Kessler, A. (2005). How we got here: A slightly irreverent history of technology and markets. New York, HarperCollins.

The title is accurate – this is a short history of how technology and capital markets evolved to where we are today (and, given the evolution of the Internet, the two will merge). Kessler connects many events in a very short format, sprinkling the text with a bit too many one-liner jokes. He does better on technolology history than financial markets, but I still enjoyed it. Quickly written and quickly read, with some good little tidbits here and there (such as the account of B.F. Skinner, psychologist and pigeon trainer, creating a bomb guidance system with pigeons inside the bomb nose cone trained to peck at outlines of Japanese war ships.

Not sure if I would recommend this – too quickie unless you already know the history (but then it is fun.) The definitive book on these topics is yet to be written. Notes:

Continue reading →

As a big fan of Horace Rumpole (John Mortimer‘s seedy but noble barrister-of-the-Bailey) I enjoyed Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders, though the office intrigues and the intricacies of the plot were somewhat simplified – dare I say mellowed – compared to the usual fare. Obligatory reading for anyone with an affinity for "she who must be obeyed" and "Chateau Thames Embankment", though.

Just finished Barbarians at the gate: The fall of RJR Nabisco, which could be described as "the mother of all case studies." (For those who didn’t hang around in the late 80s, it is about the first mega-LBO.) I did take a course with Michael Jensen, who provided much of the theoretical underpinning for the LBO craze, in 1991 – and I couldn’t quite get what all the fuss was about.

Anyway, the book is a fascinating story of monumental egos: How RJR management (in a company that produced cigarrettes and cookies) had 6 jet airplanes, called the RJR air force. There are scenes of investment banks Salomon and Drexel nearly tanking the whole deal because they couldn’t agree on who should be on the left side of the tombstone. Another LBO company, Forstmann and Little, dickering for a day over whether their press release should say that they had been "invited" or "welcomed" to bid for the company. The final chapters when deadlines are extended in 60 and 15 minute increments (with KKR being paid $45m to wait for one hour at one point) are priceless.

The book reads like a thriller, though it is a bit hard to remember who all the characters are. Anyway, it was fun to then open New York Times and read about how the LBO industry now is flush with cash, but is running out of companies to buy – and, not least, buyers for the pieces they want to shed once they have acquired them.

I had an hour to spend last night, and used it to leaf through Ray Kurzweil’s new book, The Singularity is Near, in which he argues that by (roughly) 2045, computer intelligence (or, at least, processing capacity) will be bigger than all human brains combined. This will lead to a merger of technological and human intelligence, and, in time, to the "awakening of the universe" – which I understood to be a sort of mobilization of every molecule in the universe in the service of creating intelligence.

Ray Kurzweil uses many exponential graphs to make his argument, which he sums up as the world going through six epochs (see figure) – physics, biology, brains, technology, merger of technology and humans, and, lastly, the awakening.

I don’t know. Kurzweil has a great track record on predictions with his previous books, and certainly knows how to provoke. Whenever I want to irritate my students, I give them Alan Turings Computing Machinery and Intelligence and a couple of chapters from Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines. The following discussion is always interesting, especially when students have to come to terms with what "intelligent" means.

But I can’t help feeling that there is some sort of Achilles and the tortoise about the singularity argument – I cannot bring myself to understand what happens as all these trends converge and their growth approaches infinity – nor that they necessarily do. I have always argued that processing and communication should be thought of as free resources, but, of course, within overviewable limits.

The upshot, of course, is that there is not need to panic – I’ll be 84 in 2045, and even if I don’t make it there (though, if Kurzweil is right, we all stand a pretty good chance of getting there and much longer) I will adopt a real options strategy, which is, I will wait and see, and not worry too much about it. We will know soon enough.

(Incidentally, a lot of stuff is available on the singularity.com website, including chapters 1 (the six epochs) and chapter 9 (response to various criticisms). 

