Book Review: Revolutionary Road

A couple hatches a plan to leave their conventional American suburban life and move to France; but the husband finds that he’s getting some recognition at his otherwise soul-crushing job and finds a way to put off the dream.  Very bad things proceed to happen. 

Sounds like a warning to a couple who want to take a month off to go to San Francisco but run into resistance from his job, doesn’t it?  It does, according to many who, having seen the movie, couldn’t resist telling us about the story.  And in some ways the book is indeed a tale of how suburban conformity can take away your life.  But there’s another current in the book that warns from the other direction.  The main characters, Frank and April Wheeler, are miserable in the suburbs because, well, they condescendingly despise their fellow suburban dwellers.  It’s one thing to hate the conformists from a commune or an artists’ collective.  You may be prick, but at least you’re an honest one.  But what’s the happiness percentage among those who hate suburban life from the comfort of the white picket fenced house from which they take the train to and from their meaningless corporate job?

What Revolutionary Road does so well (and the book is, as a blurb on the cover says, "flawless") is not make you hate the stifling suburbs; it’s not even clear that the author, Richard Yates, thinks the suburbs are actually all that bad.  What it makes you do is pity the poor souls who think condescending thoughts about people who are, in truth, just like them.  So yes, there is a warning in Revolutionary Road, but it’s applicable to far more people than just those looking for a trip to escape for a while.  It’s warning to anyone living a life that isn’t authentic or true.  You can pull it off for a while, but eventually, living a lie will kill you.

Welcome O' Reilly! (?) (or, a shameless plug for myself)

So I love O'Reilly Media and its founder Bill O'Reilly. Even though I'm a lawyer who works on consumer credit, not technology, I buy a lot of O'Reilly books and have even considered subscribing to their online library called Safari.
So it was with great hope and excitement that I read about their new program to provide books and videos to bloggers in exchange for reviews (good or bad-this appears to be just like the review copies publishers routinely hand out to newspapers and other reviews and not like a sleazy campaign to get good bbog PR by giving free swag to bloggers).
I applied and hope they pick me despite a dearth of tech related stuff on my blog. In case they're looking I'd point to my reviews of Rework, Making Ideas Happen and my post about Anathem.
If I get picked you'll definitely see more tech on the blog!

UPDATE:

I'm in!  First up is The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun!

Book Review: Making Ideas Happen

According to Scott Belsky, the main problem for many "creatives" is that they are good at having ideas and not good at turning them into something real.  So, rather than write yet another book about how to generate ideas or find your muse, Belsky has written a book on how to make your ideas happen. (Of course, you knew that from reading the title.)

If this sounds like a big challenge for a short (230 page) book, it is. Belsky tackles a lot: there's a chapter on the "Action Method" which is yet another how-to-get-organized system.  (Basically, you break your life into a series of projects and for each project you have your "action items" or to-dos, you have reference items, and you have "backburner" items for later.)  Then there are chapters on dealing with others on a team; on harnessing a wider community; and on self-motivation.  As a result, while the ideas in the book are great, they do feel a bit rushed.  (Of course, Belsky has a website, the 99 Percent, and offers conferences, etc. to help you out and keep you coming back for more.)  And the book is well organized, well written, and I wouldn't describe it as "dense" by any means.

Still, I couldn't figure out why it took me so long to plow through such a short book.  Only in struggling to even write this review of it did I realize that the book has a rather dry, textbook like feel.  It's just not very inspiring.  Now, let me be totally fair here.  Belsky admits upfront that he's not looking to inspire you.  He assumes that the reader is someone who comes to the table with lots of ideas and motivation and just needs a structure in which to actually put those ideas into practice.  And he doesn't really care if your ideas are brilliant or mediocre.  In fact, he posits that someone like, say, Thomas Kinkade, the "painter of light" who produces some pretty awful kitschy art, has more "impact" (because he gets so much done) than a brilliant painter who doesn't actually do any painting (or doesn't get his work seen by others).

Yet, for me, the absence of inspiring quotes or ideas made reading the book seem like a homework chore.  (Note, again, the rather functional and uncreative title, "Making Ideas Happen.")  Yes, I have ideas for creative projects, but  for many of us inspiration, not just execution, is still part of the battle. This is one reason why a book like Rework is so much more fun to read, even if it gives you less practical advice.

