The Long Tail: Why the future of Business Is selling less by Chris Anderson (2006)

Maybe 2006 was a blur to me. Maybe it was the year that books by writers from Wired magazine didn't seem to matter much. Almost self-proclaimed futurist Chris Anderson pontificates in perfect Generation X prose a single idea over and over again. To extrapolate a feature article from Wired; well to be generous it could have been a book chapter, into a whole book is not an art form.

In an idea he shares, would Anderson have spent so much time watching reruns of Gilligan's Island if there was something better to do? Probably not.

He offers us a the salvation of giving us an insight into the life since 2000. Now, this could be of great use to my Grandfather who thinks of Bob Newhart as a young guy. But really, Anderson is preaching to the choir.

But . . . ok maybe this book is for middle age men looking at the new media and scratching their heads.

This book provides full descriptions in e-commerce sites such as google, netflicks, amazon, itunes, etc, and how they work.

He makes the point that when people have more options they are not going to be sitting around watching TV. He punctuates these points with interesting factoids, such as that a top TV show now would not make the the top 10 shows in the seventies, because less of the population is watching TV.

I can relate. My TV watching declined significantly when I moved to New York City where there are a thousands better things to do than watch TV. A case in point I can watch John Oliver on the Daily Show or I can go we him perform live at Comix on 14th street.

Actually, speaking of the Daily Show, Anderson tells us that more people watch it on-line than see it on TV. Still, he goes further. He predicts that formats of shows will change as people see TV content on the web or through Tivo. He has a point with Handheld devices , such as, the iphone, who wants to sit through a scheduled half hour of TV to see the one good Simpson joke. He makes this analogous to buying individual tracks of an album on itunes instead of buying the whole CD for one song. Why should I spend $10 on the last U2 CD when the only good song is Vertigo. This is liberation!

Google (+it's services like utube), itunes, amazon are making fortunes by giving people exactly what they want and for a lot less money and time. Now I have more money and time to try out new music, for instance, often based on the sites suggestions with customer reviews to back it up. Far out ,if I may barrow the expression.

So what is happening here? How is it different than what has happened in the good ole days.

As Anderson quotes some dude, people are filled with general and specific (niche) interests. On-line stores have infinite self space, so now I can get that music of German groove and funk from 1967 to 1974 that I heard in Canada but couldn't find in one New York city record store. It's really good by the way.

So, why could I not find this music today. It's the same reason why there was a radio show called 'Name that tune.' Limited shelve space equates to limited choices. In the 1940's everyone knew the latest Benny Goodman hit. Today, I don't think I have heard a song that went to number one on the billboard chart since Outcast's "Hey Ya." And my german music would not have many buyers besides me, and Costco can only sell so many CDs so they stick to the hits. Maybe if I couldn't find my german music on line I would have bought "Fifty cent sings the Journey catalogue, 'Don't stop believing in the da Hood'" Ok, sadly that isn't a real CD.

So, what is happening with the virtual store front, such as Amazon and itunes, is that people will be able to buy their niche interests. True, they only sell a few of those each, but aggregate that and the sales equal the sales of the hits. People generally flock to stores that selling everything than specialty stores, but on-lines are both. This is the long tail, in a standard deviation there is hump then lines goes off. It is where this line going off is where the money is.

Anderson gives us most of this is the first chapter and the rest of his goes over it again and again from slightly different directions.

WILLING SERFS OF AMERICA

WILLING SERFS OF AMERICA
"Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War" by Joe Bageant (2007)

In "Deer Hunting With Jesus", Joe Bageant takes on the great question American politics: why do the white working poor America vote Republican, given that the party demonstrably works against their self-interest? And who better to answer that question than Bageant himself, a son of the working class who returns to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia in middle age.
"Deer Hunting" is a series of essays about working-class life - a life Bageant reveals to be in crisis. In the 1960s, he writes, a man could walk into the Rubbermaid factory in town, earn $1.65 an hour full-time, and comfortably support himself and his family. In 2007, his old friend was still working at the factory, but struggling to make ends meet while pulling overtime. Company-funded health insurance was gone; the tidy hospital that gave basic medical services to the community had largely been converted to an old folk's home, while those people that were sick had to eke out their Medicare benefits to get service from a hospital in the next town. Meanwhile many are being crushed by the debt on their subprime mortgages and car loans. In short, the dignity of labour has been torn away. Where once a man could do unskilled or semi-skilled labour and live decently on it, or at least know that his children would enjoy a better life, now men are struggling to stay solvent, destroying their health with long hours while competing with each other for overtime. Marx would have recognized it as the atomized proletariat.
Bageant argues that there is a simmering class war: the workers are silently enraged at their poverty, their constant economic oppression. The Republican party has simply taken advantage of this rage (and also stoked it not a little) by presenting it with a target: the champagne-sniffing, fine-art-appreciating, Volvo-driving "liberal elites" who, along with their improbable stooges the unions, are the reason the poor remain poor, taxing the working man and giving the money to homosexual-run art galleries and crack whores in the cities. By contrast, the Republicans are ordinary folk just like them. The shots of George W. Bush clearing away brush in his ranch resonated greatly in Winchester, especially when contrasted to shots of John Kerry windsurfing.
The eight essays in the book are hit-and-miss. American Serfs and "Republicans by Default" which examine working-class rage and its co-opting by Republicans are (I think, at least) the best. "The Deep-Fried, Double-Wide Lifestyle" and An Authorized Place to Die, discussing commercialism-as-solace and the health care system, also make for interesting reads. "Valley of the Gun" starts out with a tantalizing discussion of working-class gun culture and then veers into a predictable defence of Second Amendment rights. "The Ballad of Lynndie England", about the villain of the Abu Ghraib prison, somehow manages to paint her, unconvincingly, as a victim. (In fact, "The Ballad" could have been taken much further if it had become a fuller discussion of the role of women in the working-class crisis. The book is all about rage, remember, and rage is almost entirely the monopoly of men). Despite the ups and downs, the book is a quick and easy, not to mention illuminating, read, and I recommend it to all liberal elites.
We live in interesting times. I wonder what will happen now that housing bubble has well and truly burst, now that many Republicans, finally disgusted with its liberal-baiting tactics, seem to be abandoning their party, now that a liberal, elite black man with tremendous charisma is going, in person, to the white working class to promise them change. Somehow I do not think much change will take place - the poor will remain poor, and will be forgotten - and their rage will simmer on.

By

Jan De Bakker

Ugly Americans: The true story of the Ivy League Cowboys Who Raided Asians Markets by Ben Mezrich

This is my favorite book that I have so read this year. It is a delightful read. It is very male book with elements of chasing girls, mentors, finance, motor cycles, and risk. I wonder if a woman would get so much enjoyment out this book.

This is another Ben Mezrich true story where he takes someone’s story and makes a thriller out of it. These are truly American stories. They have many American ideals, such as Rags to Riches with smarts and hard work, and the idea that anything is beatable.

Ben Mezrich is best known for his books about M.I.T. students who beat Vegas in blackjack. This work he ups the ante by taking the story out of Las Vegas where the one day winnings are in the thousands to the world Financial markets where a the one day winning are up in the hundred of Millions.

The story takes place in the roaring nineties, and it is a story that can only happen in that time for two reasons. The Asian financial markets were being born in a modern sense, hence being raided as well and the computer age was coming into fruition.

Mezrich calls our hero John Malcolm (we don’t know is real name). We meet Malcolm on a plane with Ivy League football stars on a plane to Japan to play an exhibition game there. He is going to Princeton University, and he has at Princeton on a football scholarship.

While in Japan his crew meets up with some arbitrage traders in Tokyo. They handout business cards and a job offer of sorts.

He does try out for the professional football. He doesn’t make it and it beat up more than anyone because the others don’t like boys from Ivy League colleges.

As Malcolm struggles to find a job at graduation, he gives one the traders a call, and the next week he is on a plane to Osaka Japan to start a job which he does not understand.

Completely clueless Malcolm enters a world that he could have never imagined. I don’t want to give away too much of the story.

The book is interesting because for a lot reasons. One, it gives a fairly realistic culture of the world of finance and of Japan; especially being an American in Japan. I can tell you from my own experience that it is realistic. At the time of the book Westerns mainly Americans and the British were taking the Asia for all they could. There was a lot of money involved and things that usually go along with that. The Yakuza, which is the Japanese mafia, were after Malcolm and his cohorts. He even got involved in Neil Lesson, who is the trader who brought down Barring of London; Britton’s oldest and most prestigious bank ( “Rogue Trader” with Ewan McGregor is a good movie about that bit). Lastly,sex is a part of that much money. The ubiquitous sex industry run by the Yakuza is in every part of business in Japan. The testosterone is pumping everywhere and fast cars and motorbikes lead to Malcolm taking stupid risks that the Yakuza eventually take advantage of.