I am currently reading Theodory Dalrymple‘s Our Culture, What’s Left of IT, as fine a collection of essays as you will find anywhere. Dalrymple is a conservative moralist, but contrary to the standard definition of that kind of person in the US, he is literate, balanced, thoughtful and erudite. There is much to like in the book, including a moving portrait of one of my favorite authors, Stefan Zweig, as well as a merciless comparison of the lives of Marx and Turgenjev, where the latter comes out as the human and the former as the monster.

In light of the recent riots in France, one of his essays is particularly prescient. It is called City The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris, is available on the web, and clearly shows that these riots are the product of a long evolutionary process that France has no reason to be proud of. Says Dalrymple:

[….] France has handled the resultant situation in the worst possible way. Unless it assimilates these millions successfully, its future will be grim. But it has separated and isolated immigrants and their descendants geographically into dehumanizing ghettos; it has pursued economic policies to promote unemployment and create dependence among them, with all the inevitable psychological consequences; it has flattered the repellent and worthless culture that they have developed; and it has withdrawn the protection of the law from them, allowing them to create their own lawless order.

Prescient, indeed. It was written in 2002.

The Economist has a fawning review of Mark Burnell, which is interesting because it is markedly different from the reader comments on each of his books at Amazon.com vs. Amazon.co.uk. Either someone at the Economist really likes this guy, or US readers have greatly different ways of wanting their thrillers. Check out:
The Rhythm Section: US UK
Chameleon: US (“plodding sequel”), UK (The Economist: “Bigger and slicker in every way than his first novel. If you buy no other thriller this holiday season, buy this one.”)
Gemini: US UK
The Third Woman: UK (not yet available in the States).
Only one way to find out, I suppose…..

Julian Fellowes: Snobs
Picked up at an airport for light summer reading, this little novel about social climbers fits the bill, though I was a little disappointed. The main story is about Edith Lavery, a woman of middle class and high aspirations who marries into the landed aristocracy of England, to her later disappointment (her husband is crushingly dull). She is forced to choose between dull status and lively indistinction.
What she chooses really isn’t that important – it seems the author ran out of steam towards the end, anyway – but the writing has its moments. The chief character in the book is not Edith, who is rather shallowly portrayed, but the narrator, an actor who has been born into the right social circles (knows everyone from school etc.), has the right manners and strategies (the convoluted explanations of WHY everyone behaves as weirdly as they do carries much of the writing), but also knows life outside stately homes and Sloan Square.
Surprisingly, the aristocrats are portrayed rather sympathetically: They are secure in their positions, but rather narrow in their mindsets and occupations (maintaining their homes, hunting and farming, as well as being present at the requisite social functions). Their way of life is threatened, but they are too well-bred to notice. It is the social climbers that are skewered. One high point comes when the aristocrats are invited out to a fancy restaurant by someone who wants to impress, without knowing – as the narrator, of course, does – that certain people never goes to restaurants for fancy dinners, preferring to do that at home. The evening ends up as an expensive disaster for the host, though entertaining for the readers.
All in all, an enjoyable book, but not one I will re-read in the immediate future.

Peter Mayle: A year in Provence, Toujours Provence, and Encore Provence.
Frances Mayes: Under the Tuscan Sun.
Sarah Turnbull: Almost French.
These books are a little like James Herriot‘s stories from his days as a mid-20th centry Yorkshire vet: They praise the simple country life (except Turnbull’s, though the countryside features there, too) in the voice of an enchanted and formerly more or less uncultured (or, at least, uninformed) city dweller. I read (or re-read) them as a precursor to an Italian holiday – though, working on the theory that Provence is very like Italy (which it isn’t) I didn’t get through Mayes until after I was back. And Turnbull was read in two quick sittings because my daughter had promised it to a friend (and I got to blog it before her, so there).
The books are quite different, reflecting author background and goals of writing. Peter Mayle is a former ad man from London who has semi-retired to writing books and displays the laid-back (or, at least, wanting to seem laid-back) and self-disparaging tone of the English gentleman. His writing, despite numerous books to his credit, is studiously effortless and very relaxedly humoristic – reflecting, I think, the ideal of effortless and gifted amateurism as epitomized by Dorothy L. Sayer’s Parker’s Lord Peter Wimsey. Frances Mayes teaches creative writing and publishes poetry and cookery books, causing some delightful linguistic bulls-eyes and quite a few recipes. Sarah Turnbull is an investigative journalist and adds cultural analysis and self-reflection to what is a very personal journey (though not too personal).
All recommended, of course, as light-hearted reading in summer, but also as preparation for cultures which can be a bit harsh when experienced in the raw. Better then to have a little pre-cooking done by experienced, if ex-patriate, connoisseurs.