Nevertheless, as a government worker there was one quote that I felt was worth the price of the book alone.  "Bureaucracy was born out of the human desire for complete assurance before taking action."  Not exactly inspiring but something that should replace those pictures of the President in every government office.  Insights like that got me to take notes on this book (I said it was like a textbook) and I will keep the book and refer back to it.  So I would recommend it --  just be sure to set aside some time to be inspired somewhere else.

The Mobile Mortgage, a response

My sister-in-law Erin wrote a very interesting blog post about her idea for a mobile mortgage. Basically people who want to (a) own a home and (b) move a lot end up building equity much more slowly then people who stay put for 30 years. This is because when you first get a mortgage (or any loan) you pay mostly interest and only over time does more of your payment go to principal. So why not bring the loan along with you when you move?

I wrote out a response that was too big to fit in the comments box on blogger so I thought I'd put it here. (Then I accidentally deleted it so this is draft # 2.)

I really like the idea of the mobile mortgage and I think it makes a lot of sense for people who expect to move a lot. So that got me wondering why the mobile mortgage doesn't exist today. I can think of a few reasons though I'm not sure any of them are insurmountable.

The first reason is that since a mortgage is secured by a house there would be some cost and risk involved with appraising the new house to ensure that it supported the loan amount. Smaller, regional banks that hold on to their loans may not be comfortable with taking the risk on a house that is outside their normal service area. For banks that sell loans to investors (which is most of them) the appraisal shouldn't be a problem because it's no more or less likely to be accurate than the initial appraisal was. Of course, the borrower would likely have to pay for the appraisal, but they'd do that anyway in buying the new house. This would also give the bank or the loan servicer a potential veto over the borrower's new house, but if the borrower doesn't like that they can just get a new mortgage as they would have done in the status quo.

Perhaps a bigger problem is that banks in some sense don't want people to stay in a 30 year loan for 30 years. Banks have a problem with "duration matching." A bank has to raise money to lend to people and they do this mostly through deposits which are short term (that is, people frequently move money in and out). But the money the bank lends is much longer term, like a 30 year mortgage. (Actually, most loans only last about 5-7 years because people move or refinance within that time on average.) As short-term and long-term interest rates move around, the bank runs the risk that it could end up paying a higher rate on its deposits than it's earning on its loans. There are two possible solutions for the bank. One is to make the mobile mortgage's interest rate variable and tie it to a shorter term rate. However, this may be unpalatable to borrowers who could see their mortgage payment change rapidly and substantially. Another solution is to seek out investors who are looking for longer-term assets. One would expect that the mobile mortgage would last longer because people keep it even when they move. (Of course, when rates fall people may refinance out of their mobile mortgage to get a better deal so a variable rate may be necessary to ensure the longer duration.) Anyway, with so much financial innovation it shouldn't be insurmountable to structure something that works.

Still, the idea of the mobile mortgage raises even more interesting and deeper points about what it means to own a home. One reason to own a home is to "build equity" and when home prices were appreciating steadily this seemed like a great thing to do. Going forward however, it's not at all clear that the home as an investment is the best deal, compared with renting and investing the money you save in, say, the stock market. (A home mortgage is a good form of "forced savings" in that it's easy to spend the "stock-market-investment money" than it is to skip your mortgage payment. But lots of people did find that they could take out home equity loans and pay off credit cards and buy cars so it's not clear that the forced savings works anymore for mortgages.) Mainly though, I don't think people want to own a home solely as an investment. They don't want to have to negotiate with the landlord about painting the living room green. Or more substantially, they don't want someone raising the rent or just deciding to kick them out when the lease is up. And psychologically people feel more rooted and permanent and stable in a home they own. They also tend to care more about their neighborhood and community. (Although this may be an American phenomenon. In Europe people rent long-term and seem to feel perfectly rooted.)

These psychological reasons would explain the 10-year interest-only mortgage which, to me, is financially akin to renting from a bank. (Not quite because you still get to paint the living room and you can keep any appreciation in the house when you sell it, but if the house price doesn't go up you've built no equity for 10 years.)

A professor at my law school has written an interesting paper called Homeownership 2.0 that discusses ways to come up with something that isn't full ownership, but also isn't a rental or even a long-term lease. It would be interesting to see if this could be put together with a mobile mortgage and give people the best of both world between renting and owning.

