are, how they became what they are, and what they might hope to become. The manufacture of a history that never existed rewards only those who make money by deceiving the public.”

If 1421 is true, Menzies has not found the evidence to support it. If it is false, it’s junk and a waste of time to read. Further, it perpetuates a falsehood that makes the acquisition knowledge about history–real, boring, dry and factual history–that much harder to grasp.

_______________

For further criticism and reviews on 1421 check out the following links:

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Book Review: “Drood” by Dan Simmons

February 8, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Drood

With Charles Dicken’s 200th birthday just passed, perhaps this is an appropriate homage to his work and his life.

“The Mystery of Edwin Drood” was Charles Dickens last novel, but he died before it could be finished. Dan Simmons picks up the mystery, not to solve and finish Dickens’ work, but to provide a back story, the real source of Drood. The result is a tale that is tragic, eerie, and mysterious.

Simmons starts out with heavy foreshadowing. Told in the voice of protagonist Wilkie Collins, friend and confidant of Charles Dickens, we are promised to know the real story of Dickens’ last years. After a narrowly surviving a disastrous train accident, Dickens’ tells Collins of a mysterious figure he sees slipping among the dead and dying of the train wreck. Tall, pale white, in an opera cloak and stove-pipe top hat, the man identifies himself as Drood. As the story progresses, Dickens and Collins explore the underside of London, visiting underground opium dens and dark tunnels running with tributaries of the Thames, seeking the illusive Drood.

As Collins’ narrative of Dickens’ last years progresses, Dickens dabbles with mesmerism, seemingly with assistance of the dangerous Drood, always somewhere on the periphery of vision. Meanwhile, Collins fights demons of his own, an increasing addiction to laudanum and opium.

With the end approaching, Dickens slowly wear himself out conducting dramatic readings of his literary works, conducting a break-neck tour schedule, both through-out the British Isles and post-Civil War America. We also see Collins struggle, like Amadeus’ Soliari, to achieve recognition and wealth to prove his worth relative to the great master Dickens. He is only a mediocre shadow of his friend, however, and soon finds himself under the spell of Drood. Before long, we are left to wonder what is real and what is illusion, what is perspective and what is opium induced.

While the book weighs in at over 700 pages, the setting, the depth of texture, and the reality with which Simmons spins this tale in Dickens 19th century England, makes the book worth reading, even if just to see and feel the world in which Dickens lived. However, beyond just showing an insider’s glimpse of the era, the reader feels like he is looking at a picture of the great Dickens himself. The mystery, and Collins’ apparent madness, combined with the dangerous and hypnotic villain-like Drood keep the reader reading, even when the months bleed into years.

I never felt like I was rushing to an ending or being pulled along by the plot, as I might have in a Clancy or a Patterson. On the other hand, I always enjoyed my Simmons deft use of language. I appreciated his ability to keep the story, and the character development, moving subtly and building to a surprising, but entirely plausible and almost expected, climax. Throughout, he makes appropriate use and reference to Dickens’ various works, weaving them into the story and the Collins consciousness. The book feels well researched, and though I am no Dickens expert, it seems like Simmons either knows his Dickens or has done the research to look like it.

The book is at times dark. Many times I found myself loathing the narrator, and it is rare that I read a book through the eyes of such an almost irredeemable character as Collins was by the end of the novel. He is scheming, mediocre, addicted, and, inexorably, mad, not to mention untrustworthy, deceptive, murderous, and greedy. Yet Simmons writes in honesty, developing the character as he must and with a story that almost compels finishing. I cannot recommend this book to everyone, but I wish I could. Dan Simmons is a good writer, and he does Dicken’s justice with this latest novel.

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Review: “A Free-Market Monetary System” and “A Pretense of Knowledge” by Friedrich A. Hayak

February 7, 2012 By 2 Comments
English: GFDL picture of F.A. Hayek to replace...

Friedrich A. Hayak. Image via Wikipedia

I recently read the short brochure “A Free-Market Monetary System,” a compilation of Friedrich A. Hayak’s 1974 Nobel Prize speech “A Pretense of Knowledge” and a short essay on proposing a free-market monetary system (hence, the name, see?). Both are short, and neither waste any time proposing radical changes to what was then, and indeed what is still, the status quo in monetary and economic policy.

Both the essay and the speech are worth reading.