Jeremy Paxman: The English: Portrait of a people
Fun book – really a collection of essays – on the English (not to be confused with Britain…..). A good companion to Bill Bryson’s Notes From a Small Island, which Paxman pans a number of times with the huffiness of an academically oriented journalist beaten to the punch by an American with better jokes and fewer footnotes.
Paxman sees the English myth – of “mustn’t grumble”, uneducated elite and imperial post-partum depressions – as a big lie. Hooliganism, modernism and individuality are not aberrations, but the true English character, and have always been. Interesting chapter on the strict hierarchical relationship between the sexes, as well as the consequences of generations trained never to display emotion.
Recommended.

John Le Carre: Absolute Friends
John le Carre’s novels tend to focus on goodhearted people caught in circumstances that are too big for them. This time it is Ted Mundy, sometime revolutionary and later spy, whose friendship and later contact with a German spy comes back to bite him when the Cold War is officially over.
Reading this book was an uneven experience – the first two thirds are vintage le Carre, describing espionage as only he can. Most of the last third is the mystery of the book, when new circumstances come up and the reader can share the main protagonist’s confusion and alternative explanations. The conclusion of the book was, if unexpected, something of a disappointment – unlike most of Le Carre’s books, which tend to be subtle to the point of confusion, the resolution feels like a tacked-on explanation for the lay and not too smart reader.
The thriller industry was badly served by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Le Carre has fared better than most, but this book, while enjoyable reading, leaves you with a feeling that he really would like to continue writing about the good old days of espionage. As do the characters he portrays.
Not that I blame him – masterpieces like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People leave me wanting more, too.

Lynne Truss: Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
After reading this book, I can no longer read The Economist without noticing the very British overuse of commas, and have acquired a gnawing anxiety about my own punctuation, first-language English or not. I just wish someone would write a book like this for the Norwegian language. In fact, I wish Norway – the only country I know with two official languages and nobody that speaks either – would get used to the idea that languages have rules, and are stronger for it.
Anyway, recommended along with Strunk and White, Bill Bryson’s Mother Tongue and Made in America. Sticklers, unite!

Barack Obama: Dreams from My Father
Barack Obama is an amazing person: A child of an absentee black father (student from Kenya) and white mother (small-town girl from Kansas), he has been elected senator of Illinois and was the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review. At the last Democratic Party convention, his keynote address instantly positioned him as the new hope of the party, with his personification of the American Dream.
The book, a very introspective autobiography, sketches rather than chronicles his journey from small child in a somewhat protected environment up to going to Harvard for his law degree, much of the time spent as a community organizer in Chicago’s South Side. He visits Kenya searching for an understanding of his father, finding the societal and familial relations in Kenya no less difficult than in Chicago. Though slightly dated (the book was written 10 years ago, and not updated save a new preface), the complexity of dealing with poverty and slums in Chicago and other urban areas are well described through personal experiences (a refreshing brake from the sometimes stereotypical reporterese commonly seen in NY Sunday Times Magazines and similar publications).
The book resonated with me because (while not multiracial as he is) I can understand and empathize with Obama’s feeling of not belonging – or, rather, of simultaneously belonging many places and yet not completely identifying with any one of them. In an age of seemingly simpleminded politics and increasingly spin-oriented politicians, it is rather reassuring to know that at least one US senator has the experience of life in the less privileged lane; the perseverance and intellectual capability to analyze deeply entrenched issues and work at resolving them; and the willingness to keep the complex issues complex and (as his keynote speech at the Democratic convention shows) the simple things simple.
Highly recommended.