Making Future Magic: iPad light painting

Very cool video.

Making Future Magic: iPad light painting from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

Book Review: How Proust Can Change Your Life

Having never read a word written by Marcel Proust, it may have seemed a strange choice to read a book about his book(s). What's more, there seems to be a cottage industry in writing books with the name Proust in the title. There's Proust & the Squid; Proust was a Neuroscientist and probably others. (Plus Steve Carrell as a Proust scholar in the movie Little Miss Sunshine.)

But this book by Alain de Botton seems to have been first out of the gate, and it's not a "Proust And Something" book, it's just about Marcel and his novel. I bought it impulsively after reading the opening in the bookstore because I thought it was so well written. And I stick by that judgment even though the rest of the book slowed down for me. De Botton writes engagingly and humorously about Proust's life and also illustrates life lessons using characters from In Search of Lost Time. But, unsurprisingly, I feel that I would have gotten more out of the book if I'd read the source material. The chapters claim to tell you "How to Love Life Today" or "How to Take Your Time" or "How to be Happy in Love." De Botton takes each of these themes and shows us what Proust had to say about it in his novel and how he succeeded or failed at doing the same in real life. It would all be rather tedious in the hands of a boring author, but de Botton is fun to read and you feel a bit like your sitting in his kitchen having a nice book club with him, except you haven't read the book so you're faking it a bit and nodding politely.

The opening chapter, "How to Love Life Today," is wonderful. It tells the story of a French newspaper that asked a number of famous authors what they would do if a meteor were headed to Earth that would soon end us all. Proust's response is that such a thing would be wonderful because we all delay and put off life with the sense that we have all this time. If we knew our end was imminent wouldn't we rush off to do all those things we mean to but haven't gotten around to. Take that trip, kiss that girl, do that one thing you always wanted. This isn't a surprising response, and de Botton points out that Proust wasn't a particularly adventurous fellow and didn't much take his own advice. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't.  Here's what de Button has to say about it:

Feeling suddenly attached to life when we realize the imminence of death suggests that it was perhaps not life itself which we had lost the taste for so long as there was no end in sight, but our quotidian version of it, that our dissatisfactions were more the result of a certain way of living than anything irrevocably morose about human experience. Having surrendered the customary belief in our own immortality, we would then be reminded of a host of untried possibilities lurking beneath the surface of an apparently undesirable, apparently eternal existence.

However, if due acknowledgment of our mortality encourages us to re-evaluate our priorities, we may ask what these priorities should be. We might only have been living half a life before we faced up to the implications of death, but what exactly does a whole life consist of? Simple recognition of our inevitable demise does not guarantee that we will latch on to any sensible answers when it comes to filling in what remains of the diary. Panicked by the ticking of the clock, we may resort to some spectacular follies.

Of course, de Button's book is an attempt to draw lessons from Proust to help us avoid those follies and it's worth the read.

Book Review: 48 Days to the Work You Love

In our continuing search to make our lives happier and better, Nicole and I have been checking out from the library a number of books about improving your work life. 48 Days to the Work You Love by Dan Miller is one such recently-read endeavor.

Miller is a Christian and the book has a Christian theme and lots of Bible quotes. Non-Christians may find this off-putting but, it's worth getting over that because anyone could profit from reading the book. First, the Christian stuff is easy enough to skip. But more importantly, the Christian perspective to work life is probably one that a great number of non-Christians would appreciate anyway, belief in God not required. What I mean is that Miller's perspective is (a) money doesn't buy happiness, even at work; (b) we all have a calling or vocation, (whether it comes from God or not you can decide); and (c) we will only be truly successful doing work we love in accord with our calling. Consequently, if we are doing what we love (what God made us for if you will) we will find ourselves joyously serving others rather than counting out the days to retirement.

Of course, lots of books say this kind of thing, but Miller also gives practical advice on resumes, interviewing, and job hunting. My favorite piece of advice was about resumes. Miller recommends constantly updating your resume even if you love your job. The resume becomes an exercise in taking stock of where you are in your career and what skills you have developed. This focus on skills is also important. If you're stuck not just in a job, but in a career you don't like, how can a resume that lays out your experience and progress in that particular field help you land any other kind of job? Miller suggests rewriting your resume to focus on skills rather than on chronology. (I like this idea and the book has helpful samples to view, but a skills-based resume is pretty uncommon I think. I wonder if employers feel like you're hiding something with an unconventional resume?)

