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.

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

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

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

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.

Little Heathens

I’ve recently developed a potentially unhealthy obsession with life during the 1930s and 40s.* Obsession might not be the right word — I don’t really want to live during the Depression or World War II — but there is something romantic and ideal about the clear-cut purpose of the hard work that goes into making all your own food and being almost completely self-sufficient.**

Little Heathens completely plays into that — not to mention that it also reminds me of being at my own Grandparents’ in rural Iowa while I was growing up. And while I remember it being fun, I also remember being bored a lot, too (even in the 80s, rural Iowa was getting older, so there weren’t many kids). Reading Little Heathens made me feel like I was sitting around my own Grandparents’ kitchen, helping out where I could, and it also made me imagine what it must have been like in livelier days, before technology and living patterns changed and most people lived like that.

Plus, it’s got the added benefit of being relatively short and simply written by a former professor.

Little Heathens: Recommended

* I blame this at least partially on Blueberries for Sal, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, and Katy and the Big Snow.
** And not having to worry about how corruption in the Chinese government affects our food supply.

The Body Project

The Body Project chronicles both how adolescent girls think of themselves and how society treats them from the Victorian Era to about the mid-1990s (when it was written). Her thesis is that society and biology used to be in synch: girls went through puberty not too long before they got married and entered adulthood. Now, since puberty has gotten earlier and achieving adulthood happens later — and since married no longer means adulthood, what adulthood is is up in the air — the balance is off and adolescent girls aren’t particularly well served by the current structure.

During Victorian times, everything about yourself was kept private, and mothers shared very little with their daughters — even things they maybe should have. Society was community focused, and that’s how people measured their self worth. As we went through the Twentieth Century, that slowly changes — we expose more about ourselves, and more of ourselves than ever before. That translates into being more image-focused and girls measure their self-worth with their bodies much more now than they ever used to. That means not just worrying about measuring up to media images, but having sex earlier too.

After reading it, I’m terrified of my own daughter’s eventual adolescence.

Ms Brumberg does do a good job at pointing out the good and the bad of both approaches — women also know a lot more about their bodies. (I wonder what she made of Buffy?) She made me think about things I want to start doing now, for my own daughter, to help her through her own teenage years, things like making sure she’s involved with her community, not being immersed in media, and that she sees good adult female role models.

All in all, a pretty balanced overview, that ends up being somewhat alarmist, but it’s pretty easy to use it to talk yourself down from being worried by realizing what needs to be fixed.

The Body Project: Recommended

Kabul Beauty School

I first read about the Kabul Beauty School in Vogue in 2002. I remember thinking “what a silly idea” because how could teaching people how to cut hair help them? They needed an education and respect and a different society. Not how to cut hair. Basically, I had a very stupid reaction.

Women who live in Afghanistan are in a terrible society. They can’t go out alone, they get put in jail if they get raped, abuse is fairly common, and they weren’t allowed to leave the house or even mix with the men in their houses while the Taliban ruled. (The author, Deborah Rodriguez, gets stuck in this situation for a few days in Pakistan, and the women’s lack of self-esteem and boredom is frightening.) There is an abhorrent lack of respect for women, like they’re not even people.

One of the ways to get power is to earn money. And a safe way to earn money — good money in Kabul — is to do something that a society like that will accept: work at a beauty salon. So Ms Rodriguez starts the Kabul Beauty School.

It’s challenging; pupils and clients are easy to come by, but almost nothing else is. Finding space is impossible, then, once they get it, the Women’s Ministry forces the school out so they can use the building themselves. Security is always an issue. Making sure the women’s honor is respected is a constant challenge: if the school gets a reputation as an unsafe place, a place where women might become corrupt, it will get shut down. Terrorists live next door for a time. Ms Rodriguez constantly has to battle for so many things, most of which stem from the fact that Afghanistan has little organized law and order and the poor position of women in its society.

Has the school helped? Almost certainly. The stories are amazing; it’s anecdotal evidence at best, but compelling nonetheless. The book ends with it getting shut down because the Afghan government decides that it’s not an NGO because it has a salon attached, so it must pay taxes. It’s hard to come up with $20,000 overnight. (It’s website indicates that, a year later, it’s back up and running.)

