The Empire Stops Here

I want to read The Empire Stops Here, based on this non-quite-a-review and because it’s about Ancient Rome.

Busted

Busted is a book about a person — a NYTimes finance reporter — who bought a house he shouldn’t have in 2006. It was too expensive, he was recently divorced (and freshly remarried to a woman who had just declared her second bankruptcy), and he thought he could beat the market. He uses his story as a springboard to talk about the current economic debacle and he wants to use it to put a personal face on the stress that foreclosure can put on families.*

It doesn’t really work.

Busted is mostly about the generalities. His personal story is shoehorned in, supposedly enriching the whole. The two stories never mesh and as a result, neither is done well. Anyone who regularly listens to Marketplace already knows the broad strokes of what happened to the economy (though I had to keep checking dates – were mortgage brokerages really failing by August 2007? why did it take until September 2008 for the bottom to fall out?), and he never really gets into the interesting questions about the personal one. Why didn’t he and his wife talk more about their financial differences before they got married?  Why didn’t they sell the house when they could? Why didn’t they sell everything they had? Why did they take a don’t-talk-about-it attitude for so long? Why did they still have cable when they couldn’t pay their bills? He never  answers any of those questions. He keeps saying how much he loves her, but also saying how unfathomable she is to him (but that’s why her loves her! it’s the challenge!). It smacks of someone who’s gone through couples counseling who’s just realized that what he says matters.

I don’t feel like Busted made anything clearer to me, and I’m a little bit frustrated that it could have been a great cautionary tale about what financial pressures can do to a marriage. That was its hook — books about What Happened To The Economy are going to be a dime a dozen soon. Too bad it didn’t deliver.

Busted: Not Recommended

* It’s the book this article from May 2009 was exerpted from. I think the article was better pulled together than the book was.

Kiddie Lit: A Penguin Story

A Penguin Story is one penguin’s quest to see something that isn’t white (snow), black (the night sky), or blue (water, sky). “There must be something more.” She’s got a good spririt of adventure to find the humans in their bright orange coats and tents (tents? in the Antarctic? really?) Cute, but the overanalytic adult in me keeps asking just how the penguin knows there must be other colors if she’s never seen or heard stories about them. How do you know there’s something missing if you can’t see the hole? But that’s a Kate/adult problem. The book is adorable and I love the illustrations.

A Penguin Story: Recommended

Kiddie Lit: Thump, Quack, Moo

Thump, Quack, Moo is another one of the Click, Clack, Moo books. The basic premise is: Duck is a troublemaker, Farmer Brown knows it, but can’t quite keep him under control because Duck is crafty. Probably not good if you’re trying to keep your kid innocent – Duck’s a bad influence. Funny, but a bad influence. The language usage is pretty simple, too, which is good for new readers.

Thump, Quack, Moo: Recommended

Generation X

I first read Generation X in college, but I didn’t understand it, not very well. I mean, I got it intellectually, but really understanding it? Knowing what diminished expectations really are? Hating how much stuff you own? Worrying that you’ve replaced family and friends with the media and stuff? I didn’t have a clue. This time it spoke to me far too much. In no particular order:

• The need to get rid of your stuff. We do it because we move so often — twelve times in sixteen years at last count — but I also have recurring fantasies of losing everything we own in a fire/earthquake/some other disaster. We could start from scratch! Only get what we really need! I take a lot of pleasure in getting rid of things.
• Diminished career expectations. I’ve moved so much that I haven’t really had a coherent career, though I expect that while we’ll move houses at least one more time, we aren’t going to leave the Bay Area anytime soon. I let you know as soon as I believe it.
• Wanting something authentic, where authentic = not mass-marketed, not from a nation-wide or world-wide chain. This was actually more pronounced last month — we lived somewhere that didn’t have many non-chain restaurants or stores. We’ve moved to a town — though still the suburbs — at least used to be a town at one point. There are more locally owned businesses here.
• Wanting authentic experiences (as opposed to stuff). Shopping still seems to be the dominant activity, even in the downturn. What to do? Go to the outdoor mall! It’s not really a mall if it’s outside, right? Right?
• Feeling poor and like you’re never going to be able to afford the American Dream. At least as it relates to actually owning my own residence someday. The median house price in our zip code is still over $800,000 for houses that are mostly ~1500 sq feet. This is probably related to diminished career expectations.
• The vague feeling that the world is going to end in a generation or two? You betcha. In the book, nuclear war is still the main reason the world might end. Now the ever-present danger is pretty clearly global warming. And it’s inevitable.

Generation X: Recommended, because it pretty clearly relates to my life a bit too much.

The Call of the Mall

The Call of the Mall was much more critical of malls than I thought it was going to be. Paco Underhill makes his living from telling people who design stores and malls how to do a better job at it, so it definitely had the possibility of being a “look at how far we’ve come” kind of book. Instead it’s much more of a “look at how far we have to go” kind of book.