The worst that could be said about this book is that Miller has synthesized a lot of traditional career information you could get elsewhere and then "Christianized" it to sell to a target audience. But his synthesis is a good one, as is his perspective, so there's no reason not to check this book out.






Book Review: The Ascent of Money

This is another book I started to review and then didn't finish.  I enjoyed this book a lot, I remember that clearly.  But now that I'm a year or more away from it, I can't remember much else about it.  Of course, that's why I write these book reviews in the first place, so it's not really fair to the book.  But at the same time, I do remember being a bit underwhelmed by it.  Ferguson's books are all now done in conjunction with the BBC for televisions specials.  And so each chapter reads a bit like a little episode of a show.  "Today: the Dutch Tulip Bubble!"  Still, it's fun stuff, even if at times he used some fairly technical jargon without explaining it.  Perhaps I'll have to just watch the show and review that instead.  Or, dear reader, you could read the book and post a comment reminding me of why I liked it.

Book Review: Freedom from Fear, Part I

Funny.  I just realized I'd started a draft review of (half) of this book and never finished or posted it.  A little context is in order: I was reading books on finance during the height of the financial crisis, as many people were.  And the granddady of them all, The Great Depression, was written about by a former professor of mine, David M. Kennedy.  (Kennedy was the greatest college-class lecturer I had.  I loved going to class when he was teaching; his lectures were cogent, beautiful, and polished.  They were like performances--at the start of one my friend Dave turned to me and said, "I've heard this one before, it's great!")

Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize winning book, Freedom from Fear is about the Great Depression and World War II.  As I'd written in my draft (at a time when this seemed an open question), "the good news is this: We Are Not In The Second Great Depression. Not because times are good right now, but because the Depression was so bad."  Not just in the sense of economic hardship as we see it today, but in the sense of real, grinding, crushing, poverty.  Nicole's grandmother told us that for a while she ate beans every day during the Depression.  Even for people who've lost jobs and hurting, the occasional McDonald's cheeseburger is probably not out of reach.

So just to appreciate how good we have it, it's worth reading about the Depression. But the book is fascinating in other ways.  The Hoover Administration didn't just ignore the Depression, but everything they tried wasn't nearly enough.  And there was this sense of American optimism that things would be fine that is very reminiscent of how the economists and policy makers in 2007 said everything would just be contained to subprime.  The lesson is that things can get out of control so fast that no one sees it coming.  It's scary and we're lucky to have pulled back from the precipice.

There are probably lots of other great books about the Depression, but this book certainly covered what I wanted to know.  I know from my class with Prof. Kennedy that the second half about WWII will be incredible, but I've put the book away and moved on for now.

Book Review: Union Atlantic

This book has beautiful dust jacket.  It's artistic and beautiful and printed on great paper.  The whole way through this book I kept worrying I was hurting the dust jacket.

Of course, you're supposed to get lost in a book and not be worried about the dust jacket, and I just couldn't do it here.  Everyone who reviewed this book, it seems, loved it.  And the book is so timely!  It's about a big bank that fails and has to get bailed out by the Federal Reserve, yet it was written before the financial crisis!  Therefore, the reviewers said, it tells us something important about our times.  Except it doesn't really.  The author went to Yale Law School and he has a pretty basic liberal understanding of the world.  Money is bad and the people who make and spend money are bad and we're all their slaves.  That's true of course, but we all got that memo, even before the financial crisis.  But the book isn't really about the financial crisis at all.  The Bank doesn't get into real trouble until 2/3 of the way through. Instead it's about a group of characters who I just couldn't get that into.  People who are sad self-medicate with money and we're meant, I suppose, to feel pity and condescension towards them even though they think of themselves as better than us.  OK, I just don't have time for that.  I finished the book only because (a) it was a gift from Nicole who read the same glowing reviews as I, and (b) I kept hoping something would happen.  But by the time it did, I just didn't much care.