In “A Free Market Monetary System,” Hayek warns that as long as central banks are in control of the money supply, we can expect to see the economic highs and lows that we have come to expect, better known as “bubbles”  and “recessions.” Both are part of the market corrections that result when markets try to correct for artificial highs created by monetary policy in the control of a central bank.

Hayek’s recommendation?  Let private enterprises issue their own money for circulation.

I am more convinced than ever that if we ever again are going to have decent money, it will not come from government: it will be issued by private enterprise, because providing the public with good money which ic can trust and use can not only be an extremely profitable business; it imposes on the issuer a discipline to which the government has never been and cannot be subject.

Get it? Rather than “Dollars,” we would buy, and spend, money that might be called something else. Nike “Swooshes,” perhaps, or American Express “credits.” The point is that business does not have a monopoly on money the way that government–i.e. central banks–does and therefore has a greater incentive to protect the integrity of that money from inflation and against other currencies by good policies. If it doesn’t, people won’t use it and it’s value will drop. (Can you hear the invisible hand clapping?)

“It is a business which competing enterprise can maintain only if it gives the public as good a money as anybody else,” said Hayek.  Meanwhile, central banks have no such limits or restraints. Just ask Ben Bernanke.

Bernanke in Congress

Bernanke in Congress (Photo credit: Talk Radio News Service)

Could it work? Would the government ever give up its control of the money supply?

Ha! Good one. Have you ever known the government to willingly give up any power?

For an interesting look at how an economy where private enterprise issues its own money, check out the speculative novel “The Unincorporated Man” by  Dani Kollin and Eytan Kollin.

_______________________

The second part of the brochure is the text of  ”A Pretense of Knowledge.”  Hayek’s speech upon receiving the Nobel Prize for economics in 1974 (he shared the prize with Gunnar Myrdal for their work in “the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena”) was a thunderhead of a critique of policies recommended by economists and implemented by governments that had, in his words, “made a mess of things.”  He attributed the failure of economists to guide public policy more successfully to a “propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences[...]” That attempt, he said, “in our field may lead to outright error.”  Economics is not an exact science, and the application of “habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed” lead to a “‘scientistic’ attitude” that the unknowable is knowable.

Economies involve an “organized complexity” that is too deep for economic researchers to obtain.  Speaking of wages and prices as an example, Hayek argues that “the determination of [prices and wages] will enter the effects of particular information possessed by every one of the participants in the market process–a sum of facts which in their totality cannot be known to the scientific observer, or to any other single brain.”  What he is saying is that while my wife at the grocery store may know enough to decide whether one can of salsa is better priced than another–based on a list of criteria only she knows, including flavor, cost relative to other salsas, cost relative to other stores and whether it is worth driving to those other stores to get the salsa, as well as how much my daughters are fussing in the shopping cart to hurry, whether we need salsa at all, and so on–the observer, the economist or market researcher or whoever is watching, can never know all that goes into her mind.

Says Hayek:

It is indeed the source of the superiority of the market order, and the reason why, when it is not suppressed by the powers of government, it regularly displaces other types of order, that in the resulting allocation of resources more of the knowledge of particular facts will be utilized which exists only dispersed among uncounted persons, than any one person can possess.

Only the market–the composite of my wife, and the hundreds of thousands (or millions) of shoppers out there can determine what the market value–the price–of the salsa should be.

Chevy Volts coming off of the production line. Image via jalopnik.com

This is why governments mess things up when they try to intervene. Whether it is propping up failing auto companies (go google “GM volt january 2012 sales” to find out that the company bailed out by Washington, D.C. sold a measly 603 Volts last month) or promoting and subsidizing “green” energy companies (for this only, google “Solyndra scandal” where even the New York Times admits that the government took risks that the market would not take. I wonder why the market wouldn’t risk it?), when government tries to pick winners better than the market, it inevitably fails or produces less success than the a free market.

This isn’t to say that economics is entirely unable to offer predictive power. Quite the contrary. It just can’t do so with the same ability as the “hard sciences,” such as physics, or chemistry.

Often all that we shall be able to predict will be some abstract characteristic of the pattern that will appear–relations between kinds of elements about which individually we know very little.[...] The danger of which i want to warn is precisely the belief that in order to have a claim to be accepted as scientific it is necessary to achieve more. This way lies charlatanism and worse. To act on the belief that that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm.