While everyone else is corrupting themselves Malcolm finds love with a Japanese girl who is very much off limits.

Malcolm who grew up poor in New Jersey to a single mother becomes on the verge of making 500 million dollars.

There is never a dull moment in here. There is also no wasted space. There is going on and much to keep track of. It is really one of those stories where it ends of far from where it starts that only a true story can be that fantastic.

Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House (2007) by Valerie Plame Wilson

This is a book written two parts. The first part is written by Wilson with much of it redacted with blacked out sections shown on the page, and the second part is an afterword written by Laura Rozen. The afterword is written from the public record that is meant to fill in much of the pieces that was redacted by the C.I.A. So, the book is really all over the place.
The book is not that well written. Even taking the redactions into consideration the author loses focus and writes about three different books in one. She is not a professional writer and her emotions seems to be shot from the traumatic events in her and her families lives due to the well documented outing of her C.I.A. agent status and the right wings war against her family.
I wanted to read this book because I wanted know about a woman’s experience being in the C.I.A. It is a perceptive that I have never heard before. I do get that buried in somewhere within the emotional life of Ms. Wilson, which not a criticism. The woman is learning how to feel. She is getting her life organized her brain and is obvious when reading this.
What is surprising is just how likable the author is. She is very girly girl. She tries to tries to write the book with a tough bravado. She does this with her chapters on her C.I.A. special agent training on “The Farm.” However due to the redactions and the fact that it just didn’t seem like her, it doesn’t last for very long.
Next.
Probably the most fun you have with this book is the time she is a working as mother with two small children and as a C.I.A. agent. She is totally a mom, and she has working mother concerns all while having this super risky important spy job.
Then comes the dark side. While working for a part of the C.I.A. that was looking into nuclear proliferations in the outside world, a request from the Vice-President Office came in to have a lead that the Iraqi government was looking to buy Yellow Cake Uranium from Nigeria. Plame writes that it was suggested to her ask her husband former ambassador Joe Wilson to look into it. She would have been derelict of her duties if she did not follow through with that. It was common practice that people outside the agency, such as business people or former government officials to carry out some important matters such as this. Joe Wilson went pro-bono ( meaning that only expenses were paid) . He found nothing, wrote his report and they went on with their lives until the President, she writes, used a few words citing Yellow Cake Uranium and Iraq to sell the war on Iraq. Wilson wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times, debunking those words in the Presidents speech. After that everything fell apart.

The right wing declared war on the Wilson’s. Most egregious from the office of the Vice President and Carl Rove leaked Valeria Plame Wilson’s name to the press. Supposedly Carl Rove who is member of the Wilson’s church said that Valerie Wilson was “Fair Game” in retaliation to Joe Wilson. The so-called liberal press printed her name and protected their sources; hence exposed her status putting her and her contact lives in jeopardy. It was a political retaliation for crossing the administration.

She goes on and tells about how the war on the Wilson’s went as far as death threats, lack of protection from the C.I.A., tax audits, and more. Right wing donators threatened Universities and High Wealth individuals to make sure that Joe Wilson’s consulting business would go bust and that he would not get any speaking engagements. Plame speculates that these tactics were a dry run on the swift boat attacks on John Kerry in the 2004 Presidential Campaign.

Although, some justice eventually came her way in the form of “Scouter” Libby being prosecuted for the leak by the federal government. The toll taken on her family and her career was more than most people could take.

Towards the end of her she is pouring facts and unbelievable stories from her experience. It is upsetting, and it is clear that it is probably not over.

It was hard to read, because it was really upsetting. What was good about it is that is a first hand account of a family being hunted by the right wing for saying anything that contradicted it.

Dreams of My Father (A Story of Race and Inheritance) by Barack Obama

Barack n’ Roll, baby! Barack Obama won the democratic nomination being the first blackish dude to ever be accomplished such a feat.

Barack Obama maybe the first generation X president. Part of the hope that he gives is often felt by young people. Those people who are ready to kick out the Vietnam War generation of the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the Reagan Revolution. We are really tired of that combative culture of a generation spoiled and not appreciative that they were living in the highest time of American wealth and status so far.

If you have any question that Obama is the Gen-X candidate then read the Dreams of My Father, which is not be confused with John McCain’s Faith in My Fathers, which was also a good book. The names sound alike. His mother was a child of the sixties and a bit rebellious. She married a Kenyan and a Malaysian. Took her family to live in Malaysia, and only when immersed in that culture did she come to value being an American. Barack was the child of all that.

Brother Obama went to college in the 80’s and grad-school in the 90’s. By the way, he went to Columbia College at Columbia University.

Remember in at the start of the campaign, there was the question “Is Obama, really black?”? Well, this is why. Barack was conceived with Kenyan father of many wives, and a white woman. He was raised by her and sometimes her parents. On a side note, I attended a tapping of the Colbert Report where a columnist from Salon.com argued that Brother Obama was not black.

Remember when they were saying “Obama is Muslim”, because of his Kenyan family which he almost never knew growing up and that he lived in Malaysia when he was very young. People tried to scare up these facts. Hillary Clinton was nice enough to dig up a picture of Obama in Muslim looking clothes from a trip to Kenya he took to see him family there and gave them to the right wing media site, the Drudge Report; who always thanked the Clinton campaign for digging up dirt on Obama.

Anyway, to say the least Brother Barack is not your average black guy.

He went by Barry before college.

What I like about the book was how honestly and detailed, Obama described not fitting into an ethnic stereotype, which is something that I can relate to. For Obama, he had blackness inherited, but he did not inherit the African-American experience. He really didn’t grow up with it, except when it was trusted upon him.

Barack throughout his life, basically, learns to be black. Other black’s kinda accept him, but not totally. They think the Kenyan bit is cool, but it is nothing they can relate to. As Barack has one foot in and out of the door he has a unique position observe racism and its hypocrisies.

As far as race affects him as well as he observes it Obama takes it in deeply and personally, and in this there is a very favorable view of his character. The book is filled with well though out insights. You can see that he judges things from as many angles as he can find. He also seems obsessed with it. He sees the hypocrisy of both sides. His conclusions ring as true and biting at the same time. He even sees the hypocrisy in his own mother. He describes a situation of her, and his younger sister (who he barely mentions in his book) going to see an old movie where black people are portrayed as happy children, and she, his mother, is in love with that image. He also describes other areas of racism in his family.

The world and situations he describes are in direct conflict with the right wing exsertion that racism is dead, and should never be spoken of in a context prior to 1970. In a way, this book great because it speaks of a taboo of race in America.

The last part of the book he decides to really get into the black community in Chicago where he works as a community organizer. It is at this time where he meets his controversial preacher, which he has disowned in the election. It seems that in order for him to really be accepted in that community he has to drown himself in it, and it is where he leaves the reader. He is about to leave for Harvard Law. You wonder if he so immerse in the black community does he see the world outside of that, and in the election I am sure that will be asked this over and over again. This will probably where Obama the candidate, I suspect, will be vulnerable. Barack saturated himself with some of the most radical of the Chicago black community. It does not mean he is a radical, but some people will falsely accuse him of being guilty by association. Also, let’s not forget Hillary Clinton’s race laced stabs at him, which I thought was race bating. Clinton wanted Obama to defend himself on her racist smears, which would have been political suicide because he would be breaking the taboo on race. The double standard is that people can make subtle racist remarks, and the victim can not defend themselves; outside of saying “that was stupid” lest be punished for bringing to view that there is racism in America.

His image the post-race candidate is silly. Does “post-race” even make sense?

Does the book make you want to vote for him? The answer is well yeah, but not entirely.

I wanted to read it because I knew nothing about Obama. I chose this book because it was written before he was a candidate. So, a reader today is missing about 13 years of the Obama story.

As a book it is filled with insights, and is really well written. I think you can feel some of his training as a lawyer; for better or worse. You get the Gen-X perspective on things.

Of course, can Obama beat the real American Hero, McCaine?

The Nine, Inside the Secret World of THE SUPREME COURT by Jeffrey Toobin (2007)

The Nine seems to be that book that everyone has heard of but no one has read. No worries, read my review instead.

I have to admit my interest in this book is fill the gaps of my knowledge of the United States, and to continue to understand the times I am living in, which is sometimes spurred by the constant right-wing extremist rhetoric that come across.

The Toobin book is not linear history of the Supreme Court. It goes far back as 1972, but it picks up in the Reagan era, and it ends in 2006. The author travels in an odd pattern of telling the story. He jumps around a lot but somehow it works. At one time you are in 2002 and then back in 1992 and so on.