His main point is that society needs gathering places and that some sort of place for merchants to gather – be they bazaars or open-air markets or the mall – has always been around. Like it or not, malls tend to be that central gathering point in the suburbs. Many times, it’s one of the few places in the suburbs that does function as any kind of gathering space.

Which, now that I think about it, qualifies as damning with faint praise. His more direct criticisms are:

• Malls are not all-inclusive. The poor are often discouraged from coming via the stores’ marketing and malls are typically not accessible by public transportation.
• They’re too safe, isolating teenagers from the world they need to learn to interact with.
• Malls rely far too much on women’s apparel for their profits. What happens when women slow down or stop buying clothes?
• They’re ugly as hell. He goes into great detail about why the outsides of malls look so terrible and has evidence that their ugliness is one of the main reasons people don’t like them.

His thesis: we need malls, but they could be greatly improved. He does a good job making his case and if you like reading or understanding about people’s shopping habits, it’s worth reading.

The Call of the Mall: Recommended

The Ascent of Money

Niall Ferguson is wicked smart and, I think, ambitious as hell. The first thing I ever read of his was The House of Rothschild (vol 1 and vol 2), and it was brilliant. I learned an amazing amount about history, economics, and why the Rothschilds were so instrumental in shaping European history during the 1800s and 1900s.

His later books haven’t been as thorough, though they’ve still been good — I’d recommend Empire and Colossus (the latter with some reservations) to anyone. The Ascent of Money? Not so much.

It’s light and breezy and I don’t know if it was orginally planned as a TV series but it maybe should have stayed there. The book was so hastily written in an effort to get it out quickly that there are obvious errors: Asia and other emerging economies are not insulated from the current economic climate, for the most obvious one. There are also places where he needs to get into more detail — about securitization, for example — so the reader can understand the current crisis and how it all ties together.

There are places where it shines: I find myself thinking about the French banks during the 1800s to understand the role of The Fed in our current crisis, and the bit about the Medici pioneering the first currency trading helps explain why economic isolation is A Bad Thing.

I like it, but I expected more of Niall Ferguson – the whole thing should be good, not just bits.

The Ascent of Money: Meh

The Long Winter

Disclaimer: I’ve got a soft spot for YA literature and the Laura Ingalls Wilder books specifically. They, combined with frequent visits to my grandparents in rural Iowa, form some of the do-it-all-yourself, what-it-means-to-run-a-good-house attitudes that I have. They might be the reason I’ve never been able to bring myself to hire a maid or why I cook supper most nights.

Anyway, on to the book. The Long Winter is about a seven-month-long winter in the Dakotas that causes all manner of hardship for the Ingalls and the other families in town. The Ingalls have to leave their homestead and move to town simply to survive. No trains arrive after Christmas, which means very little food. They almost starve and there’s a close call with a grain riot when a merchant tries price gouging. They lose the energy to do anything except prepare food – school for all the townschildren is cancelled altogether because of the lack of heat and light. There’s music and dancing at the beginning, but Papa’s fingers eventually become too stiff and sore to play the violin. After the warm weather comes again, the music comes back, in a particularly obvious bit of symbolism.

Laura Ingalls Wilder is particularly good at pulling you into the setting. I couldn’t get warm while I was reading The Long Winter. Their comparative lack of stuff, and the work they have to do to get things we take for granted — food, entertainment (they get a shipment of magazines and letters in November and nothing else), clean clothing (line-drying clothes when it’s below freezing doesn’t sound fun or easy), and warmth (they end up twisting hay into sticks that they can burn in the oven, and they close off all of the house except the kitchen in order to conserve heat) — it made me feel guilty at the very clear excesses we have today: more food than we can eat, turning up the heat when we’re not comfortable enough instead of putting on a sweater, TV, the internet, radio, more books than I could read in a year… I’m happy I live now, when food is plentiful and heat is easy. Putting myself into that house in town was somewhat scary.

Overall, though, I do enjoy these books.

The Long Winter: Recommended

It’s All Too Much

It’s All Too Much was a quick read. I think I read the whole thing (or the bulk of it — it’s been a couple of months) on a Saturday afternoon. There were no big revelations in it: if you have too much stuff, it can get in the way of you living your life. You keep stuff because of the life you want to have not because of the life you do have, and to a degree that’s all right, but you can’t let it get in the way of your relationships or let it get out of control.

What it is good at is motivation. The Sunday after I started reading it (perhaps after reading that stuff you don’t use = trash and why would you want to live with trash bit) I cleaned out my closet and bathroom cabinet. I was still feeling slightly disdainful of the book — why had I wasted my time reading it if it wasn’t going to tell me anything new, hey wait, did I just fill up ten bags full of stuff I don’t need and finally manage to go through all of my mom’s sewing stuff to figure out what I had and what I’d use? Yes, in fact I had. I haven’t missed any of the stuff since, either.