Book Review: Rework

This was one of the best, most fun, and inspiring books I've read in a long time.  It's written by a couple of guys who run a web-based business and it filled with their lessons on how to run a company.  But even though I work for the government and not a private company, I still found it great.  Much of what they have to say is just about how they way people work today is often ridiculous and counter-productive.  I think the "Don't Treat People Like 13 Year Olds" should be standard reading in every IT Department (why is it that so often something useful that's only a mild security risk gets disabled and people find themselves resorting to things that are bigger security risks?).

The book is short, but consciously so.  The authors cut the number of words in half between the second-to-last version and the final version.  Yet there's no chance that doubling the size would have made it any better.  And that's a pretty good summary of their advice.  Do what needs to be done and focus on making that part the best part.  You can have a hot dog stand without condiments or drinks or a colorful umbrella, but not without hot dogs.  Send people home at 5; fire the workaholics; resumes don't actually tell you anything (nor does GPA or school attended or years of experience).  Bottom line: there's a lot of truth in this book that almost everyone I know understands and yet somehow gets smothered in most of the institutions we work for.  I'd like to give this book to just about everyone I know who holds a job.

White Noise versus The National Security Strategy

This is an excerpt from President Obama's National Security Strategy:

Effectively Manage Emergencies: We are building our capability to prepare for disasters to reduce or eliminate long-term effects to people and their property from hazards and to respond to and recover from major incidents. To improve our preparedness, we are integrating domestic all hazards planning at all levels of government and building key capabilities to respond to emergencies. We continue to collaborate with communities to ensure preparedness efforts are integrated at all levels of government with the private and nonprofit sectors. We are investing in operational capabilities and equipment, and improving the reliability and interoperability of communications systems for first responders. We are encouraging domestic regional planning and integrated preparedness programs and will encourage government at all levels to engage in long-term recovery planning. It is critical that we continually test and improve plans using exercises that are realistic in scenario and consequences. 

This is an except from a book I loved, Don Dellilo's White Noise:

"That's quite an armband you've got there.  What does SIMUVAC mean?  Sounds important."

"Short for simulated evacuation.  A new state program they’re still battling over funds for."

"But this evacuation isn't simulated.  It's real."

"We know that.  But we thought we could use it as a model."

"A form of practice?  Are you saying you saw a chance to use the real event in order to rehearse the simulation?"

"We took it right into the streets."

"How is it going?"  I said.

"The insertion curve isn't as smooth as we would like.  There's a probability excess.  Plus which we don't have our victims laid out where we'd want them if this was an actual simulation.  In other words we’re forced to take our victims as we find them.  We didn't get a jump on computer traffic.  Suddenly it just spilled out, three-dimensionally, all over the landscape.  You have to make allowances for the fact that everything we see tonight is real.  There's a lot of polishing we still have to do.  But that's what this exercise is all about."

Book Review: Hamlet's Blackberry

I tend to read a fair amount of news, and I pretty regularly read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. I've noticed that, after a decent interval, one of those newspapers will run a story that the other has already run. They're never completely the same, but they're pretty close. And I don't mean run-of-the-mill daily news, I mean the kind of feature stories that one would think ought to be unique. 


I bring that up because this weekend the Journal ripped off a feature from Wired magazine.  Both features offer a sort of debate between about whether the Internet is making us smarter (WSJ, Wired) or dumber (WSJ Wired).  Nicolas Carr, whose new book is about how the Internet is making us shallow thinkers, is on the "dumber" side.  For example, he says that studies show that the mere presence of links in an article degrades our ability to retain information--even if we don't actually click the links--because our brain is distracted by the need decide whether or not to click them (so, sorry about those links up there).  On the "smarter" side is Clay Shirky (in the Wired article he's joined by Dan Pink) who's noticed that we spend a lot of time watching TV (surprise!).   That TV time might be more productively spent, say, adding information to Wikipedia. For example, Shirky's Journal article cites a statistic that the total number of hours people have spent editing Wikipedia is about equal to the number of hours Americans spend watching TV ads over a weekend. (Makes the Wiki-geeks seem less geeky doesn't it?)