As I have said on this blog before, neither the Members of Congress making laws, the President and his Executive Branch (proposing, executing, and, also, making laws), nor judges in their black robes know enough to out think the decisions of millions or billions of people that make up a market.

But in the social field the erroneous belief that the exercise of some power would have beneficial consequences is likely to lead to a new power to coerce other men being conferred on some authority. Even if such power is not in itself bad, its exercise is likely to impede the functioning of those spontaneous ordering forces by which, without understanding them, man is in fact so largely assisted in the pursuit of his aims.

We may not always understand why the market chooses what it does, but in large part the market chooses, through spontaneity, that which helps man get what he wants.

In other words, Hayeks’ message to economists and policy makers is simple: get out of the way and let the market choose. It’s much smarter than you are.

_______________________

You can read the brochure here for free. Download it and read from your mobile device, including Kindle or iPad (or you can pay $4.99 to Amazon for a Kindle version or $6.00 for a paperback. Go figure).

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Book Review: “How to Read Literature Like a Professor” by Thomas C. Foster

January 26, 2012 By 2 Comments

How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

It’s a rare day that I’m willing to give a full five out of five stars to a book. It’s rarer still that I’ll give the five stars, and then put it back on my bed-stand for continual reference in my future reading.

It’s just that kind of a book, and every bibliophile should read it.

In “How to Read Literature like a Professor,” Thomas Foster has given us a delightful little romp through literature, producing a guide to the themes, symbolism, ironies, allusions, and plots that recur through-out almost all the fiction we read. Whether it’s Charles Dickens or Charles Schulz or even Tom Clancy, Foster’s collection of essays are each a fun and enjoyable guide to what you’ve been reading, and what you will read, when you pick up a work of fiction.

For example: in chapter 10, “It’s more than just rain or snow,” we read that “weather is never just weather. It’s never just rain.” Rather, Foster says, instead of providing just a setting, a backdrop to the story, weather in fiction is rooted in our fears and hopes. In addition to appearing as a feature character in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic biblical tale of the great flood, it makes notable and significant sightings in mythologies from all over the world, often, if not always, appearing and appealing to our fear of drowning. “Rain,” Foster says, “prompts ancestral memories of the most profound sort. So water in great volume speaks to us at a very basic level of being.

So rain–and floods–signifies drowning? Kind of, but it doesn’t stop there. Citing D.H. Lawrence’s “The Virgin and the Gypsy” (1930), which I’ve not read yet, Foster sees it as a “big eraser that destroys but also allows a brand-new start.”

Kind of like baptism? Yeah. If you’re part of that Christian tradition, this is what baptism is: death of the old, imperfect, and flawed man, and rebirth of a new man. And such is the role that this element–rain and floods–plays in literature. Well, most of the time. Fog can represent a lack of clarity, sunshine hope and clarity. In short, weather is rarely just setting.

That’s rain and weather. Each chapter is a written with a quick and light wit that allows a reader, whatever his level of experience with literature, to follow along, see the theme, enjoy the examples, and find a taste for the point. Other chapter titles include the following:

• “When in Doubt, It’s from Shakespeare…”

• “…Or the Bible”

• “It’s All Political”

• “Marked for Greatness”

• “Nice to Eat with You: Acts of Communion” and, of course,

• “Nice to Eat You: Acts of Vampire.” (Stephanie Meyer ought to pick that one up to understand why people who love literature hate Twilight….or maybe she’s trying to be ironic? Yeah, I doubt it, too).

Weighing in at just under three hundred pages, “How to Read Literature Like a Professor” doesn’t need deep commitment, deep concentration, or deep literature reading. My brain-candy of choice usually falls in the science-fiction or fantasy categories, and yet, I’ve started to find the themes and allusions and ironies that I saw in classics like “Howard’s End” and “Bleak House” appearing there, too. Whatever you read, it applies the symbolism that Foster walks through. As a result, my experience, whatever I’m reading, has been more enjoyable since I started it. It’s that moment of sudden realization when the whole theme of Steven Erikson “Book of the Fallen” subplot (and there are a lot of them) is an allusion, or imitation, to Spartacus (I think). Or that the journey (all journeys are quests) across the water is a journey of transformation, where the fallen man chooses to start a new life, emerging from the water, as it were, reborn.