At best this book charts the Right wing of the Republican Party taking over of the court by the second Bush administration. It highlights a bit the division within the Republican party between the moderates and the Evangelical Christian right, which eventually the latter have completely taking over in the second Bush presidency.

Toobin mostly focuses on Sandra Day O’Connor. She was a Reagan appointee in 1981. She might not have been chosen to the court if Kenneth Star, who was in charge of her background check, had done with his homework to see that she had ruled on abortion cases. O’Connor, much like Bush former Treasury secretary Paul O’Neil, was pushed to the left as the far right came into power; not so much by a change of mind, but rather as the Party went to further to right, it left many behind. Both went from loyal conservatives to outspoken critics of the George W. Bush White House. \

O’Connor was the swing vote for almost 25 years, and she decided tone and outcome of many of the courts biggest cases with those 25 years from Abortion to Bush v. Gore.

The book is neither too deep in legalese; meaning you don’t have to a lawyer to read it, neither is it dumbed down. In fact, I hear that the book is popular amongst lawyers.

My biggest criticism of the book is that I felt the author could have gone further into the cases that the Supreme Court ruled on. For example, I wanted full explanation of Bush v. Gore, but I felt that he barely touched the subject.

I thought what the The Nine did best was give the reader a solid understanding of the Rehnquist Supreme Court and then give a good taste of the Roberts’ Supreme Court. Both are very different. Both court represent the very different sides of the Republican Party, and to borrow the phrase from John Edwards, although he never meant it this way, represent the two different Americas.

The Supreme Court as it stands right now is George W. Bush’s biggest triumph and lasting legacy. Love it or hate it, it’s the law of the land. Toobin shows the last thirty years of the court in rational and compressive manor.

Wigfield: The Can Do Town That Just May Not by Stephan Colbert, Amy Sedaris, and Paul Dinello (Audiobook)

Audio was the way to go for this one. Really a book written by Stephan Colbert would be better preformed by the Actor/Comic/Narcissist. Amy Sederis and Paul Dinello preformed multiple rolls and while Colbert did his shtick as Russell Hokes the investigative journalist out to find the story a lifetime, his lifetime, in Wigfield; a town that may not really be a town. It could be just land held by squatters, but that is just what the law says.

A former street painter, Hokes painted the dashes in the center of the highways; he decides that he must be a writer. His first work of fiction is his resume.

After blowing most his advance in a Mexican resort, because he needed a little “me” time, Hokes hits the open road looking for the great story of the American small town, and this is the joke.

Much like the Colbert Report, Colbert and Company pokes fun the media’s decades old news story of the decline of small town America. This story takes the view that real America, the heartland, are small almost all white small towns in the bible-belt, and it being destroyed by “them.” The good true real Americans, with pristine small town values, which are good especially as oppose to “them.” I always sensed a bit of racism in this view and a distortion of fact. So, I enjoyed that this work takes the view of that small towns are not always inherently good and can just as bad as or worse than anywhere else. It really takes that point to town.

It is as funnier as anything as I have come across in a very long time. It makes fun self-righteousness in many forms by making the point that sounding self-righteous doesn’t make you right.

The book is like taking all the funniest jokes of a good sitcom for its entire lifespan and condensing into one book. Brilliant!

As an audiobook it sounds like a play recorded for radio sans a lot of cheesy sound effects.

The rest of the story is that the town of Wigfield is about to be destroy when the local dam is suppose to be destroyed. Here the old anti-government attitude by good ole fashion values is poked fun at here. These satirists are minor sociologist too.

Anyway, Russell (Colbert) has to get his story before there is nothing left or his publisher won’t give him anymore money.

Wigfield: The Can Do Town That Just May Not is highly recommended for constant laughs.

The Know-It-All: One Man’s humble quest to be the smartest person in the world by A.J. Jacobs

This is another book by a neighbor of sorts. A.J. Jacobs, I saw him speak at a J.C.C. of Manhattan talk on the Upper West Side. From how he seems to describe every nuance of his life, I gather he live somewhere in the West 80’s. I rarely make it up there.

Jacobs takes the reader through his adventure of reading the encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z.

He describes why. It is not really to be the smartest person in the world even though it is what he tells people. It is to regain his perceived lost sense of being the smartest boy in the world. Today, he finds his mind rotting in a perfect storm of pop-culture, which he works, lives and breathes. He is often surrounded by other know-it-alls, such as his father and brother-in-law.

Most of the time he reads , if you will, to us sections of the Britannica that he finds interesting; shares his thoughts, and kvetches about life. He endless describes his wife Julie, so much that you feel that she is the greatest woman who ever lived. I guess he loves his wife. They are trying to have a baby in the book, so I guess the book as sex appeal. Just to give it away. They do succeed eventually.

The book is peppered with vignettes about the relationships with his boss, his father, his brother-in-law, and his appearance in ‘Who’s wants to be a Millionaire’ TV game show.
Not to mention joining Mensa, meeting so-called smart people including Alex Trabrek; whom he mistakes for a Mexican gardener and who’s personal contact excludes him from getting on Jeopardy, which is the New York Times of games shows apparently.

The author does sound like your whinny little friend who spends a lot of time in doors and has share every little thought with you; like a less neurotic Woody Allen. He does write so conversationally that the book reads like a very long conversational letter.

You learn interesting things and not-so interesting while following A.J.’s adventure in reading. For instance, the average of a person in Roman times lived to be 29 years and that there is no entry for Tom Cruise, which is slight to Julie.

It does get it boring in the middle as he goes on and on with the , , and ‘who cares’ . However, after putting the book to do something else, anything else, it picks up again, and in the end there is wisdom.

This is where this project/effort by the author and the reader of the The Know-It-All becomes a success. Because all involved puts a lot of information in their mind, information that will soon be forgotten, and comes out of with wisdom.

Jacobs learns to appreciate life in modern times. He learns that intelligence and knowledge might not be the same but live in the same neighborhood, which might be a quote from the book. He learns to appreciate his father, brother-in-law, and feels more prepared to raise his soon to be new born baby.

For the reader, the reader gets some knowledge at Jacob’s expense, some wisdom at Jacob’s expense, and not laughs also at Jacob’s expense. Get the book from the Library and there will be no expense to you.

The Beatles, The Biography by Bob Spitz

Just what the world needs, another biography of The Beatles. Surely, the pantheon of knowledge is lacking study of the Fab Four. The Beatles’, who are the most celebrated, studied, covered and renowned rock band ever, story is as a part of modern culture as any musical figure in history. The Beatles are really the first band, so to speak. Before The Beatles, you had Elvis, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and the Crickets. It was usually some dude or some dude and his backing band. After The Beatles, it was all Rock Bands, The Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, etc. The few that followed, for example Elvis Costello with his band and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, were, in fact, referencing the old style for effect.

The Beatles in fact did not invent the genre but they developed it, so much that there has been very little ground that they did not cover. Like anyone is a young field, think Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in 1979, the new world was their’s to dominate. If you can be the first at something, do it.

Again, there has been much ado written of The Beatles. I have only read one other book on them, Here, There, and Everyway: my life recording The Beatles by Geoff Emerick, which was the best music memoir I have ever read. Still, I have seen the Anthology and other Beatles specials. I have listened to “Breakfast on with the Beatles” on the radio in High School. So, I think I know a thing or two about them.

And maybe, do because this book by Spitz offered little new information. There weren’t enough details that really told the story. The most detailed section was about Brian Epstein’s homosexuality.

Spitz does cover the whole story, but mostly with highlights. However, there were a few new things for me. He does dig in on Yoko Ono more than I seen before. She is greedy and out to destroy to The Beatles so that she can get John Lennon all to herself. Ono would be motivated by the financial security and legitimacy that Lennon would bring her.

He also details Lennon’s misery in his highly successful life. Lennon is angry and impulsive. Spitz takes the excuse that he is an artist, and offers little other explanation. You do get the idea that Lennon, for all his acting out, doesn’t take control of his life and instead to just reacts to it, which is explained by his childhood of being passed around from his mother to his aunt, and his exposure to his mother’s various boyfriends. Throughout the drama of John Lennon, as bad as that was, he bitch seems worse than his bite. He was easily taken advantage of and he instead punished those that were weaker than him.

Spitz goes pretty easy on Paul. Even Emerick who couldn’t be more aligned with Mr. McCartney was more critical.

What I think I got most out of the book, maybe because it was what I was most interested in were the bits about the song writing. Spitz describes Lennon and McCartney both as artists. The difference between there styles being that Lennon was a sculptor and McCartney a painter. Lennon would makes songs out of something else, a child’s drawing, a poster, another piece of art. While McCartney would use things that came out of him without even Paul understand exactly how. “Yesterday” came out of a dream and “Michelle” came out of a need for a song; and John remembering that Paul did some French thing.

