A Life Spent Reading

Dane Kennedy’s quick-sketch biography of Richard Burton takes an unusual, but ultimately very fruitful, approach. Instead of concentrating like so many of Burton’s biographers on the man and his many accomplishments, Kennedy locates Burton firmly within the Victorian world, using Burton’s multi-faceted life to illustrate and probe into that world. While Kennedy is first and foremost an academic, the book is highly readable, and in fact makes many of the more conventional Burton biographies (Edward Rice’s, for example) seem dry by comparison.

Even someone who is reasonably familiar with Burton’s life should find quite a bit that is new here. Certainly, the most familiar parts – the search for the source of the White Nile, the disguised entry into Mecca, the Arabian Nights translation – when held up against the backdrop of Victorian England and the British Empire, acquire new life and serve to stimulate thought beyond simple awe at the man himself. Kennedy also does a good job of showing Burton’s weak points (his unsuitability for politics, etc.), presenting a more balanced picture of the man than some of the more hagiographic efforts.

All in all, this is an excellent book. It is a fairly quick read, but nonetheless well researched and copiously end-noted, with enough in the notes to satisfy anyone who wishes to delve further into any of the many, many fascinating topics that are broached. I recommend it to anyone with an interest in Burton, history, the British Empire or Victorian England.

Every American citizen, as well as anyone who is financially invested in America, should read this book.

I think that people generally know that America’s time at the top is coming to an end, the usual cheerleading notwithstanding. The collapse of the housing bubble is just the latest manifestation of America’s mania for spending more than it earns, and the country has been doing that for a couple of decades now. The question isn’t if, but when the American lifestyle will undergo a severe readjustment – downward. And the answer is: soon.

Peter Schiff has done the best job I’ve seen in laying out the causes and effects of the coming crisis. (I say “coming”, but really we’re already into the leading edge.) In plain, non-technical language, Schiff lays out the primary movers in the housing crisis, why inflation is much worse than the government would have you believe, and the reasons that America is in for an extended period of adjustment, after which we may or may not emerge whole. Certainly, even in the best scenario, Americans are in for a decade or so of relative austerity, and given America’s dislike of inconvenience, it’s not going to be a pleasant ten years.

The primary lesson is: get your money out of the US dollar, which is already starting to be massively devalued. In the age of the Internet there are plenty of ways for people to move their money into other currencies and so on, even for those who are not experienced investors. My own personal recommendation for those who may not know what to do (aside from: Read this book!) would be to open a bank account with Everbank (www.everbank.com) and put some money into one of their foreign-denominated CDs. Alternatively, you can get an account with an online trading service like Ameritrade and put your money into a foreign index fund. Schiff has some good recommendations for choosing one, as well as a quick discussion about which options are best for your level of tolerance.

Most Americans are financially illiterate; this book will go a long way to help you out if you’re sitting there watching your nest-egg “appreciate” and can’t understand why you’re continually losing ground. Highly recommended.

I think I like Richard Preston’s stuff even better than I like his brother Douglas’. Richard tends to write more in the way of dramatized real-life stories than novels, and he’s very good at it. The Hot Zone, for example, will make your blood freeze a bit if you take the time to understand what he’s saying at all.

The Wild Trees deals with redwoods. You might not think that that huge trees would lend themselves to drama, but Preston makes it work. There were times I was actually short of breath as I read his descriptions of the scientists climbing around in the California canopy. If you like nature, or conservation, or have ever seen a redwood and wondered what it would be like to climb it, or are just are in the mood for something a little different, this book won’t disappoint you.

First, let’s be clear about what this book is: a guide for entrepreneurs (which is what the “E” in the title stands for, not anything to do with the Internet) on how to make their small businesses function better. And there is some good advice in here. Michael C. Gerber’s insights into treating your business like a franchise, even if it isn’t one, the distinction between working on your business instead of working in it and so on are valuable and, I would think, pertinent to anyone who starts a business and then finds himself wondering how to get on top of it.