The timelines are confusing, and the way she tells the story of getting married to an Afghan man is handled unevenly, but the Afghan women’s stories are so poignant that it’s compelling.

Kabul Beauty School: recommended

You can donate money to the school here.

Mindless Eating

I thought Mindless Eating was going to be more like Stumbling on Happiness: a lot about cognitive psychology, not so much on the practical applications of the science. But it turned out to be a lot more about why people eat so much, what you can do to eat less and it was deeply practical. Really, it reminded me a lot of French Women Don’t Get Fat: be sensible, don’t eat when you’re not hungry, keep food out of sight.

I never really thought about how meals are complete when the plate in front of you is empty, not when you’re full. I used to take a lot of crap from my friends because I never, ever cleaned my plate at a meal; that’s not-very-subtle social pressure to measure how full you are by the amount of food left, not by how full your stomach is. I was always full, and that was always my defense. But it turns out that that’s how Americans, by and large, decide when a meal is over — if the plate is clean. You’re weird (but healthier) if you don’t do that. (For what it’s worth, in the last few years, I’ve succumbed to measuring done-ness by whether or not the plate is clean. It works fine when you’re good at estimating how hungry you really are, not so much when someone else is dishing it up.)

It also had a lot of tips I already knew, like use smaller plates and only bring the serving dishes with vegetables to the table. If you’re going to keep food ready-to-hand, make it fruits and vegetables, not candy.

Overall, a largely practical book that has some surprising information that could help you control what you eat more.

Mindless Eating: Recommended

On Paradise Drive

I’m putting On Paradise Drive down not because it’s bad. It’s not; in fact, so far it’s been quite entertaining. But that’s the problem: it’s entertaining. It’s not teaching me anything new about the structure of the suburbs and who lives there and why. In fact, it seems to be perpetrating some classic Baby Boomer stereotypes about who lives in the suburbs and their lack of an inner life. And even though it’s entertaining, that’s bothersome. Just because people live in the suburbs doesn’t make them more scorn-worthy. They just live in the suburbs: maybe it’s because that’s where their jobs are, maybe it’s because they have kids who need space to run around, maybe it’s because that’s where they grew up and they like it there. I don’t need David Brooks to remind me of any of that.

On Paradise Drive: Meh

Death by Black Hole

It’s been a long time since I’ve read a science book. Here’s why: to understand most science — at least the physics part that people like to write about — you have to understand something about quantum theory, relativity, and a bit of string theory. Not enough to explain them to someone else, but enough to be able to tell yourself a good story about them. I have a tenuous grasp on relativity: if something goes reallyreallyreally fast then it also gets reallyreallyreally heavy and time goes reallyreallyreally slowly for that object. But quantum physics? The electron might be there, but it might not? Or the nine (or fifteen or whatever it is these days) dimensions of space that string theory requires? Waaaaayyyyy over my head.*

Don’t get me wrong: I like science. My favorite chapter in this book was all the neat things you can learn about the world with a stick and the sun. I take a small amount of pride knowing that if the moon is lit on the right-hand side, then it’s waxing. Being able to observe the world around you is a Good Thing. Being able to make predictions from that is an even Better Thing.

That pretty much sums up my reaction to Death by Black Hole: the bits I could understand were well-explained and entertaining (although a bit repetitive, since this is a compilation of previously published columns from Natural History some background facts get repeated a few times), and the parts about very small, very fast things (and how they affect the universe at large) were not so interesting.

Oh, also? Death by Black Hole is very good at making you feel very small. And maybe like the heat death of the universe is a bit depressing.

Death by Black Hole: Recommended

* Doug once lent me a book to help me understand how there could be a before time started if there was no time. Needless to say, I only made it through the first couple of chapters before I got a headache.

A Perfect Mess

Here’s what I learned from A Perfect Mess: I’m existentially messy, because we’ve moved so much and every time we put together a life, it gets uprooted. I try to control that through organizing things, but I also organize things as a way to procrastinate doing things that scare me.

Trust me when I say this isn’t news to me.

And that’s the big problem with A Perfect Mess. There’s nothing new. Did you know that organizations can be more innovative when they’re less hierarchical? It’s true! Did you know that organizing everything to within an inch of its life may not make your own life easier? Also true! The book is saved from being not recommended by simply being a common sense antidote to sites like Lifehacker and 43 folders. Sometimes common sense needs to be pointed out.