I bring these news stories up because they demonstrate a large theoretically debate going on about the promises and perils of the Internet and I recommend either feature, although the Journal articles are not free.  But those article don't do what William Powers' Hamlet's Blackberry does: offer some practical thoughts about how we are all living today with interruptive technology.  I wish everyone would read the book, especially the people who won't like it. For many of us, the constant mind-candy and threat of being always reachable is degrading our lives. Work never leaves us and we can develop the feelings of a "hunted mind." But we cannot blame just our employers, we spend our free time scratching at our smart-phones like crack(berry) addicts.  I am, after all, typing this on my shiny new iPad.


Powers' book is great and simple but not simplistic.  He reviews 7 philosophers from Plato to Seneca to Ben Franklin to Thoreau who lived in times of fast-paced technological change, and he pulls out practical wisdom from each. At the end of the book he details his family's habit of having an Internet Sabbath each weekend. No in-home Net access; they must walk to the library if they must get online. Powers finds this liberating and good for family togetherness. We plan to try it. 


So I highly recommend that people read the book and spend some time thinking about how well we are integrating technology into our lives (and letting our employers have more of our time than we'd often like). What's funny is that I heard about this book in an interview on the Monocle weekly podcast (#59). And a few weeks later the interviewer (and founder of the Monocle) Tyler Brûlé  wrote a column in the Financial Times about how he can't stand people who have out-of-office replies on their email.  He thinks they must only do that because they hate their jobs and so they should quit and be entrepreneurs like him. (And he thinks they're the sort of people who wear sweatpants.). But not everyone wants to be connected all the time and I really wish that Mr. Brûlé  would spend some more time pondering William Powers' excellent book.

Book Review: Born To Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

Pasted below is Nicole's review -- I couldn't have said it any better myself:
***
I am such a book evangelist. I go into it with the same verve: “You have to read this book. It is so amazing.” And away I go, telling the person in front of me how great this book I just read is. Ugh. So annoying.

But I am at it again. I just read Born to Run. Brent and I both read it. And loved it. Brent was a runner in college, for exercise sake. I have never been too good at running, but a few years ago I had this dream about running, where it was fun again, like when I was a kid. I jumped over things and ran under logs. It made me long to run again.

About six weeks ago I started running. Slowly. One Mile. I am up to 2 miles at a go. I run until I don’t feel good, then walk. I started running because every “weight loss” book/story of success I have seen, the person has begun running.

But the book was an after thought. And what an inspiration it is. The book just makes you want to get out there and do it...barefoot. Who needs Nike? Since the advent of the running shoe in the 1970’s running injuries have steadily increased. “Shoes block pain, not impact. Pain teaches us to run comfortably. From the moment you start going barefoot, you will change the way you run.”

Did you know the foot comprises one quarter of all bones in the body and more than 200,000 nerve endings? Over 2 million years has lead to a very well designed foot for running. Putting a shoe between your foot and the ground, means those nerve endings are deadened. We don’t need shoes; we need to get off the couch. Because we are wearing shoes, our feet muscles have atrophied. The book makes the argument that our evolutionary advantage was our ability to run, unlike other species near to ours.

“Heavier people are more likely to die from at least ten different kinds of cancer.” Who knew the exact numbers?

“When cancerous tumors are removed by surgery, they are 300 percent more likely to grow back in patients with a ‘traditional Western diet’ than they are in patients who eat lots of fruits and veggies, according to a 2007 report by The Journal of the American Medical Association.” To read the actual study, click this sentence.

I have started using my Vibram FiveFingers to run, and it is so much more fun. I am really enjoying feeling the ground, standing up straighter, and breathing better. It is really amazing.

The book talks about racing, and ultra-racing, and touching moments, and high drama. It makes you want to run. So run right out and get the book!

Book Review: White Noise

Don DeLillo is one of those authors whose name I kept seeing but didn't know much about.  But I'd seen my favorite author, David Foster Wallace, compared to him so I was intrigued.  From reading the book jacket of White Noise (I found the version that was the 1985 entry on the Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) it was clear that Foster Wallace must have been influenced by this book.