It’s fun. A lot of fun. Even just reading the book itself is fun. To boot, at the end Foster provides a list of all the books he refers to throughout his essays to allow you, the reader, to pick them up and read further. And what could be more fun about reading than delving into great fiction?

Pick it up, start reading, and enhance your general reading experience. If you’re going to read fiction, and you should, you might as well get the most out of it.

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Book Review: “Anthem” by Ayn Rand

January 10, 2012 By 2 Comments

Anthem

If you’re looking for something from Ayn Rand that’s a tad bit shorter than “Atlas Shrugged,” but can still show you her philosophy in a nutshell, “Anthem,” her novella set in a dystopian world of the future, may be worth the effort. It didn’t take me more than a sitting and a half to flip through it.

Objectivism: an extreme philosophy that is to the free market what communism is to liberalism, just in the opposite direction. Instead of glorifying collective action, it glorifies the individual, the ego, denigrating all else–love, charity, God, and any kind of shared effort or brotherhood. I’m all about independence, freedom, and self-reliance, but Rand sees no need for sacrifice, charity, or love, even when no coercion is present.

This last one, love, is perhaps the most difficult piece for her to handle, and she so clumsily. Quite ironically, he only female character, rather than typifying the EGO she emblazons on the last page of the novella, does not exist in her sole woman character, but to give and to serve her male counterpart, Equality 7-2521, our narrator and protagonist. He sees her, and finding no specific qualities but that she returns his affection (a play on the elementary school “eye game” where shy children flirt only by taking turns catching each other’s eyes). From there on, she seems only to live to serve. She gives him water when he thirsts, follows him into the Uncharted Forest when he flees the City, becomes his lover, and tells him that she loves him. In return he names her Gaea, an interesting play on the Greek goddess of the Earth who was mother to other gods and goddesses. In other words, her highest purpose, still, is only to give birth. In contrast, Equality 7-2521 renames himself Prometheus after he who stole fire from the gods and gave it to man, a play on his role in discovering, or rediscovering, electricity. We see a contrast in their roles as Prometheus represents power, gives names to himself and her, and pronounces the dawn of a new age, an age in which EGO rules, not “brotherhood” or the smothering power of “we.”

And Gaea, the once named Liberty 5-3000, will be the mother of that new empire, quite literally.

I don’t mean to denigrate the role of women in bringing children into the world. No man can fully repay the debt he owes his mother, or the mother of his children, for bringing him and future generations to this world. However, women’s purpose and gifts and abilities do not end, or begin, with child-birth.

But I digress. In any respect, Rand places the entire sum of glory on the power of the individual, with no recognition of the powers above or in the shared responsibilities we have to each other. It’s a stark world in which she lives, and I am confident that it is better we live in a world that is neither her’s nor Marx’s,her ideological opposite.

Never the less, “Anthem” is worth the read, if just for it’s thought provocation and the warning that it gives to the results of too much institutional control and too little individual opportunity for growth.

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Book Review: “Heroes” by Robert Cormier

January 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment

HeroesFor those of us who have never known war, there’s something chilling about the post-war experience of those who have. For all the bullet-dodging action heroes that Hollywood produces and America consumes, we rarely get a taste for the horrors that the scarred veteran must face upon return to the home-front. Even when a movie does try to convey that horror, it remains a visual experience.

Robert Cormier’s “Heroes” has no such problems. Francis, Cormier’s young protagonist, has been marred by war, and in the most visceral way. He’s lost his face to a grenade. He is unrecognizable, even by those who knew him well, and though cited for bravery, he hides a secret. As we read, we soon learn that he is not the only one. Unlike the gloss and gleam of Hollywood flicks, we are ensconced in Francis’ head, fully exposed to his pain and guilt, his regrets and hopes. It’s almost too close, and as the novel moves towards a final crushing denouement, we sense as much as we read, guessing and knowing the horrible truth before Cormier lets his protagonist reveal the chilling and even disturbing truth.

“Heroes” develops fast, and it is perhaps the parsimony of words that provides his story with such careful and pointed impact. Each word, section, and anecdote is calculated to one purpose only: the building of a story about a hero, and not just any, but one who is anything but what he seems.

I recommend the read, but because of content (nothing gratuitous or graphic, but merely the subject matter) suggest it for adolescents in their teens. I look forward to reading and discussing with my own children.

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