I am just back from a week’s travel in New England. While it was fantastic to be back at Harvard Square again (one of my favorite places in the world), the happiness was considerably marred by the discovery that my favorite bookstore, WordsWorth, had closed just a month before.
WordsWorth was fantastic – you could spend hours in its rather small, but extremely well-stocked (100.000 titles) store. I have never gone in there without coming out again with something – often more than my budget and luggage allowance really would allow. And the service – I once asked for three different books: One technical book, a novel, and an (at least to me) relatively obscure book on history of economic theory – and the guy behind the counter not only knew where they were, but also that one was on order (the economic history) and would be there in a week. Without consulting the computer. Wow.
Oh well, I suppose one reason for the demise was that the Harvard COOP bookstore finally provided some serious competition when Barnes and Noble took over its management. Still, a sad story.
Luckily, there is the Harvard Bookstore, with its knowledgable staff and well-stocked used book cellar. And in Amherst, I found the Jeffery Amherst Bookshop, which has much more than their Emily Dickinson collection.
So there is still hope in variety. Harvard COOP isn’t too bad (though the web site doesn’t do it justice). But I’ll miss WordsWorth.

Neal Stephenson: The System of the World (Volume Three of The Baroque Cycle)

The last of the three volumes in the Baroque Cycle, The System of the World, is both a detective story set in London in 1714 and a phantasy on the very early beginnings of the industrial age, where the natural philosophers leave their roots in alchemy and become real scientists. Isaac Newton and Gottfried von Leibnitz figure prominently here, with much rivalry but also some interesting philosophickal discussions, as do the personages from the earlier volumes, The Confusion and Quicksilver: Jack and Bob Shaftoe and various of their relatives, Eliza, Dappa, Van Hoek, Daniel Waterhouse, and the enigmatic Enoch Root.

The System seemed to me the most worked through of the three volumes – there are fewer digressions and meandering descriptions, the intrigue is tighter though perhaps more predictable. The language is less modern, the backdrop of old London interesting, and the research into the outline of the Tower of London or the details of justice metered and rendered is deep and more relevant than in the other volumes. I enjoyed The System the most of the three and found it the easiest to read.

Overall, there has been progression through the three volumes – somewhat unusual, though I wonder whether not sales have suffered because the Quicksilver was comparatively hard to get through, with more historic personages and less progression in the story. I like long books, philosophy of science, and enough magical realism (we never get an explanation for the denseness of the Solomonic Gold, for instance, as well as Enoch Root’s longevity – he shows up in Cryptonomicon, too) that you get a sense of the playfulness of the author.

Recommended – though some perseverance is necessary with the first volume. Have fun.

Patrick Bishop’s Fighter Boys is a thorough history of the young fighter pilots who saved Britain during the Summer of 1940, at enormous personal cost. The book covers strategy, tactics, organization, individual dogfights as well as the aftermath of Fighter Command.
As a child, I read my father’s collection of Biggles books, and learned the difference between Hurricanes, Spitfires and Mosquitos, as children tend to do. This book gives the real story – and one of the things it taught me is that in the Biggles stories about the Battle of Britain, Captain W. E. Johns was authentic. The battle was fought by young men who saw it as a game, responding to the danger and the horrible injuries (primarily from burns, creating members of the Guinea Pig Club) with understated humour, but suffering badly in silence.