Unfortunately, this valuable message could have been condensed into about 50 pages — and the book tops out at almost 270. I have to say that I have rarely read a book in which the writing style was so obtrusively awful. Gerber uses three main techniques to get his point across. One is that about half the book is told in the form of an extended “fireside chat” he has with a client of his, a woman who ostensibly owns a bakery. The tone of this chat is so full of cloying 1950s paternalism that I wonder if he has any female readers at all. Even the choice of his “business client”… I mean, come on: a woman with a bakery? I guess a food business made things easier to explain, as Gerber holds McDonald’s up as the ultimate franchise prototype (and deservedly so), but could we not have something a little less barefoot and pregnant?

Technique number two is the One Sentence Paragraph. He uses this to such exclusion of anything more fully developed, this business book sometimes reads like a William Shatner novel. Okay, so business people don’t have to be great authors, but there’s a point beyond which stylistic peculiarities become a little ridiculous. And that point is passed very early on.

Finally, there is the mind-numbing repetition. Gerber seems to have an obsession with saying things three times or four times. Usually this is a stylistic affectation; it begins on Page 1, in the second paragraph (also the second sentence, of course) and two hundred and sixty-some-odd pages later, he’s still going strong. (Take a look at page 232, where six of the eight paragraphs start with “And”.) Often, however, the repetition appears as repetition of actual information, where Gerber seems to be trying to say exactly the same thing using as many different words as possible, just to make sure the reader gets the point. Consider this excerpt (p. 211):

“I’m beginning to see the connection between all these things we’ve talked about,” she said. “They’re all beginning to make sense. The puzzle is coming together. I can see the parts merge into an exciting picture…”

Imagine a couple hundred pages of this sort of thing and you’ll have some sense of what reading the entire book is like.

Final verdict: There is good information here, but if you’ve read the back cover you’ve gotten 50% of it already. Boiled down, it is this: 1. Treat your business like you intend to franchise it. Quantify everything, and write up rules so that any untrained idiot can step in and follow them. 2. Care about what you do. 3. Spend time working ON your business, so that later you don’t have to work IN your business.

Now, if any of that was unclear, or if you happen to be a masochistic type who enjoys mental torture, feel free to go out and buy the book.

This is a very interesting book. Sub-titled “The Impact of the Highly Improbable”, it deals with our (in)ability to predict events, and the meaning that this has for people in their non-everyday lives.

Taleb is an elegant and wide-ranging writer, and the book is full of pithy quotes (“Doubting the consequences of an outcome will allow you to remain imperturbable”; “We tend to use knowledge as therapy”) and odd connections. He likes to tease the reader a bit, and he’s not afraid to take a stand against conventional wisdom, especially when said wisdom makes things seem more certainly predictable than they really – according to Taleb – are. He deals with probability in an engaging and accessible way; readers without a strong background in math need not worry.

Basically, Taleb’s thesis is as follows: Conventional probability studies (using the Gaussian or “bell” curve that all of us remember from college) are of limited application. Much of what happens around us is understandable only by throwing away the Gaussian and using a Mandelbrotian (i.e., exponential) approach. Things that seem unimaginably unlikely (because they lie so far outside the tails of the bell) are in fact not so unimaginable at all when seen through a Mandelbrotian lens…rather, they are downright likely to happen given enough time. And that time is shorter than what you think.

Taleb’s background is in finance, so he uses the market to illustrate much of what he says. And many of his arguments seem convincing, especially when it comes to options valuation and the like. But some of his examples would seem to ring false. For instance, he says that the October 1987 market crash was unpredicted, and happened for no discernible reason. But some of the world’s best traders and investors apparently did see the crash coming, because they got out of the market and into cash with, in some cases, uncanny timing, and then jumped right back into the market when it was about to turn around and go up again. There are also investors like Jim Rogers who seem to be right time after time, over decades, which would also seem to argue against Taleb’s idea that the markets are basically unpredictable.

Or maybe it’s just the case that with six or seven billion people on the planet, the odds are that a few of them are going to be right. I really don’t know.

I would think that anyone with an interest in finance or investing, as well as those people who just enjoy having their minds expanded a bit, would want to read this book. I bought it in hardcover, and found it to be well worth the price.