There are facts here and there, which I didn’t know much but probably could have gotten from another source, like Ringo got paid less or Twist and Shout was recorded with John screaming while being horse , sick and in pain, which you can hear once you are aware of it.

I somehow doubt that this is the best Beatles book out there. In fact, if you are looking to learn more about them, I would suggest the DVD of the Anthology over this book. However, it’s fun learning about The Beatles, and I enjoyed it as a fan.

I think that success of the book is based on the success of everything new of The Beatles come out with years, decades after they broke up. They could release new Beatles CDs of the band turning their guitars and it would generate a charting position. People are looking to recapture something, and maybe something new will do that, even if it’s just the same and the packing is different. I am not sure what that “Something” is, but I know that it is certainly there.

A Three Dog Life, A Memoir, By Abigail Thomas (2007)

This work by Abigail Thomas is a true story; her story of a chapter in her life. Maybe it is summation of a life of experience. These kinds of stories are not hard to find. I am sure they are not as well received as this one, with its awesome lauds from everything newspaper to author Stephen King. However, for me, it’s a little different. It turns out that Thomas lived about three blocks away from me at the time of this book. We shared the same streets, and shopped at the same Market in the Columbia University area of Manhattan. Although, I have no memory of this woman, I am sure that I must have past her on the street or even waited in line with in the Westside Market.

OK, so this book seems a little more real to me. Got it?

The story focuses around one event and its aftermath. Thomas’ husband was hit by a car returning home after taking their beagle Harry for a walk. Rich sustained massive brain damage. He lost short term memory and control of much of his mental functionality. He was emotionally all over the place sometimes going into unexplainable rages and paranoia.

Abigail’s life changes immediately. She has to handle what happened to her husband while handling what happened to her. The book in many ways is a story of adaptation, which seems to be a strength of the author. If you ever had to adapt to a sudden and traumatic change in life, you can easily relate. What she is does best and what is best about the book is her ability to document the process honestly and with great sympathy.

At the start of the book, she starts out with one dog, Harry. By the end she has three. I think her favorite is Harry the beagle, but I am biased. I am sure that I have seen this beagle as I noticed every beagle on the street, so I am sure that I must have noticed a neighborhood beagle on Broadway or Riverside Drive.

The title of book is taken from an aboriginal saying that during especially cold nights the more dogs sleep with you. Anyone who has an indoor dog know that on cold night dogs will get in bed with you, roll into a ball, and lean right up against you. If you have a beagle, you know that the beagle will do the same but take up most of the bed or couch.

I liked that Thomas is a true dog person. She gets them. This is evident in all of her little insights about the personalities and skill sets of her dogs.

In some ways, her book it is quite frightening and lonely. It frightening what her husbands goes through, and what she goes through with her husband. Rich is healthy individual who had a terrible thing happened to him and lost everything except his wife. You sort of know that he is going to die soon. It hangs over everything. It is a lonely experience to go through her loneliness, until you realize that she seems excel in loneliness.

In many ways, she is a happier and stronger person after this tragedy; one because she learns how to rely on herself and she learns to find comfort where she can find it. She, of course, finds comfort in her dogs. Who wouldn’t? She finds comfort in her Husband in his new life. She moves to Woodstock to be near the facility that he now lives in.

Although as I fell deeper into the book, more annoyed I got with Abigail. I found that the book lacked insight and wisdom. In sometimes, I wondered if she liked her husband better after the accident, whom she related to more as dog than as a human being. She is definitely woman who prefers solitude; more immersed in her own thoughts than with other people. She seems to come to terms with after a life time of fighting, and feeling bad about it. It’s not uncommon, I have met people like this, and I think she is one of them.

My favorite passage is when she describes how she used feel unnerved that there was something else going on and she wasn’t there, and now she hopes they are having a good and don’t call her.

Maybe it’s a story of depression and loss. There are hints of sweetness and strength which are certainly not mutually exclusive. It is certainly a powerful story, well written, and very touching.

Busting Vegas by Ben Mezrich

The full title is Busting Vegas: The MIT Whiz Kid Who Brought the Casinos to Their Knees. This is a true story that reads like a thriller. My heartbeat increased and I was on the edge of my chair for the minor cliffhangers. It seems fantastic and realistic at the same time.

Busting Vegas is not the first book by Mezrich written about MIT to kids taking on casinos black jack tables. Bringing Down the House which is another book on the subject has been made into an upcoming movie called “21.” While we are on the subject, Busting Vegas is not the only book by Mezrich about Ivy League kids. Ugly Americans is another book on my list.

“Make money playing blackjack” is all it took. The story focuses around Semyon Dukach who was a MIT student. He comes from a poor background as a Russian Jewish immigrant. Semyon finds this flier on campus; “Make money playing blackjack.” The flier said to attend a meeting. It is lead by a guy named Victor (maybe not his real name). Victors makes teams of students. They go to Indian Casinos and practice Victor’s methods for beating the house. Victor then takes those who he thinks would be the best at taking on high stakes gambling and puts them into an elite team. Once the new team is assembled he teaches them the Three Techniques. These techniques are quasi-legal. It’s not card counting or anything that has been seen before, and they really work. Armed with fake IDs and personas they fly down to Vegas. They quickly make mad money. In minutes they are up thousands of dollars. Even though part of the act is to make a scene, the Casino get wise to the kids are winning every time they bet big.

Now the ugly side of Vegas shows its head, Semyon and his buddy are separated. His buddy gets the crap beat out of him in a windowless casino back room, and Semyon is taking to coffee with a British consultant who tries to get a picture of his new enemy.

The casino’s are now on to them. Everywhere they go, the network of Gambling industry identifies them and this British consultant is tracking them. Nevertheless, they travel all over the world, sometime making enormous amounts of money and sometime just getting away with their lives.

Eventually there is too much heat and problems in the group. The team eventually disbands with their lives, but just barely.

It is fair to say that these types of teams and veterans of them are still hitting the Casinos today.

I found the book a bit like a Harry Potter book, in that it starts out a bit slow then by the end you can’t put it down.

I loved this book. It was exciting and I recommend this book to anyone.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby

This is a great book, Very deserving the praise you will find on cover from the New York Times, Washington Post, and Financial Times lauding the book as one of the best books in a hundred year. The The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a gripping, heart-wrenching, tautly poetic prose, which you picked and really can’t put down. The story, if you can call it that, as it is not a straight narrative, is told in vignettes. I read it in a weekend, and mostly in one sitting. You don’t want to put in down, because it goes down so easily, but also because it is so sad that you don’t to carry that feeling with you for a long time.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly tells a true of an editor of Elle Magazine in Paris who has a stroke, which in a previous day would have surely left him for dead, but now days he is has a condition known as Locked-In syndrome. He communicates through blinking one eye. He composes the book by someone going through the alphabet until Bauby indicates which the right letter is by blinking. What you get is an internal world of person who is alert but has lost all functionality with his body, hence losing his ability to communicate to the outside world. His mind stays active. In his prose is the world of a man in complete solitude. His sentences are perfect pithily prose, but you also get a sense how much time he has spent inside his own head.

He describes his situation of having no control over his situation without frustration. I don’t know of any other record of someone in his condition.

If you have ever worked or volunteered in a hospital with a population with severe neurological trauma, you know that these people exist. They lay there alone or piled next to each other like a Victorian asylum to human misery; not quite alive and not quite dead.

The courageous part is that this man never lost his consciousness of everything and his spirit remaines strong; grasping on to life where ever he can get it. But you know he is going die. In his memories, he romantically shares the memories of his life; it’s tragic that a life could boil down to a few precious moments.

He knows he is dying. He doesn’t die in the book, but it is written on the cover that he dies a couple days after its French publication.

The book was a huge success internationally. It has been made into a movie that is out now, and is suppose to be very good. I am not sure if I am going to see it. I am still touched and sadden by the story. I am not sure if I want to go through that again.

iCon by Jeffery S. Young and William L. Simon

The full title is iCon Steve Jobs The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business. So, this is basically a book about Steve Jobs president and founder of Apple Computers, Next Step, Pixar, and the ipod.

I really can’t believe how over-the-top this book is. It could either be written by Jobs himself or maybe his mother. They say that the world of Apple is a cult of personality that follows Steve Jobs. There is some truth to this. I have only owned Apple/Mac. I have seen Jobs at an Apple keynote, which the only word that is sufficient “Mesmerizing.” I even paid full price for a crappy biography of Steve Jobs.