The book is about a professor of "Hitler studies" at a small college.  Not much happens in the book, except in a few powerful bursts.  The main one is the "Airborne Toxic Event" which consists of a black cloud of highly toxic gas released after a railroad car accident.  The end of the book has a somewhat gruesome scene too that I won't spoil.  The book it very funny, very biting, sometimes scary, sometimes sad.  I enjoyed it immensely and it makes me wish I knew how to write like this.  How does one fill 310 pages with, for the most part, small nonevents (a trip to the grocery store, say) and nothing but internal monologue and conversations.  Moreover, how does one do that in a way that is gripping and keeps the reader interested?  Where do you learn to write a novel that says something about life as it's lived today without anything much happening to otherwise uninteresting people?  I don't know but DeLillo does.  And for a book written in 1985 its seems very prescient to me.  His observations about modern culture may have seemed exaggerated then but have only become truer since.  But the best way to convince someone to read the book (or not to) is with the following passage which I loved.  If it speaks to you then so will the book, I think.  It occurs as the protagonist professor is getting attended to at a shelter during the Airborne Toxic Event:

"That's quite an armband you've got there.  What does SIMUVAC mean?  Sounds important."

"Short for simulated evacuation.  A new state program they’re still battling over funds for."

"But this evacuation isn't simulated.  It's real."

"We know that.  But we thought we could use it as a model."

"A form of practice?  Are you saying you saw a chance to use the real event in order to rehearse the simulation?"

"We took it right into the streets."

"How is it going?"  I said.

"The insertion curve isn't as smooth as we would like.  There's a probability excess.  Plus which we don't have our victims laid out where we'd want them if this was an actual simulation.  In other words we’re forced to take our victims as we find them.  We didn't get a jump on computer traffic.  Suddenly it just spilled out, three-dimensionally, all over the landscape.  You have to make allowances for the fact that everything we see tonight is real.  There's a lot of polishing we still have to do.  But that's what this exercise is all about."

Book Review: Bursts

The nonfiction book world owes Malcolm Gladwell a beer. Or maybe a car. Or even a house. You see, as far as I can tell, Gladwell was the first one to make science-y concepts accessible by telling you a story about someone or something. He won't just explain, say, some new strategy for cancer research, he'll tell you about Bob the cancer patient and Joe the cancer doctor and how no one understood what was wrong with Bob until one day he met Joe and ....

Bursts tries to make the research of author Albert-Laszlo Barabasi accessible. And Barabasi really gives us a cast of characters: the globe-trotting artist who keeps getting harrassed by Homeland Security; a guy who corresponds with Einstein about the fifth dimension; a dude with an fake ear surgically implanted on his arm (really); and best of all, half the book tells the story of the Hungarian version of Braveheart.

These stories are generally great and very intersting. The story of the Hungarian Braveheart is worth buying and reading the book alone in my opinion. The chapters of the book actually alternative between the main narrative and the historical tale of a minor nobleman who starts a rebellion of the peasants in late Medieval/early Renaissance Hungary (for Freedom!). So you could just read the history and skip the rest. In fact, I'd almost recommend it because the rest of the book is a bit of muddle.

The book is called "Bursts" and it turns out that scientists, including Barabasi, have discovered a bursty pattern in nature, including human nature. For example, animals don't search for food using a truly random pattern. If they did, you see the same animal is all kinds of different places on any given day. Instead, animals stay in a particular area for a while, hunting someplace while the hunting is good. Once the hunting turns bad, then there's a 'burst' where they jump to a new hunting ground. Similarly, humans tend do to things like respond to emails in bursts during the day. We don't respond as every email comes in, but we prioritize. Some emails will get an immediate response. Some will wait hours, some days, some even weeks (or longer for me).

Great. So we burst. Animals burst. So what? Well, Barabasi is also trying to tell us that we're very predictable. If he knows your daily pattern he can tell you where you're likely to be on any given day at any given time. For a huge percentage of us 80% of our time is spent at home or at work. And we're very regular about it. We might show up in Australia once in a while, but that, too, happens in bursts. We don't wake up on random mornings and say "hey, why don't play hooky from work and fly to Paris instead!" (or if we do, we don't actually follow through).

Barabasi thinks that someday we'll find out that our future is totally predictable because he can predict (using our cellphone location records) where we spend most of our day. Or at least, the future might be predictable. Or it might not. Hmmm. Did I mention the part about the Hungarian Braveheart? I don't want to give anything away, but if you think Mel Gibson got tortured good at the end of that movie, wait until you find out how they did it in Hungary! Worth the price of admission alone.