This is a quick but well-researched read into the life and times of one Nick Zappetti, ex-pat New Yorker and would be yakuza/mafioso. The book deals with the half-century after the war in Japan, and Zappetti’s activities along the way to becoming one of the most successful (and heavily investigated) foreigners in Japan. Along the way, it delves deeply into the ties that exist between the Japanese government and organized crime, the question of who really runs the country, and the way that a person like Zappetti, who spent most of his life in Japan and took Japanese citizenship but never bothered to learn much of the language, could rise and fall so dramatically.

The political stuff is covered in far more detail in Karel Van Wolferen’s seminal The Enigma of Japanese Power (probably the most impressive book of its sort that I’ve seen), but only those with a very intense interest in Japan will be able to wade through the whole thing. Tokyo Underworld is far more accessible, and sketches a quick line-portrait of how things work in Japan for the more casual reader.

Michael Lewis has written a well-crafted and entertaining book. It’s laugh-out-loud funny in places, with that special sort of humor that seems only to be found in sports. But make no mistake, this is a book that raises some very serious questions for anyone interested in baseball.

The author’s thesis is this: traditional “wisdom” about baseball, in terms of (a) scouts knowing what to look for, (b) statistics such as home runs actually meaning much of anything, and (c) money being the primary determinant in which team is going to win, isn’t worth much. This is the story of how a manager named Billy Beane took a team with one of the lowest payrolls in the sport and made them into a winner. It is (c) especially that the book addresses; by virtue of superior sabermetrics, Beane was able to scout and recruit good players that other teams didn’t value very highly. In this way he was able to get around the old canard of more money equalling better talent. If he’d been in a bar, Beane would have been the good little guy beating up the good big guy.

While Beane’s success is now a matter for the record books, a larger question, one that may obviate Moneyball’s relevance, is still waiting to be answered. Now that Lewis has shined the light on what happened, other teams will undoubtedly hire their own statisticians and begin to use the same techniques as his team did. (In fact this has already happened.) In other words, the playing field will once again be leveled in that respect, leaving the teams with more money able to make higher bids for better players, and thus bringing things back around full circle, where money is in fact the determining factor.

It’s a bit ironic, but maybe it’s just one more step in the evolution of the game.

One thing’s for sure. If you play Fantasy League Baseball and haven’t read this book, you’re losing your money to someone who has.

Tim Ferriss is a smart guy, he’s done a lot in a relatively short time, and he seems like he’s got a sense of humor. The 4-Hour Workweek is well-written, has a lot of good information, and addresses a real problem in today’s society. But for all that, something about the book seems a little too calculated. And a man who wins an athletic competition by exploiting a loophole in the rules — and then brags about it (in print, no less!) — is just a bit too smug for my taste.

Maybe that’s just me, though. Certainly there is a lot of value in the book (and on Ferriss’ accompanying website), and I found myself agreeing more than once with Ferriss’ view of what’s valuable in life. Calculating free time along with income, the distinction between relative and absolute income, the benefits of travel and language learning… All of these are important in my own life, and I’d be a hypocrite to dismiss them in this book. But I have to wonder if we’re seeing the start of a new sort of imperialism, this one based on the power of the Internet.

Ferriss’ basic idea is this: Find or create a product that you can market effectively over the Net. Do some testing to tweak things for maximum profitability, then outsource everything possible to get and keep the ball rolling. Website design, marketing metrics, production and distribution… all of it can be done from your home if you have a computer and you’re connected. And there are companies in places like India that will do a bang-up job for you for $5/hour.

This is the point I just can’t make up my mind about. Doing things this way strikes me as living like a British colonialist in 19th century India. Just issue the orders; everything else will be taken care of by the servants. The only real difference is that you’re operating at a considerable geographic remove. Furthermore, not everyone in the world can do what the book recommends, since these guys lying around in hammocks need to have someone to outsource to.

On the other hand, $5/hour is a good wage in India (at least for the moment), so why shouldn’t they be allowed to earn it? It’s a real question.

Bottom line, I think that most people, especially most young people, should read this book. It will likely change your thinking about work, the role it plays in your life, and just exactly how much of your life it should take up. Ferriss’ answer is: not much, and in that, at least, I completely agree with him.

It’s been a long time since I just purely enjoyed a book as much as this one.