I might need to get it out of the library again to motivate me to tackle the office.

It’s All Too Much: Recommended

Home

Home is wonderful. Marilynne Robinson is an amazing writer. Read it. Buy it, don’t just read it. Read Gilead. Read Housekeeping (but only if you’re prepared to be a little bit crazy when you’re done).

Home: Highly Recommended.

Watchmen

I’m pretty sure that to really explain how I feel about Watchmen would actually require therapy-level analysis that would take far longer than I actually have to write this. So, my basic impressions:

• Ohmygod Nihilistic.
• Clearly written in the-world-is-going-to-end nuclear mess of the mid-eighties, which  might explain the nihilism.
• How on earth did they turn this into a movie that they expect people to see?
• If you read carefully, the real message is that the world is way better off without superheroes, people who are going to take care of everything. So maybe not so nihilistic? Just a commentary on where society was in the scary mid-80s? Hmmm…

Watchmen: Recommended, but it’s not for the faint of heart.

Kiddie Lit: The Lump of Coal

Lemony Snicket’s not-so-big-secret? Underneath all that ironic detatchment is a gooey heart that really believes in the best of people. If it weren’t wrapped in all that irony, though, it’d probably be too sweet to handle.

This is a cute, short read. I got it out of the library for myself, not my kid. It’s aimed at slightly older kids (and me).

The Lump of Coal: Recommended

The Good Thief’s Guide to Paris

I picked up The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam at the library awhile back, and it turned out to be a fun, light mystery, the kind I like to read at the end of a particularly long day. (I like being led through the story, knowing all will be revealed with minimal work on my end. It’s relaxing when I’ve spent the day trying to ferret meaning from reams of seemingly meaningless data.)

The Good Thief’s Guide to Paris was also fun in the same way: lighthearted, doesn’t take itself seriously, with just enough complexity to make it interesting. I’m looking forward to the next one.

The Good Thief’s Guide to Paris: Recommended

American Wife

I’m conflicted about American Wife. On the one hand: I was completely sucked into it. I stayed up too late reading it more than once, I loved the exploration of the difference between the perception and the reality of a relationship, and I loved the way the author portrayed the rural Midwest as a place to love and be proud of, instead of treating it as something to run away from.

On the other hand, there is the presumptuousness of the premise. It’s a take on Laura Bush’s personal history and a fictionalized version of who she is and what she thinks. And I find that very… presumptuous. The author doesn’t know who she is, doesn’t know that she’s secretly a Democrat, doesn’t know so many things, and to think that someone who researched but never interviewed the subject could get anywhere near who Laura Bush is, is baffling to me. Aren’t there better ways to explore the same themes that are going to be less wrong?

And maybe I could let that go, but every time something happened in American Wife that didn’t quite ring true — the husband’s conversion to Christianity (it really took just two weeks with only a nominal struggle?), the whole section where her husband is President — it was because it sticking too close to the Bush story and the author couldn’t let the characters develop naturally.

It’s really the combination of those last two that makes me unable to recommend this otherwise very good book; strip off the Laura Bush premise and you could fix both problems. But they probably wouldn’t have sold nearly as many copies without it.

American Wife: I just don’t know.

More Information Than You Require

John Hodgman is best in small doses. A book is not a small dose.

More Information Than You Require: Not Recommended (But it does hurt to type that. I wanted to like it.)

Sneaker Wars

Sneaker Wars

Sneaker Wars is a fairly interesting book about Puma and Adidas, two sneaker companies that were run by brothers on the opposite sides of a small town in Germany. They started out owning Adidas, but then, due to family politics during World War II and its aftermath (the brothers got treated *very* differently by the occupying Allied troops), one of them left to start Puma. They barely spoke again until their deaths.

Honestly, the book reads like a soap opera. The brothers were only one of the family rivalries. After the split, the brother in charge of Adidas brings his son Horst into the business. Horst ends up running Adidas France as an almost separate company, with a parallel structure to rival the headquarters in Germany. There was a mess (to put it mildly) when Adidas had to integrate the two organizations to cut costs. Plus, this all coincides with the rise of marketing, which necessarily involves Nike, since they really masterminded sneaker and athletic wear marketing.

That said, I completely lost interest in Sneaker Wars once the businesses passed out of the families’ hands, which happens about two-thirds of the way through the book. The soap opera was done, and the story turned to the mechanisms of corporate raiders instead of being about families and relationships.

Sneaker Wars: Meh

Kiddie Lit: Just So Stories

Just So Stories

There’s this line from The English Patient (which is a couple of miles away from me, so there’s no exact quote) about reading Kipling slowly, imagining him sitting at his desk in India looking out the window as he writes. I’d add that you should only read one Just So Story at a time, and you should read them out loud. Both help to make sure you read them slowly, which really does help.

