All in Book Review
Andrew Ross Sorkin has brought the great crash back to life with another bestseller, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in History—And How It Shattered a Nation. Sorkin’s telling of the financial debacle focuses on a few individual stories
Jon Ralston tells you most everything you need to know about Nevada’s most prominent politician in his very readable new book The Game Changer: How Harry Reid Remade the Rules and Showed Democrats How to Fight
Finesilver writes, “Our current system cheats kids, rips off taxpayers, and sucks the energy and creativity out of teachers.” At the same time, “where I and my colleagues work are places where lawlessness prevails.”
Maybe all one needs to know is FTX and related firm Alameda Research, valued at $32 billion, did their financials on QuickBooks. The company had no risk officer, no chief financial officer, or head of human resources.
“This Is The story of the greatest financial mania the world has ever seen.” Those are strong words and having done some work studying financial manias and living through one, Faux’s statement may be hyperbole. But, then again, the crypto story may not be over. More booms and busts may follow.
McKenzie made the morning show rounds earlier this summer pitching his book. He is an actor who during COVID got hooked on speculating on crypto and other speculative vehicles. Instead of taking his losses like a big boy, he decided crypto and capitalism itself is all a big fraud and decided to write some articles with Mr. Silverman and ultimately the book Easy Money.
Patterson weaves together a very readable story of how Taleb and Spitznagel met and the frustrations of selling tail-risk hedging to a Wall Street that held the collective belief of Modern Portfolio Theory, diversification of high and low risk investments in a portfolio provides protection from an unknown market calamity.
Bobbie Gentry “looked like a Greek goddess and she was deeply involved in tasks usually reserved for men. Obviously there are many factors behind success but, in 1967, America was clearly not ready to roll out the red carpet for the female artist who wrote, played and produced her own material.”
Unlike the many recent books about Trump, Haberman connects Donald’s early years with his presidential term and aftermath. Haberman has reported on Trump her entire career and is the only person who could write “Confidence Man.”
My questioner, another prominent libertarian attorney, replied with words to the effect,”Trump showed no respect for the government strictures and laws we all hate. He was good because he showed no respect for the government.” While I put up no argument at the time, Trump’s disrespect reflected no libertarian principles, but only 300 pounds (okay 239 according to the White House physician) of walking, talking personal character defects.
once relatively anonymous political strategists now have star power that had previously only been accessible to those at the tippy-top of the presidential strategist ladder, people like Lee Atwater or Karl Rove or James Carville or Paul Begala,” Miller writes.
“Clarence Darrow is the lawyer every law school student dreams of being: on the side of right, loved by many women, played by Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind. His days-long closing arguments delivered without notes won miraculous reprieves for men doomed to hang.”
For the first half of Bernstein’s very readable, and richly footnoted, book, Hearst was either bankrupt or rich, there was no inbetween. He made and lost fortunes, but nothing slowed him down. He had a natural nose for finding gold and silver.
The book, authored by vice president of distressed debt and convertible securities trading at Lehman Brothers Larry McDonald, with Patrick Robinson provides an eye-witness account of the nation’s largest bankruptcy, a tripped domino which provided some semblance of an Austrian Theory style malinvestment flushing.
Although famous for his business acumen, for Trump, numbers were not a fixed thing, “for him they were surprisingly, even magically elastic.” Elections, like bets, lie in the fickle hands of the Goddess of Wagering and as the aforementioned Axthelm wrote: "The Goddess must be appeased, soothed, tithed. She must never be affronted by statements hinting that a gambler has taken fate into his own firm grip."
What Read did best was raise money while catering to what Rothbard called the “high school” of liberty. The current president of the country of Mar-a-Lago also successfully raises money while mouthing freedom bromides to housewives and the like.
Roger McKinney doesn’t see eye-to-eye with the pope. In his book “God is a Capitalist: Markets from Moses to Marx,” Mckinney “shows how Biblical economic principles answer the most vexing problems the world faces today, such as poverty, inequality and pollution.”
This storyline may not scream OSCAR to you, but, in director Chloé Zhao’s hands, “Nomadland” is a 7-1 favorite to win the best picture academy award according to goldderby.com. Zhao is the 10-3 favorite for best director ahead of heavyweights David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin.
“The cost of one megabyte of hard drive memory has fallen from approximately $1 million in 1967 to 2 cents today,” writes Booth. We can easily imagine what that means for the cool stuff that will be on our smartphones. What I can’t fathom is what cheaper computing power will do for the price of a can of beans.
Bob Woodward takes his second bite from the Trump apple, with “Rage.” Woodward has completed the interview circuit with his biggest prop being Trump on tape. Trump cooperated and the esteemed author had the president saying what he knew and when he knew it: about the coronavirus, of course.