First, HarperCollins did a great job with the overall look and feel of the book. It’s bound in a sort of black faux-leather, has a bright red bookmark ribbon attached, and the pages are edged in gold. If you hold the book up sideways, you can almost see yourself in the reflection. The overall impression is that of a somewhat sleazy bible; undoubtedly intentional, as I’m sure there are a lot of young men out there who have made this the primary book in their lives (at least for a time). Inside, you’ve got acid-free paper, velour-red end-pages, interesting chapter motifs, illustrations that fit the overall mood of the book perfectly, and flawless editing. I paid the full twenty-four dollars for the book, and it was worth every penny.

Second, Neil Strauss is a very good writer. This is the first time I’ve read his work, but I will definitely pick up more of his books in the future. He works for Rolling Stone as a sort of pop-culture reporter, and has written books on various personalities within it. Strauss seems like a very cool Everyman, which is the perfect place to start from with a book like this.

The Game tells the story of his two-year metamorphosis from Average Frustrated Chump to Master Pick-up Artist. Although you can glean quite a bit in the way of tips from this book, it’s not really an instruction manual. Rather, it tells a sort of allegorical forbidden fruit story, what happens when you actually get the power to accomplish something that most people only dream of, and the fallout. Unlike allegories, though, everything in this book actually occurred. It is an illustrative exercise in the old saying, “Beware what you wish for… because you might actually get it.”

I would recommend this book to anyone, male or female, who is interested in learning how the bar scene really works, or good writing, or a good story, or exploring an interesting sub-culture. Have the scales fall from your eyes at the content or be horrified at how easily you might be manipulated in a social setting, but either way you won’t be bored.

I had two very different reactions to this book. One was good, the other not so good.

The good reaction was about some of the comments that author Robert Kiyosaki made concerning the lack of financial education in America. His point, which I absolutely agree with, is that there isn’t any. Nowhere in school do you learn how to balance a checkbook, understand financial concepts like compound interest, talk about housing loans, etc. In fact, there is really is NO financial education at all, unless you go to college and enter a finance-related field.

Kiyosaki’s stance is that traditional education has more or less become obsolete – if not useless – in today’s world. While I believe that traditional education is still a good thing, there is no question that some very important areas are being been left out. How much do you learn about nutrition in school? How much is taught regarding a critical stance toward advertising? Nothing at all. Areas of knowledge like these are unfortunately becoming more and more necessary, and it seems that very little is being done about them.

I also like Kiyosaki’s ideas on changing one’s mindset to make more money. Many people seem to want to make money, but they have no idea how to go about doing so. While part of the blame rests with the lack of pertinent financial education mentioned above, it is also true that more people need to think outside of the “get another part-time job” box. Save, invest, and you should see your money start to work for you instead of the other way around.

All that said, it appears the man is a charlatan. There have been several very detailed inquiries into just how successful Kiyosaki has been at anything other than selling motivational books, and more or less nothing has been found to substantiate his claims. Nor is there much detail in Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Also, some of the things he says in the book are just not factually correct. Corporations don’t get taxed? Please. If you form a corporation you will be taxed twice, not just once as you would as a private citizen. Furthermore, all of the tax deductions and write-offs that you can take as a corporation can be had without the corporate shell if you designate your profession in a smart way. List yourself as a “writer” and you can write off pretty much anything as an expense. I would imagine that calling yourself an “entrepreneur” would – within reason – accomplish the same thing.

It also seems that the “rich dad” of the title never really existed, which makes one wonder whether the whole thing is just one huge sales scam. Again, I like the motivational aspects of a lot of what Kiyosaki writes in the book…just take everything with a grain of salt. If it were that easy to make millions, many more people would be doing it.

This is the fourth or fifth time I’ve read Mark Salzman’s charming debut novel, and it’s still just as delightful as I remember it. The book recounts Salzman’s two years of teaching English in China in 1982-84, and it is one of the best and most honest of the “English teacher in Asia” type books I’ve seen, as well as being one of the best of the China Watcher genre (although the China it describes really no longer exists). It helps that Salzman speaks Chinese and has an abiding interest in the culture; he seems to have been game for pretty much anything, including punishing bouts of martial arts practice, calligraphy, cooking and what have you. Despite the light style of the writing, these interests enable Salzman to delve deeper into what goes on around him than most foreigners would, and saves the book from the limitations of, say, Learning to Bow.