The Just So Stories are folk tales that explain why animals have the features they do: why the kangaroo hops, how the elephant’s nose got so long, that kind of thing. And they’re fun, silly stories, though I could do without the phrase “best beloved” being repeated that often. He uses it as though he’s reading them out loud to his own children, and I found it annoying after the first couple of stories.

My daughter seemed to enjoy them — she kept asking to read new ones — but I don’t remember lots of repeats. It’s been awhile since we read them, so my memory may be wrong. We certainly haven’t gotten it out of the library again. But then maybe she was too young when we read them?

Just So Stories: Meh. But maybe recommended if you have an older child.

Everything and More

Oh my. It’s been awhile since I’ve written a non-children’s book review. Let’s see how I do, shall we?

Everything and More is, as the subtitle says, a compact history of infinity. And no one ever told David Foster Wallace that popular science and math books should never, ever contain an equation. The book is rife with them, along with series and sequences and proofs (Yay! Cantor’s diagonal proof! My favorite!) and graphs.

I remembered some things from calculus and college math: that limits really do make more sense when you talk about epsilons and deltas; that my own personal understanding of a lot of math is not too far above the calculus level; and that Godel showed that math, while useful, may just be a set of abstractions that exist only in our minds and not be the fundamental theory of the universe. And that kind of freaks me out. It’s way more comfortable for me when math is the fundamental theory of the universe.

I learned some things too. That there’s a reason math is taught to students in the order that it is and not in the order it was discovered. The section about limits and defining them is told in historical order and only cleared up when we got to the part about the epsilons and the deltas (which was near the end). But, now that I think about it, maybe that was the point. Maybe he wanted his readers to see the confusion and to understand how asking clarifying questions about equations is one of the ways that math moves forward. I also learned that historical asides, like that Georg Cantor was a violin prodigy, can provide de-stressifying moments in otherwise hairy explanations, and the juxtaposition of set theory and fourth grade math is both funny and occasionally appropriate. And footnotes in math books can make the arguments hard to follow.

All in all, I’m glad I read it. I’m glad I bought it, something of a rarity for me these days.

Everything and More: Recommended

Kiddie Lit: Duck Dunks

(Quick admin note: My own reading has slowed somewhat, but I do read to my daughter an awful lot. I know that a number of you have kids or are occasionally on the hook for baby shower presents. So I’m going to start reviewing some children’s books.)

Duck Dunks is a cute little book, full of good rhymes, and is a ton of fun to read out loud. It’s about five little ducks – no parents in sight, just like the best kind of kids books – who spend the day having fun at the beach. It’s idealized of course (you mean there’s no TV anywhere?), but that’s the best way to think about childhood: full of fun and friends and activity, coming home and collapsing at the end of the day. (Forget childhood, the summer after my junior year of high school was largely spent with my friends at the beach, swimming, reading magazines, talking, playing vollyball…) It’s definitely the kind of childhood you want for your own kids.

Duck Dunks: Recommended

The Secret Diary of a Call Girl

I got interested in The Secret Diary of a Call Girl because of a conversation with a colleague who has a masters in Women’s Studies about whether or not prostitution exploits women. (The short answer: it depends on who’s making what choices.) She finished up the topic by saying, “But are you watching Secret Diary of a Call Girl?” I had to answer no, that I didn’t have Showtime. She raved about it.

A few days later, I went in search of Belle de Jour, the author’s blog (that preceded the book), and read this post about how women treat other women vis a vis their sexuality. Based entirely on that, I reserved The Secret Diary of a Call Girl at the library.

I read the first 100 pages or so in one sitting. It was fascinating, but in that way that sex inherently fascinates. No one turns away from sex, unless the point is to turn away from it, in which case you’re still calling attention to it. And that’s not what I wanted from the book. I wanted… I don’t know, everything around the sex to be more interesting: better reasons for why she got into it (not just that she likes sex and needed the money – people always fall into their jobs because they like something about it and they need the money), how her boyfriend dealt with it, more thoughts about the why and how, less of the what. *

Maybe that’s what was disappointing: her blog now talks more about relationships in a very thoughtful way, in a way this book doesn’t. Maybe that’s where you get after five years of daily blogging about the same subject. The early entries in her blog are about the sex and now they’re more about the people. The sex is fun, but once you’ve figured out that her life isn’t really that different than anyone else’s (in the whole motivation-of-it-all, not in the day-to-day activities which are quite different), the people hold your attention longer.

The Secret Diary of a Call Girl: Meh. Read the blog instead.

* I should note that she seems remarkably psychologically healthy. Many people who like sex as much as she does often have self-confidence problems. She doesn’t.