Still, this is just a non-stop uncritical laud of the computer guru. There is nothing here that you couldn’t of gotten by just following the news and an Apple press release. It is so sanitized that you could feed it to the I.C.U. I guess, I had holes in my knowledge of Jobs, so it filled in the gaps. I keep that in mind when I think I paid $17 for this, and I get paid in dollars. {It ain’t what it used to be}

There is almost nothing about the technical advances, war with Microsoft, or the brave new world of the “i” in front everything. I found the T.V. movie “Pirates of Silicon Valley” to be more informative, not to mention more entertaining.

Now, let me take a step back, there is a guilt saying anything bad about it for the same reason is why I am so angry about the flakeyness of this book. You see the Mac is the Jew of the computer world. Always fighting for market share, if not survival itself. Ruled by a brilliant yet impetuous G-d; that sometime flies off the handle. Totally over-represented in the computer world, and in the advancement in the industry. You will find Mac in top positions, and in the entertainment industry; and saturated in large urban areas like New York City. If you own a Mac you have had to perry an onslaught of attacks and ridicule personally from the Microsoft community; who even though have about 90 percent of market find Mac’s 3 percent so dangerous. By being put through this the Mac-users becomes a battle harden expert on the Mac with loyalty enviable to any company. With such a culture you know that when the Microsoft Operating System is a part of computer history that there will still be a Mac.

Then we came to the end by Joshua Ferris

I guess this was a very really good book, because in the end I found that I really cared for the characters. I had an emotional reaction to their misfortunes at the end of the book.

I picked up this book when the New York Times put it in its top ten book of 2007 (fiction). I can’t remember exactly when about the article made me want to read it. I paid for price at Barnes and Nobles, which is something I rarely do.

The book is basically about life in an office. This time it is a Chicago ad agency, but it could be any office in the U.S. In the story, everyone is slowly being laid off, as it is set in the dot-com bust of a few years ago, but it rings true today. It was unnerving reading a story about people getting laid while lots of people in my own office have been dropping or “walking the Spanish” as they put in the book.

The book, which is Then we came to an end is a perfect book about the culture of an office. Really, I think every college or high school should be forced to read this book, so they can ask themselves if this (“the office”) really for me, or they can prepare themselves, because working in an office is like, especially when you are young, being in first grade again. You have to do so much more than kindergarten, which is basically college and especially grad school. You have recess, try to talk to your neighbor and look for a place to take a nap. This book captures everything about that perfectly. Ferris, the author, does it with much whit and insanity. He gets the archetypes right. The bitch, the boss, the scape goat, etc., and all their disorders are presented like the Canterbury tales or more aptly the Decameron.

I hope I didn’t forget to mention that it is so funny. There are definitely some laugh out loud moments. lol.

While I was reading this book, I used it as a guide of office pranks. I switch people’s chair to see if they would notice. I went to different floors to determine who had to the best coffee. It was the fifth floor on my building. These and other great ideas I lifted right the pages much to my co-workers’ bewilderment.

There is the TV series “The Office” both in UK and US versions. That’s really bizarre, and not too realistic because it is so extreme. It’s funny though. This book has too be drawn from real experience because some of the stuff written about has that “it must be true feeling,” because you can’t make that stuff up, and there are time where you think that this part of book is out of the author’s imagination. At other time you figure he was just a fly on the wall.

The Chicago part seems dead on. I hear the same voices and styles when people my Chicago office tell stories. It has the same feel.

This is Joshua Ferris’ first book, so you can’t anything else by him. He lives in Brooklyn now, maybe his next one will be more ghetto. Totally great book, read it.

All too human, my political education by George Stephanopoulos (1999)

It’s been many years since the last days of the Clinton Administration. Reading All too human by George Stephanopoulos is like get a heartfelt postcard from the past. A past, which is now a dim memory, that lingers like the residue of a dream. As a friend put it, the 90’s were the party, and now we are living the hangover.

Reading All too human, I felt the sensations of living 15 years ago. I thought, could it really be that long ago? Bill Clinton was the first President that I had really experienced from start to finish.

Stephanopoulos is not referring Clinton being all too human, but himself. It is good title because the book is a retelling of his years with Bill Clinton in a intimate narrative, which sounds almost like a therapy session. It more of how George Stephanopoulos dealt with the situations that came before him, which were the situations that ailed the Clinton Whitehouse. George takes you right through, how much he felt and knew at the time, how he dealt with it, felt about that, and finally what he thinks and feels about it later, which may sound like any memoir, but I can assure that I have been through many and it certainly isn’t. In a way George sounds like he is unloading a guilty conscious; justifying himself; giving corroborating evidences. At other times, it sounds like a love letter to Bill Clinton. What can be sure is that it is both heartfelt and rational writing of an experience that went from Jennifer Flowers to Monica Lewinski. In the end, he becomes his own person, less of a defender of Clinton based on awe, and rather he becomes more realistic in his loyalty to the President. It is a story of growth at it’s core.

I found that Stephanopoulos account of the role Hillary Clinton to be on the same page as the Carl Bernstein book on her, A Woman in Charge.

George Staphanopoulos graduate from Columbia University, where he was a visiting professor. He gave the commencement speech for the college during my time at Columbia. From that experience, I can say that he sound like a Columbia kid. He has that New York Ivy League persona that has lead so many from 116th street and Broadway to Washington. FDR went to the law school at Columbia, and there has never been a session of congress without a Columbia graduate.

I really did enjoy this book. I wish it were more updated as it was written in 1999; almost ten years ago. But I did like two things very much about it. It was terse and emotionally honest. I googled the book and found that some reviews blasted him for being self serving. I didn’t see it that way. I saw a narrative that was as honest as he could be with himself. The book neither, raised or lowered my opinion of Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton. Instead, it reminded me why I feel the way I do about them in the first place.

I bought this book for a dollar on Amazon. It’s not a bad look at the Clinton years. As a young person during those years it was hard to not see George Stephanopoulos as someone you could relate too, generally because he looked too young to be there.

The One Percent Doctrine by Ron Suskind

The full title is The one percent doctrine: Deep inside America’s pursuit of it’s enemies since 9/11.

The book reads like an information overload. It is like the best spy novel you have ever read, expect it isn’t fiction. You wish it were fiction.

Suskind picks up the story in the August before 9/11 when the CIA interrupted George W. Bush’s long vacation to warn him of the imminent threat to the country. Of course Bush had been warmed of the threat since before he took office. Over a year later, and with intelligence all of the world, especially the Middle East, saying that America was going to be attacked, George Bush told George Tenet and the CIA, OK, you have covered your ass, and went back to his vacation. Bush did nothing. (This meeting has been reported by many sources, and George Bush talked about it his interview with Bob Woodward)

After the attacks many things happened. George Bush saved CIA director George Tenet job, and thereby owning Tenet. A series of policies were put into place on how conduct the new war against terrorism. Dick Cheney put forth the One Percent Doctrine. This stated that there if there was even a one percent chance that something could threaten the United States, the government must act as if the country was certain to be attacked. This idea threw out analysis and evidence.

Cheney and Rumsfeld made sure that CIA had all the weapons it needed to fight this new war. This included torture and wire-tapping. The funny thing is that these measures have been used since the start of the CIA. The old rule used to be if it is isn’t public then it is legal. (A History of the CIA by Tim Weiner). The Bush administration went to great lengths to make it legal, even with great costs to the country’s collateral. I am not sure you can say that the difference is scale, because during the Cold War all mail that went out of the United States was searched. It begs the question that this insistence, to make it all legal was less about fighting terrorism than it was about gaining revenge for two men who were burnt by the Watergate era and wanted payback; to put the country where they thought is belonged.

The idea was that the United States would never be caught off guard again is the rational for these new measures. Of course, if the Administration would have just listened to its intelligence, maybe 9/11 could have been avoided. Al Gore, in The Assault on Reason suggests that if the government had just followed their leads, all the terrorists could have been caught using public records and know lists. Of course, the CIA, FBI and other government organization have a long disastrous history of not talking to each other. One the best things that the Bush administration has done, is not tolerate such behavior, which is the first time in history. The idea was that the FBI was fight terror at home and the CIA overseas, and that effectively worked.

The story really starts when Libya decided that it wanted to join the world community again. (Check out current news, i.e. Libyan meeting with the new French President). It had been alienated since the Reagan Administration for terrorist actions. Now a Libyan representative met with the CIA at the Hyde Park, London home of a Saudi Prince. He gave as an offering one name. The CIA took it and found that person in Pakistan. Working with Pakistani authorities that capture him and more importantly a computer, a diary and other important information.

Now like most things in the past few years, once American agencies have an opportunity to do their job right, they do, and they do it great. Unfortunately, the ideologues in the Administration, like Rumsfeld, get a hold of information and they filter it through fantastic and unrealistic view of how the world works and they screw everything up.