Salzman isn’t a really well-known author, but he has written a number of books, and the ones I’ve read have been uniformly engaging and entertaining despite their widely divergent subject matter. He has an ability to relate – when you think about them – really incredible stories with a complete lack of pretentiousness and a good dollop of humor. At the same time, Salzman isn’t afraid to look more deeply into himself and others to find the more lasting lessons and aspects of the things he has experienced.

I find it hard to imagine a reader who wouldn’t enjoy Iron and Silk. If you’re looking for a new author, you can do much much worse than to try Mark Salzman.

The Tipping Point has generated enough publicity and buzz that there really isn’t much I can add to what’s already been said. I found it to be a very interesting book, especially the chapter on fighting subway crime in New York City via the elimination of graffiti. Apparently there are lots of people out there now looking for tipping points of their own, for their own purposes, and hopefully this will allow Gladwell to put together a sequel, this one composed of various success stories.

I recommend the book. It’s well written and easy to get into, and – like a lot of popular sociology – will encourage you to see the world through a slightly different lens.

Subtitled “The World in the Age of Terrorism”, this book is a collection of essays and diary entries by New York Times Foreign Correspondent Thomas L. Friedman. When you’ve won the Pulitzer Prize three times, you deserve to have people listen to what you have to say. But I wonder about that subtitle. If it were me, I would change it to “The Age When Terrorism Finally Came to America”. After all, the world at large has been dealing with the issue for quite some time now.

Still, Friedman certainly doesn’t lack for global experience or a comprehensive world-view. In his previous (excellent) book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, he demonstrated convincingly that he knows absolutely everyone who is anyone of political significance — in any country. And in Longitudes and Attitudes he puts a long-standing interest in the Middle East to good use. Few other American journalists can claim to have the same insight into the region.

And what is this insight? To me, the most significant point he makes is this: amid all the controversy and criticism about whether America should be in the Middle East, supporting Israel and all that, Friedman, alone among the journalists I’ve read, is asking a different question: what are the Arab leaders doing to improve their region? What policy are they formulating that will enable their countries to solve the problems that face them? The answer is: apparently, not much. Friedman obviously thinks that, while Israel is clearly a large issue, there are other equally large ones. People on both sides of the Atlantic have spread a lot of ink debating whether America’s support of Israel somehow justified the 9/11 attacks, but no one seems to be asking about anything else. What are middle eastern governments doing to improve their schools? Their health-care? Their political processes?

Friedman is also a very good writer. He has a knack for talking about large issues in a friendly and unpretentious manner, for boiling the complex down to a level where it’s understandable to non-specialists, and for making odd, punning connections that illustrate his points. (He describes Putin’s plan for Russia as going “from Das Kapital to DOScapital”.) And the tough questions he asks are not exclusively aimed abroad. Why, for example, has America failed to really make an effort to explain itself to the Middle East – in Arabic? It seems a ridiculous question to ask, but maybe that’s why no one else with Friedman’s stature is asking it.

Despite the wealth of insight and nice writing, I doubt that I’m going to finish this book. It’s been gathering dust now for several months, and I have absolutely no desire to get back to it. I’m usually interested in most anything that’s intelligent and well-presented…but you know what? I’m sick to death of hearing about the Middle East. We should’ve been out of there a long time ago, it’s not our problem, and if America has to pay more for oil, well, it’s the price of our having been complacent and not developing alternative fuel sources decades ago.

I like Thomas Friedman; he’s an important writer and often makes connections that no one else really sees. But I’ll wait for his next book. Hopefully, it will be on something that hasn’t been beaten to death in the news for the past half a decade.

Ah, Trevanian. It’s such an unalloyed pleasure to read him.

I think that Trevanian may be my favorite author of all time. The words flow smoothly across the page, the story unfolds with an elegance that reminds one of the great fin-de-siecle writers, he evokes humor and pathos with equal élan, he can write in seemingly any genre, and the things he has to say matter. What more can one ask for?