Organization may or may not set you free.

A Perfect Mess: Meh

The Gospel of Food

How appropriate that I’m writing a review of The Gospel of Food while I’m making supper. (Pepperoni pizza, using Trader Joe’s Herb & Cheese Focaccia Bread for the crust.)

The Gospel of Food is about the main cultures that surround food in the US — attitudes toward fast food, high end restaurants, home cooking, obesity, things like that. As long as you remember that, you’ll be OK. He’s not a nutritionist, but he quotes so many studies about food and health and how the two things are interrelated, that you can lose track of that. He doesn’t do it to show that particular kinds of food are better for you, he does it so you can see how dissenting studies can get lost in the media circus, or to see how a later study can refute an older one, or how changes in small numbers produce huge percentage changes. It’s easy to get caught up in the nutrition. Don’t do that.

It is an excellent critique of how society views food: how we demonize fast food and the people who eat it; why people who say that we need to eat more meals around the table with our families are really criticizing the fact that more and more women work; why we revere the Big Name Chefs; how food scientists use the media to further their own careers, not make us healthier. His own opinions occasionally get in the way, but since he’s part of society, he can’t help it, but he is aware of it, makes a point of it, and tries to correct it when he can.

Also, it’s a pretty fast read. Overall, it’s pretty good.

The Gospel of Food: Recommended

The Millionaire Next Door

The big secret in The Millionaire Next Door? That people who have money save more than they earn, which means that they have small houses and don’t spend very much on cars. They save 15% of each paycheck. They invest in the market, and they don’t do a lot of buying and selling. This is nothing you can’t figure out if you read any of the major money management sites. There’s nothing new here, but it did help reassure me that not buying a house in the Bay Area is the Right Thing To Do.

It would be a good summary of the main attitudes to have if you want to accumulate wealth, but its big downfall is that it’s amazingly sexist. The authors talk mainly about the big earner in the couple, usually the husband. This is a by-product of the fact that, in order to be worth $1 million, you need to work for a long time, and fewer women have been in the workforce that long. Fine. That means that the data will show that more men are millionaires. That’s acceptable, and I expect it to change as more women earn more money. And they do talk about the women millionaires as well. But the book’s big point is that you have to save: in the second chapter of the book, they acknowledge that the other spouse is Very Important and tacitly admit that the person who’s not earning all the money is largely in charge of spending. But the earner ends up getting all the credit, and the only one worthy of being called a millionaire.

Not to mention the chapter about stay-at-home wives who are apparently either super-human in subsuming their own desires to take care of their husbands, kids, and parents or they’re completely selfish, spending all their husband’s and parent’s money in order to boost their own self-esteem. There’s no in-between.

In short, you can get the same info elsewhere, without having to put up with all the crap.

The Millionaire Next Door: Not Recommended

Augustus

Augustus, what do I want to say about you? The background about your family, where you came from, and the political climate in the first century BC are all wonderfully set up to explain how your rise was possible. That the portrait of you as a coddled mother’s-boy (that the folks over at Rome are apparently taking advantage of, I don’t have HBO, but that’s what I read on the internet) is maybe accurate but also incomplete because you are also steely and determined as hell to get what you want. That Livia, who will probably never be seen as anything other than evil because of history’s idea that powerful woman can’t be good — see Cleopatra, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Catherine the Great for three other examples — and because of her portrayal as a complete bitch in I, Claudius, was actually a good wife and counselor to you.

Basically, the book is a good history: it explains who Augustus is, his rise to power, his dependence on Julius Ceasar at the beginning, his war with Mark Anthony (and their political maneuvering to eventually fight each other make the current Iraq brouhaha look like peanuts), and what his life and family was like after he solidified his power. It gives enough detail to let you imagine what life was actually like, but never gets bogged down in it. Everyone comes across as real, not just as historical personas. Although he does have an annoying habit of fictionalizing a major event right at the start to draw you into the book — he did the same thing in Cicero. But that’s a small flaw in an otherwise excellent book.