Now from here on, the story goes in two directions. One is the CIA success from that seed that of the original Libyan contact, and the other is the political story of the Administrations war on Terror. The CIA/FBI investigation went great. The seed lead to more and more information and arrests. Their money systems tapped. The U.S. was everywhere they raised their head. At the same time torture such as water boarder was being used those capture those who had to no knowledge anything, and those who were mentally unstable, although you have to wonder about the mental stability of all these people who are out to do so much harm. Nevertheless, things were said do to the torture that were untrue. However, because of the One Percent Doctrine everything had to be taken as a threat even though there no possible way these wild stories could be taken seriously. So what happened was that resources were spent chasing nothing. These stories of terrorist plots everywhere came mainly from one unstable man during torture. Evidence had to be thrown out due to directives from the highest level of government. American threat levels were constantly going up and down. This is why.

In fact, the combatants were trained and expect torture (so the argument that talking about American torture is giving intelligence to the enemy is complete nonsense), what they weren’t expecting of the FBI’s technique of doing favors. The FBI even went so far as to get someone’s wife for him from Pakistan and the wife told him that he better tell the U.S. what they wanted to know. Most who experience such treatment told the U.S. want they wanted to here. What the ideologues don’t understand is the history of the United States. They only knew the propaganda and the bravado. People from most countries expect to be tortured or spied on. It doesn’t help to be just as bad as the worst dictators. What worked for the U.S. in World War was that the Germans knew that the American were the most humane of all the Allies. They really didn’t want to be captured by the Russian, because they knew death would be better. German soldiers and citizens more easily surrender and cooperated with the American because they knew that the American would be just to them. (Source Stephen Ambrose ‘Citizen Soldier’).

Politics and reality become very confusing. As old and never followed through plots were uncovered were released to the press as if it they were current threats at prime periods during the 2004 Presidential elections, it would push the public towards President Bush. He ran on the premise that he had kept America Terror free. Even Bin Laden got in on the election. By making an appearance Bin Laden almost sealed the presidency for George W. Bush. It was clear that Bin Laden wanted Bush in the White House.

But it asks the question why hadn’t American been hit by a terrorist attack. To CIA the answer was that maybe they didn’t want to hit America again. Sure, America was now a harder target to hit, but the terrorist don’t do anything without a purpose. They have goals that they are trying to achieve. They only do things in their interest. Terrorists create chaos and achieve their ends by destabilizing a society. When they hit Spain, they got the Spanish out of Iraq. The scariest part, I thought is that, you realize while reading the book that they are an outsourced organization. Just like how everything is outsourced in business, so is policy of rogue or unfriendly states. Somehow these stateless organizations aren’t so stateless.

The One Percent Doctrine doesn’t really end anywhere. It just takes the reader along what is probably the first chapter on the War on Terror. It gives no answers. The author gives a statement on how it is an act of civil disobedience just to report on these events. Because the sources went against the current Administration’s political polices by telling what they knew, they put themselves in great danger.

The Price of Loyalty, George Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O’Neill by Ron Suskind

The Price of Loyalty is an account of former Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O'Neill, under our President George W. Bush. Full of well researched material backing up the person account of O’Neill, it goes by very quickly as it is a personal story. It is not quite a biography. It goes in the Paul O’Neill’s past a little, but not much. If it is biographical, it is only in respect to Paul O’Neill’s life as Treasury Secretary.

Being in a cabinet post, O’Neill had very close access to President George W. Bush, and he was the first to write about it. I find the tone of this book kind of bitter, but not unjustified.

O’Neill was a very successful CEO of Alcoa, a self made man, and he had worked in the Ford administration with such people as Dick Cheney and Alan Greenspan. He grew up dirt poor and work his way up to be retired with $60 million in the bank.

He reluctantly took post of a cabinet member. He thought he might be too controversial for the Bush administration. It turns out that he was, but not for the reasons he thought he would be.

O’Neill did fit in with other member of the cabinet who would also not survive, such as Colin Powell and Christie Todd Whitman. Alan Greenspan and O’Neill were old friends.

O’Neill saw himself as a problem solver. His take was that you take away the excuses and look at something realistically; you will then find your solution. He was looking forward to doing that kind of work for the country under George W. Bush’s White House. Instead, he found something different.

One of the first things, he found was that ten days into the Bush Administration, there talk and high priority given to finding out a way to invade Iraq. Another decision was to abandon the peace process in Israel. The cabanet meetings were scripted. Everyone has their role to play with the president and no real discussion ever took place. The meetings became an echo chamber of ideologues by such people as Carl Rove, who would say such as things to the president as “Stick to Principle.” Old friend Dick Cheney had changed from the person O’Neil had known in the Ford Administration. He had become an ideologue too. Alan Greenspan, in his book, also iterated his shock and dismay over the change in Cheney. Both men acknowledged that it had been a long time since they worked with him and hence thought they knew him. Once Cheney he said he in a meeting “the one Ronald Reagan taught us was that deficits don’t matter.” O’Neil couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The one thing Ronald Reagan taught us that deficits DO matter! The deficits of the Reagan era did damage to the country. At one point, a 3rd of the United States government’s revenue went to paying the interest payments of the debt (Greenspan). It was the finical conservative discipline of the first Bush Administration and the Clinton administration that brought the United States back to financial prosperity.

During the early days of the Bush Administration, there was a ginormous (the word is in the new version dictionary - look it up) surplus forecast in tax revenue, which was coming off the Dot-com bubble. O’Neil wanted to use this money to continue to pay off the debt and solve the Social Security problem. The Bush administration was dead set on making huge tax cuts, because he had made that promise in the campaign. Now tax cuts were the idea of the day. Al Gore had also promised tax cuts during the campaign, but on a smaller level and with a commitment to continue to pay off the debt. Alan Greenspan was also in agreement of tax cuts because he feared a U.S. government with too much cash in its hands. However, Bush proposal, which the administration referred to as a stimulus package, was broad and largely irresponsible. Paul O’Neil proposed a series of triggers that would roll back the cuts in case government revenue ever reduced at a significant level. Greenspan agreed and tried to sell it. The Bush administration ignored such an idea and fought against it. In the end, the tax cuts were passed by congress with no triggers. Shortly afterwards the Dot-com bubble burst, and the country would be going back to deficits soon afterwards. Bush would get more tax cuts passed. O’Neill would argue that there isn’t much a benefit to the economy of cuts taxes to the wealthiest section of the country, because they are most likely going to be the ones to put the money away in savings. The Bush administration always took the view that the economy was worse when it was well to justify more tax cuts, which lead the country in further fiscal insolvencies.

O’Neil was probably most in the news with the tour of Africa he took with U2 front man Bono. They went on a highly publicized tour of Africa giving O’Neil a firsthand view of the situation there. He got up close and personal with the problems and saw solution that were very achievable there. He took his family with him. He came back to Washington with ideas of building wells in Africa. That plan never really went anywhere while he was in Washington. He never lost sight of the plan.

O’Neil always spoke his mind and dealt with facts and not ideologies. It eventually got him fired. Like all the other moderates in the administration, he was one of the first major posts to be replaced. O’Neil never played the political game, and it was obvious that he was mistreated. After his departure he has been called back by almost all areas of government to help on projects.

O’Neil describes Bush half a bully and half a sheep being lead my ideologues totally devoid of facts.

The Suskind book a sobering account of the Bush Administration. O'Neill was let go in 2006, so it stops there. I found it surprising rational and lucid. At this point some the ideas are known already. However, like in most cases, it good to get the source of the themes that came out of the book in order to separate from the commentary and talking points.

I Am America (And So Can You!) – by Steven Colbert (2007)

Finally a book by Steven Colbert, I can’t believe it. Well, that’s not true, I can. After reading I Am America (And So Can You!), I ask is this too much Steven Colbert, and I think it is. The book is funny, and I imagine the audio book is funnier. You have to get Colbert's voice in your head to truly get it, or, at least, it helps. What I found most note-worthy is that you get a taste of reading right-wing propaganda books like those of Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and Bill O’Reilly. It gets into your head until you are completely brain-washed.

Colbert does a very good job at satirizing most of the right-wing agenda’s talking points. He speaks of immigration, Hollywood, gays, religion, the media and all other themes which are have been so apart of the political landscape of the United States in the past few years. I suppose what Colbert does best is to take the themes and hidden messages within the News Corporations’ media outlets, for example, and shout them in plain English. This is really all Colbert does. So, why is he so successful? In many ways it has little to with him, but rather on how ridiculous these talking points really are.

The best and worst thing about such an effort is the complete lack of context and explanation given. After reading so much extreme takes on American life, the reader wants an explanation on how those opinions came to be. By the reader, of course, I mean me. Especially in this faith-based American culture, rarely do I hear anyone asking someone how they got to that conclusion, especially of someone on television or radio.