Book Reviews: The Age of Turbulence and The Age of the Unthinkable

This is a review of two books by two authors each trying, grandly, to define an "Age." One is an 80 year old who has decades of experience in economics, business, and at the highest levels of government. The other is by younger man without the benefit of so much experience and so many lived-through crisis who is nevertheless attempting a revolutionary manifesto. One book demonstrates wisdom and nuance, and has an underlying current of thought that says that we can never be too sure of things. The other lays out a far-reaching and comprehensive global world-view that leaves no real room for doubt or second guessing.

Of course, it's probably not a surprise that the older man is not the one demonstrating wisdom, but rather the straightjacket of ideological precepts he faithfully served for 40 years. But it is still striking how it seems as though Alan Greenspan has written a book of anti-wisdom. His book is a faithful catalog of ideas that ruled the world for decades and now, still, lies shattered.

Greenspan's book, the Age of Turbulence, came out before the Great Recession. Even his prologue to the paperback edition came out before the worst hit. And so, his book is confident and breezy. This is a nice touch as he describes his life. I can confirm what all the reviews I read said: the first, biographical, half of the book is quite enjoyable. But the second half, his take on the world and his prescriptions for it, is like watching an particularly painful episode of Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm. Sure enough, right there on page 230, Greenspan mentions exotic mortgages. His take is that, "the typical American household ended up with a more valuable home and better access to the wealth it represented." Sure we took on more debt and there might be a bubble but hey, we'll all recover nicely. He does have one concern about the boom years though: all that income inequality. But never fear, better education will take care of that.

OK, at some level, this isn't really fair to Greenspan. He's been brutally honest about the failings of his ideology and the concerns he expresses are real and legitimate. From everything I can tell he's a decent guy who tried to serve his country well, and for 18 years at the Fed had no indication that he was doing less than a superb job. But sometimes, the messenger gets shot when the message is bad enough. The Age of "Turbulence" ended with a massive gust of wind shear that damn near took the whole country down. His book reads as if Mikhail Gorbachev had written a testament to the majesty of Communism in 1989.

Joshua Cooper Ramo, who, as a partner in Kissinger & Associates, ought to be kinder to 80-something ex-government types takes it to Alan Greenspan quite often in his book, The Age of the Unthinkable. And rightly so. Ramo, like Malcolm Gladwell, illustrates ideas with vignettes. He tells about the success of Hezbollah (which is quite remarkable considering the Israeli army and intelligence services they are up against); about drug-resistant tuberculosis; about a man who got a fundamental flaw in the internet fixed without revealing the problem (because it would have allowed the hackers to take things down before the patches could be applied). In short, he writes about all kinds of complex and unpredictable systems that take down men like Greenspan and Gorbachev. As he puts its, complex systems can, "demolish poor Alan Greenspan's hope that even 40 years of experience is a reliable guide to the future."

The best example Ramo gives in his book is an experiment done by dropping grains of sand onto a plate, one at a time. Slowly, without any human intervention, the grains of sand will form a pyramid. They form a structure that, for all the world, looks supremely well-managed and stable, even though no outside force is doing the managing or stabilizing (anyone else thinking of the Invisible Hand?). But then, suddenly and without warning, one single grain will be the straw that breaks the camel's back. It will send the whole pyramid crashing down. And here's the craziest part: no one can predict which grain of sand will be the one that causes the crash. Over and over scientists have done this experiment and we still cannot predict the future. Even 40 years of experience is not a reliable guide to the future.

Ramo's solution is to fight fire with fire. If Al Qaeda is using decentralized cells, then perhaps the State Department and intelligence community should be radically decentralized. He provides a fascinating example of a Brazilian company that gave so much power to its workers during the 1990 hyperinflation that its owner no longer even knows what all the company does or how many employees it has. Another example is that the South African government's resistance to handing out AIDS drugs led to a grass roots people-power movement that has succeeded remarkably at quelling AIDS, while the government's multimillion dollar tuberculosis program resulted in people stopping medication too early leading to drug resistant forms of the disease.

According to Ramo we need to be resilient not just defensive. The sandpile is coming down sooner or later and we'd better be ready for it. By contrast, Greenspan is trying to describe what keeps the sandpile up so we can continue to build it higher and higher. I don't know about you, but after this last decade I'm afraid I have to side with Ramo. And to highly recommend his book--the first three or four chapters get you there if you're in a hurry. But we all need to start thinking about the sandpile on which we're living.