Augustus: Recommended

The United States of Europe

I wish I’d liked The United States of Europe more than I did. Hell, I wish I’d been able to get through it. I wanted to like it because I agree with its basic premise: that a unified Europe would make a good counterweight to a dominate US. But its tone and its assumption that Europe can throw more weight around in the world without increasing its military spending were irritating. Not to mention that it was written before the Dutch and French vetoed the European Constitution, and before the riots in the French suburbs, which dates the book and diminishes its relevancy.

Which is not to say that a European counterweight to the US won’t or shouldn’t happen (although God knows I get too much of my European news from The Economist and not enough from anywhere else, so my limited view on the issue should be taken with a grain of salt). But The United States of Europe (or at least the part I read) seemed like boosterism for the cause instead of analysis of it.

The United States of Europe: Not Recommended

Good to Great

If you’ve heard of Good to Great, you probably know what it’s about and whether or not you should read it (if you already haven’t). Seriously, to learn more about it, you could visit the author’s website, the book’s website, or watch the PBS program. I feel like the book’s been so reported on that writing a review of what it’s about would be largely useless.

I will tell you that the attention is, by and large, worth it. It’s got tons of solid information about how to run a good business, case studies of both successful companies and unsuccessful ones, and it’s written clearly, which makes it an easy read. If you haven’t read it, I’d recommend doing so.

Good to Great: Recommended

A Gentle Madness

A Gentle Madness is essentially a chronicle of book collectors. It takes pains to point out that people who like to have books around them don’t necessarily like to read them, just to have them. Not only does it treat book collectors as good people, it elevates them to a higher class of collectors, somehow better than people who gather other things. It even treats book thieves as scamps, with a boys-will-be-boys attitude about the stealing, rather than as the crime that it is.

In addition to sparking every get-rid-of-your-stuff instinct in me, it also made me think that this kind of information-gathering just to have it made a lot more sense before we lived in a world where information was as ridiculously plentiful as it is today. Before, a good library might have been essential to having certain information at your fingertips, and, even more in some cases, a sign of social status. Now, practically everyone has the internet*, with more information than you’ll ever need. Having the information at your fingertips is no longer a social-status signifier. Now, you need to be able to make sense of the information and put it to good use. Collecting makes less sense now.

Do I need 500 pages about collectors to think about that? Nope. I ended up putting A Gentle Madness down after about 60 (I did glance through the table of contents to see if anything else was going to be covered), and I’m ok with that.

A Gentle Madness: Not Recommended

* I’m clearly ignoring any digital divide-type issues; but the fact remains that even people without internet connections at home, in the developed world (which A Gentle Madness concentrates on) anyway, can always go to the library to use the internet.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

I bought A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again in 1998 because I’d never read any David Foster Wallace before, and I was trying to work my way up to Infinite Jest (which was, and still is, intimidating). I read along knowing that I was supposed to like it, and not really getting into it for the first two essays. One is about the wind and growing up in the Midwest, but I couldn’t relate to it very well, despite having grown up in the Midwest. The second is about the evils of television, which I’m sort of on the fence about. He argues quite well for the why TV is A Bad Thing, but he’s sufficiently unconvinced of TV’s evilness that you really do understand both sides of it (which somehow reinforces the argument against it, now that I think about it).

Then I got to Getting Away from Already Pretty Much Being Away from It All. That’s when I decided that I love his writing. I love it because it nails the complexity of the Midwest, and it understands that rural isn’t inherently bad, like much contemporary popular culture (which, it should be noted, is produced in urban areas). It’s perfect. Plus, the Native Companion, who still lives in Illinois, where he grew up (and was his prom date), is awesome.

It also exemplifies one thing I like about David Foster Wallace’s writing. He’s not arrogant (and of all people he’s got the right to be, more than most) and he’s curious and the fact that he’s not convinced he’s infallible makes his writing so much more approachable, even the literary reviews that are my least favorite essays. It’s a weird duality: he’s an athletic former tennis player who’s a very successful writer, but he’s also an oversensitive, allergic-to-everything, knows-everything-possible-about-grammar geek. It’s like he knows that he’s intimidating (or his work is intimidating) and he’s trying to reassure you that he really is a normal person, and it works, probably because he probably is a normal person.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Recommended