I think if Colbert gave a reason for things he says, he would be out of a job. I am not sure that America can handle an explanation of the events of the world around them. I don’t think they want one. I am sure they feel something is wrong, but they are listening to the loudest voice instead of thinking. It is hard to say how you got lost when you don’t know where you are.

If you take Steve Colbert greatest moment, which is the White House correspondence dinner speech where Colbert lampooned the administration, he doesn’t say you’re bad to the President for this or that rather he comically states that there is something wrong here; really wrong. Just when all opinion opposite to the Administration was being suppressed, Colbert speach was a message that needed a voice. The response to it especially by people 16- 35 years old showed that there was a silent opposition by the American people to the course of direction that the country is going in. The entire speech is at the back of the book.

In many ways, reading the Colbert book is like watching the Colbert show. There are little margin comments like the segment of “The Word,” and there can be some refreshing randomness that accompanies any good comedy show.

In Summary, it hard to know how to feel about it, because, if you are reading this book, you can appreciate and laugh at the absurdity of these talk radio points defined, but you still are uncomfortable with them. Colbert is sometimes best in small doses. If you are dumb enough not get the joke, and many people are, then you might feel that he go far enough. On the other, hand the book is almost like an educational tool, and maybe defense against the millions of listeners and viewers to these opinionists who, like Colbert, speak in absolute truths. Luckily the book is just under 300 pages and there are plenty of pictures, cut outs and stickers. Die hard fans will be overjoyed. Anyone with a mind to question will be intrigued, and fair weather fans will be overwhelmed. Finally I suspect foes will be confused. I liked this book, but it certainly not for everyone. Hell, it’s funny!

The Age of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan (2007)

Not exactly light reading. This is a serious book with some intense insights. It is clear, profound, serious, and esoteric. I think a background in economics would help with reading this endeavor from the former Federal Reserve Chairman.

Alan Greenspan is essentially writing three books within one.
One book is a personal history of his life. Another is the political history of his time working with every president since Nixon to George W. Bush, and the last, by the far the lengthiest, is a financial history of the World economy of the past thirty years with projections into the future. Each side has its own personality.

Alan, when speaking of himself, writes an endearing portrait of himself as a man who is both very emotional and very rational. He highlights mistakes in his life where being too rational or emotional had lead to the wrong decision. At best he is the embodiment of both simultaneously.

Alan Greenspan, born in New York City to a lower middle class Jewish family, grew up in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. He really didn’t suffer through the depression, which I believe has a lot to do with his negative views of the social safety nets established by the Roosevelt administration. Although his parents divorced, his mother maintained a job as a secretary in the Bronx. His father worked on Wall Street. Alan received a 25 cent allowances growing up during the depression, which according to my grandfather was “pretty good.”

During this early period, he was more interested in music than in finance. He loved Jazz and played professionally in a band. At one point Alan got to jam with Stan Getz. While in the Jazz scene he read finance books during his downtime. He eventually left the music world got his degree at NYU, and then took a job in finance. He earned $48 a week in 1948, which again my grandfather said, “what I could have done with $48 a week in 1948.” So there you go.

Now, Greenspan took the job for $48 a week over another job for around $60 a week, because he felt he would learn more at the lower paying job than the higher. This is the kind of reasoning that he would display throughout his life.

In the 50’s, he would get married and divorced, and become part of a social group headed by Ayn Rand. Rand and her circle would up Greenspan’s game intellectually and socially. They would meet in Rand home on the East 30’s.

In the late 60’s he would meet and help out Richard Nixon in his presidential campaign. Although, he would admire Nixon for his intelligence, he grew to dislike Nixon for being a paranoid and vindictive person who would lose control.

Later Greenspan was brought on to the Ford administration. Ford was a man that Greenspan liked very much. He said was one of the most secure men he had ever met. He was not brilliantly intellectual like Nixon and Clinton, but he never had that sense of weirdness to him like so many people. There he would meet many people such as Dick Chaney, who would become part of the George W. Bush administration.
Never part of the Carter administration, he joined Washington again after a person phone from President Reagan at his dentist office. Reagan asked him to work for him and Greenspan couldn’t refuse.

Before Reagan made him Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Greenspan chaired the bipartisan committee that saved Social Security for the next thirty years. Although, Alan was impressed by Reagan convictions and personality, he didn’t think he was too smart. Like our current president, Reagan didn’t read much.

When Reagan did make Greenspan Fed Chairman, the 1988 stock market crash, the worst ever, happened. Not too long after there was the Savings and Loan sell off, and the death of the manufacturing industry in America.

Although Greenspan spoke the warmest about President Ford, the lengthiest and most enjoyable time was with President Clinton.

Although Greenspan was worried about Clinton, being that Alan was a life long Republican and campaiged for the other guy; he immediately was impressed with Clinton’s intelligence. For all the bad things that were said about Clinton Greenspan states firmly that he never saw them. Clinton was a financial conservative; more of a throw back to the Kennedy administration. It was the first president Bush’s and Bill Clinton’s economic policy of fiscal responsible that lead the economic boom in the nineties. President Reagan left the country leading to financial ruins. The deficit was the major killer. A third biggest expense to the United States government was the interest payments to its debt.

Clinton was never true of what he was called. He was not a tax and spend democrat. He cut from almost everyone, but used the money responsible and the country was on the path peace and property that the United States hasn’t known since the days Dwight D. Eisenhower.

At this period of time Alan Greenspan achieved rock star status. He would lead world into a new era; one of a technological revolution and another of pervasive globalization. The direction that he took the world will be debated for a long time. Greenspan maybe the most influential and respected American in finance since J.P. Morgan. Together with Rubin (now trying to sort of Citigroup’s finance troubles) and another colleague, Alan watched over the economy in judicious and pragmatic fashion.

The problem was that as much as Greenspan can analyze the past and near future, he had major failures in predicting the not too distant future.

Like many Republicans, Alan was very enthusiastic with the arrival of President George W. Bush. Many of Alan’s old friends from the Ford administration were coming along in the new President’s administration.

In the 2000 election, Al Gore also pledged a tax cut but a smaller one than George W. Bush. However, Gore pledged to continue to pay down the debt. Greenspan also agreed that debt should be paid down.

During the early years of the Bush Whitehouse, the surplus projections were large and spanning many years. Greenspan saw a danger of the Federal Government having too much money on their hands, so he supported a tax cut albeit smaller than the administration had outlined, and with check and balances in case the surplus didn’t hold. The administration threw out that idea.

The surplus was over almost as soon as Bush got into office. The Dot-com bust had effected tax revenue and hence no more surplus.

As time went on, Alan was dismayed by the lack of planning, reason or thought in which the current government ran. And he makes it perfectly clear over and over again that the real reason invading Iraq was oil and NOT weapons of mass destruction.

Greenspan spends the rest of his time speaking about the economy. He speaks highly of economist Adam Smith, who he admires the most. Then describes free market economies and gives economic projects for the rest of the World.

For the United States, he predicts an economy being exactly as it is right now going into 2030. Although, he admits that events unforeseen might occur, his projections mainly take world where nothing changes.
One thing we have learned over time is that things change.

Alan Greenspan takes a bird-eye view of economy. Somehow I don't get a sense that he understands the true nature of globalization in terms of the effects on the United States economy. Nobody I have heard really does. I think it is only those who are in the middle of it, in the trenches if you will, that can see what is really going on. Of course, those who negatively affected by it the most, feel it but may not know it. Those who have the most to gain, mainly foreign middlemen and those under them, give a rosy picture as do corporate executives who are profiteering from it. I would like to talk to Alan Greenspan about this and get his views. Maybe he will write another book where he will address these issues.

One my biggest criticisms of his work on free market economies is the foolish idea that social safety nets have never worked. It seems like an idea similiar to someone who doesn't take health insurance because they have never been sick before, which is taking a pretty big risk. Although, Greenspan can see the impact on the economy when huge hedge fund goes under that the Government has to bail it out in order sustain the overall health of the greater economy. He does not seem to keep in mind that if large amount of Americans go bankrupt, that too will have a far reaching negative impact on the greater economy too.

I certainly did love this book. I can’t say that it is for everyone. I think it is an important book given the times we live in. I am sure that Alan Greenspan will go down as one of the most influential economist in history.

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner (2007)

I think it was impossible to understand the United States' foreign policy and the world of current events without knowledge of the history of the CIA.

Take currents events: at the time of this writing the country of Turkey was launching military offensives inside the Kurdish part of Iraq. The Kurdish area was the most stable part of Iraq. Besides fighting the Turks, the Kurds have also been fighting the Iranians on that side of the border. So how did this come to be? Did it have anything to with the Cold War?