The Crazyladies of Pearl Street marks a return to his top form. (While I’ve liked all of his books, I have to say that Incident at Twenty-Mile was probably my least favorite, followed by Hot Night in the City.) Trevanian’s most notable successes came in the 70s and 80s, long enough ago that younger readers may not have heard the name. And this is a shame, because he is perhaps our best stylistic bridge between the classics of the 1800s and today’s bestselling authors.

Crazyladies is highly autobiographical, and tells the story of a young boy growing up in an Irish slum in New York City in the 1930s and 40s. As another reviewer has noted, it is not an easy read. Words like “gethsemane” and “epigenous” pepper the text; I can’t think of another contemporary author – well, Paul Theroux, perhaps – who so consistently comes up with words that you’ve never heard of but which work perfectly within the sentence and yet often defy contextual definition.

Long-time fans will have the bonus pleasure of seeing how several of Trevanian’s signature touches came into being. There are also cyber-notes to be downloaded from Trevanian’s website. These are expansions and musings that the publisher felt would detract from the book, but that Trevanian wanted to have in there. I think that his solution is exactly right; people who just want the book can buy it alone, and those of us who will read most anything this author writes can get a substantial addition virtually for free. I found the cyber-notes informative and entertaining, and I recommend them.

Unfortunately, this may well be the last of Trevanian’s books. The author was dying as he wrote it (a fact that he himself was aware of), and he makes no mention of any further works, although there is a partial manuscript on his website. So we must – perhaps – make do with the canon: the two Sanction books, Shibumi, The Main, The Summer of Katya, and the two books mentioned above. I recommend them all to anyone who enjoys a well-told tale or has a love of the English language. There are also two books written under the name of Nicholas Seare, but these are comedic parodies set in the Middle Ages and, while as well done as the other books, definitely not for everyone.

It only takes one book like Practical Programming to expose what you see in the mainstream “fitness” magazines for the ridiculous crap that it is. This book sets out what you need to know in order to get strong. And it’s laid out in a pleasingly straightforward fashion, with none of the “Get hyoooge!!!!” hype that always seems to obscure what little practical advice exists in the Glorify Beef newsstand publications.

Basically, there are two things you have to do consistently if you want to experience continued progress in your training. One, you have to make sure that you work hard enough to overload your body and force it to adapt. Second, you have to give it enough time, rest, nutrition and stimulation to recover.

This second point is where about 95% of the gym population goes wrong. As someone once said, a workout that you can’t recover from is a wasted workout. We’ve all seen the folks who spend hours in the gym, killing themselves day after day, only to stay in the same place year after year. Rippetoe and Kilgore (two violent sounding names, but the authors seem to be level-headed enough) lay out very succinctly what one needs to do at various stages of his or her training career in order to not only stimulate the body to grow, but then allow it to do so.

The book is divided into two rough halves. The first one is background information that one needs to know in order to understand the basic workings of Selye’s adaptation response, nutrition, exercise and so on. The second takes the reader through three stages of an athlete’s career: novice, intermediate and advanced. Probably 90% of consistent gym-goers fall into the intermediate category, and these are precisely the people who could most use this book. Novices will experience progress doing anything, and advanced athletes usually have good coaches working with them. It’s the general gym crowd, those people who have advanced beyond the “I’m getting bigger and stronger every workout!” stage, who founder and fail to see progress. Practical Programming will show you why.

My only, very small, complaint about the book is a certain dryness of style. The book is academic in tone, and at times reads like a physiology text. The authors could stand to lighten things up a bit here and there, and might garner a wider audience than they now enjoy, thus allowing them to get their message out more effectively. But this is a small gripe, and a much larger plus is the fact that the book is very well written and edited. This is a huge relief in a field that is riddled with poor writing and even worse editing. It’s no exaggeration to say that many of the books in the fitness field, especially those geared toward smaller segments of the weightlifting population (bodybuilders, for instance), are so poorly written that at times it becomes difficult to figure out what the author is really trying to say.

No such problem here.

I’ve got the usual Amazon link above, but another place you can get this book is at the Aasgaard Company. They specialize in strength-related books and have great customer service. I recommend taking a look through their site if you don’t already know about it and are interested in strength development. They have lots of special deals if you order more than one book, or a book and a poster or two.