It had everything to do with Cold War. Many years ago, the United States was aiding and arming Islamic extremist in an effort to thwart the influence of communism in the world. The Kurds took the communist side and the U.S. supported their removal. However, in the past thirty years things have changed.

The Kurds were happy to see the Islamic extremist leave. The point being that it was the Cold War that has set up this conflict with Iraq, Iran, Syria, and the region. Almost anywhere the CIA interfered with governments in the effort of fighting communism; the U.S. now struggles with them.

Tim Weiner writes a very enthralling book that breaks the myths of the CIA that has been propagated in movies, books, and television.
Legacy of Ashes was well writing and was an intriguing work that leaves the reader with an different view of American foreign policy in the past half-century.

Here are a few highlights:


The Beginning

The Central Intelligence Agency was created after World War II in 1948. The CIA came out of the Office for Strategic Services (OSS). The OSS ran covert actions against the Nazi with the British and the Russians.

The CIA was born at the beginning of the Cold War. Its main objective was to protect American interests, especially against Communism. The U.S. was never to experience another Perl Harbor. On its own the CIA was a neophyte organization. As European spy agencies had been around for centuries, the CIA had almost no idea what they were doing.

The Russians were always many steps ahead of the Americans. The CIA never got anything right about the Russians. The KBG had agents all over the CIA and they fed the CIA false intelligence since the start the agency till probably right now.

The CIA was better at strong-arming small poor countries. The CIA got results there but it later kicked back at the U.S.

A cast in point Iran

The British were taking most of the oil profits from the Iranians while the Iranians lived in squalor. The Government of Iran wanted to split the profits 50/50 with the British. The British were not keen on this, so they wanted a change of government in Iran. The U.S. did not want to take part of this as they felt the British were being unfair. However, the Korean War was starting, and Churchill put a condition on British support of the Korean War, which was, help them in Iran or they would not support the U.S. in Korea. So the CIA staged a coup against the Iranian leader. They paid to organize radical Islamic forces in Iran to act against the government. They were planting the seeds of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The CIA did overthrow the government of Iran and implemented a U.S. puppet government who ruled Iran with an iron fist, which lasted until the revolution.

Throughout the 1950’s the CIA projected a mystic sense of competence if not omnipotence. But it was not the case.

The Kennedy Assignation

The book sheds little light on the Kennedy assignation but it does shed a little light. It strongly suggests that Castro might have ordered a hit on the President for the failed assignation plots order against him by the Kennedys.

It makes it very clear that the Warren Commission was a joke. All information about the covert actions conducted by the CIA was hidden from the commission. President Gerald Ford, who was a member of the Warren Commission, made it very clear that if such information had been provided to the Commission that the outcome of the report might have been different.

As soon as the assignation happened, both Johnson and the head of the CIA thought that it was a conspiracy. The CIA order an intern report, which was kept secret, but it never completed or made a formal conclusion.

The Assignation was a bit like 9/11. Many sections of the government had files on Oswald. The FBI, CIA, immigration services all had files on him. All knew he was a threat long before the shooting and if they had shared information, it would have been clear to take him out before anything happened.

The Vietnam War

If there was any question on whether Kennedy or Johnson started the Vietnam, it was Johnson. In fact, the CIA had been running gorilla operation in Vietnam as part of its covert operations around the world. So, there was a secret war there too. It was only in the gulf of Tonkin that brought the U.S. officially in the war. U.S. warships in the gulf took at shorter length than the international waters guideline. They were listening in on North Vietnam. Vietnamese patrol boats were spotted and they were fired upon by the United States. The patrol boats shot back. The American warships maybe took a bullet of damage, but this was blown out to be an unprovoked attack on the United States. This Official CIA report was hidden until recently. Hawks in Johnson administration were set for war. In fact, most of the CIA intelligence was good during the Vietnam War, but the Johnson administration wanted facts to fit political opinion. The, if you don’t support what we think argument then you are not of the side of the U.S.A, argument raised its head. Furthermore the CIA knew early on that war was not winnable, eventfully the people in the Johnson administration took them seriously, and people like Bob McNamara got it. Of course then Nixon came in.

Nixon and the CIA

Nixon and CIA were not a good fit. Nixon stepped up the war in Vietnam on all fronts. He tore the agency apart, and when he tried to have the CIA take the fall for Watergate. The agency wouldn’t go that far for him and Nixon was forced to resign.

Enter the NeoCons
In the late part of the Carter administration, the CIA entered a new battle against communism, which was a battle via humanitarianism. The U.S.S.R. had a battle that they couldn’t win.

During this period, Paul Wolfowitz and other NeoCons would end up in the CIA and produced fictitious reports about the capabilities of the Soviet Union, which caused a 2nd red scare and produced large increases of defense spending. It created a panic which ultimately, with the Iranian Hostage situation, got Ronald Reagan elected.

CIA under Reagan
The CIA under Ronald Reagan was more of a mess. They essentially got very little right. They were unable to be helpful in events in the Middle- East. In the cold war they armed the radicals Islamic factions. At the time, a great success of the 80’s was seen as being the gorilla war in Afghanistan against the Russians.

The CIA never saw the fall of the Soviet Union coming until after it happened. It would be irresponsible to say that the defense spending of the Reagan administration was a calculated measure effort that destroyed the U.S.S.R. Certainly an arms race helped, but it was only by accident.

The hunt for Osama bin Laden – The Clinton years

Bill Clinton’s relationship with the CIA got off to a bad start. The CIA was bitter that Clinton beat their favorite son George H.W. Bush, former CIA director in the Ford administration. Bill Clinton, a son of the anti-government activists of the 60’s and 70’s had a lack of interest in the agency. In the beginning, he rarely met with them.

Sadly, Clinton was responsible for an egregious complacency with Rwanda. He was not interested and in atrocities that weren’t televised. He refused to call the events in Rwanda as genocide.

The CIA really didn’t know what to do with itself after the fall of Communism.

Eventually, they came together on a common enemy, Osama bin Laden. The last three years of the Clinton administration tried to kill Osama bin Laden. The CIA was in charge of that hit, but they failed every time. The CIA failed to act everytime they had an opportunity to act. There were many chances blown to take him out.

9/11, Iraq and George W. Bush


The CIA had been warning George W. Bush since September of 2000 when he was running for president. The CIA director warned Bush then that Terrorism was an imminent threat to the United States. Later in 2000 after the election, Bush was warned specifically about Osama bin Laden. When Bush took office, Bill Clinton told President Bush that Osama bin Laden was his biggest problem. Bush claims to have no memory of that. Throughout all the days of the Bush presidency before 9/11, the CIA fervently tried warn the president about danger to the United States, which was not a question of if but rather when. The data was clear. Intelligence agencies all over the world were warning the United States because terrorist chatter was loud and very active. Nevertheless, George Bush was just not interested, and nothing was done about it. 9/11 happened and it was no surprise to the CIA. After that the CIA jumped on the Bush administration bandwagon and manipulated intelligence to appear that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. So how did they do this? Of course, they a few guys saying exactly what the president wanted to hear , so they would structure their analysis so that it would look as if they had many sources instead of the same few informants who were defectors or others that had something to gain.

After, no WMD’s were found Bush blamed it on the CIA intelligence and made an effort to clean house at the CIA. They hired a Bush ideologue, who politicized the agency, and got rid of anyone who was considered being part of the left, like if they came on board at the time of Democratic President. Many highly qualified agents were let go.

The CIA was further run into the ground by trying to accommodate President Bush’s Faith-based agenda. Finally, it was out-sourcing that nailed another nail into the coffin of the CIA. As the government started out-sourcing, agents started leaving the agency for higher paid jobs for government contractors. (For fun look up Blackwater) It is hard for the CIA to hold on to anyone because in five years, basically when they are up to speed, they leave for higher pay.

It was interesting reading a book about the CIA. The CIA is not the omnipotent agency that is widely believed. They are neither the evil empire which is also believed by many. In fact, I was constantly amazed by how many good people that were spoken about. It was really impressive in the midst of such chaos in the world that there are people who stood up for was right and humane, and many in the CIA did that.

The CIA was often misdirected the presidents who lead them and the politics of time. Sometimes the CIA was just wrong and sometimes they were right as in Vietnam, but the politics of those in charge buried the right information.

Of course, not all information about the topics covered in this book has been released to the public. This book was written this year, so it is pretty up to date for now.

The Legacy of Ashes was clearly written and easily assessable in non-technical writings. It was engaging and thought provoking. I thought that it didn’t cast moral judgments to it. It presented in a matter of fact style, which leaves the reader the choice to make up their judgments.