Neal Stephenson: The Confusion (Volume Two of The Baroque Cycle)

I just finished The Confusion, the second volume of The Baroque Cycle (and it really is three books, you can’t start at volume two or three) and liked it much more than the first volume. Where the first volume was confusing in its storyline and a tiny little bit pretentious in its wealth of researched detail, the second volume is more lighthearted and readable. There is much more swashbuckling, centering on the picareque of Jack Shaftoe meandering through Asia and Latin America with a merry and eventually shrinking Cabal of conspirators, and a hint of the creation of a world-wide system of currencies and trade, with Eliza’s global financial machinations. But Stephenson has a problem with endings – like Norse sagas, his characters have a habit of suddenly disappearing.
Like Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose, The Confusion suffers from not being able to get fully into style: The modernity of language and thought of the main characters as well as their frequent communications with each other decreases realism while speeding up the plot. I suspect Stephenson made a deliberate decision here – whether it is motivated by consideration for his tech-enabled audience or by a belief that people thought and acted very close to how we do today then doesn’t really matter.
The Confusion, much more than Quicksilver, was fun. It has an element of continuance, like the second of the Lord of the Rings movies, but also plenty of adventure, some humor, and a touch of magical realism. I liked it and have already ordered the last volume, The System of the World, which was published two days ago. Stay tuned.

Interesting book on the Krakatoa explosion: Simon Winchester (2003): Krakatoa, New York, HarperCollins. Subtitled “The day the world exploded: August 27, 1883”, this is a detailed account of the history of the Sunda straits and the Dutch colonial powers, prior eruptions, and the eruption that blew Krakatoa away and which was literally seen (or, at least, the pressure wave registered) all over the world. Winchester sees the event as the first “global” event – thanks to the newly established telegraphic network, the news was known within days all over the world. He also, less convincingly, sees Krakatoa as a catalyst to the Islamic rebellions against the Dutch colonial powers a few years after.
Most interesting to me was the explanation of the mechanisms of the eruption (the meeting of two tectonic plates of differing composition, water-rich material being pulled under one of the plates and then pressuring its way up again) as well as the sheer size of the eruption. The noise of the final explosion was so loud that it was heard 3000 miles away – on the island of Rodrigues, where people thought it was naval gunnery. This is equivalent to hearing a noise made in New York while sitting in San Francisco. Krakatoa remains largest single natural catastrophy known to modern man, at least by some measures. 38,000 people died, a paddle steamer was lifted 3 miles upland, and a number of tsunamis, the largest the height of a 10-storey building, swept away whole villages, harbors and ships.
Winchester writes in an almost Victorian detail, sometimes overdoing the flowery language – I suppose it is hard to avoide being influenced by one’s sources. The book is very detailed – but I like that. One small irritation, however, was the low quality of the overview charts in the beginning of the book. It took me quite a while to understand precisely where Krakatau was the Sunda strait. A more detailed overview map with some of the places that were eradicated (such as Anjer and Merok) would have helped.
Recommended.

Just as I was beginning to despair and think that another Name of the Rose wasn’t possible (and that we forever are doomed to read the illiterate snippets of The Da Vinci Code,) along comes Matthew Pearl’s The Dante Club to rewive our spirits.
This is a very good book – historically correct as far as possible, painting fascinating portraits of Longfellow, Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., and other literary figures of late 19th century Boston, and with a proper plot, shades of Sherlock Holmes mixed with modern-day notions of what happens after the conclusion of a war.
One of the critiques of The Name of the Rose was that it seemed a bit after the fact: That the main protagonist had ideas that were several hundred years ahead of themselves, in expression if not in content. I had the same feeling reading this book, but it seems based in the writings of the people involved – and I am continually amazed by how early ideas turn up, and how we seem to rediscover them in every generation.
Nevertheless, The Dante Club is a must read in the historical crime mystery genre (if there is such a thing), and a relief, as I watch the NYT Book Magazine carrying ads for talks on lectures on The Da Vinci Code. Pearl can write, is historically correct as far as possible, and can set up a plot. His book is not very filmable, though. But it is very readable.
Very highly recommended.

Light summer reading that is neither shallow nor pointless: Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. About an autistic (at least that is what I assume he is, since all I know about the subject comes from Dustin Hoffmann’s performance in Rain Man) boy who finds his neighbor’s dog killed, and sets out to find out who did it. The journey he sets out on is one of very small and carefully planned steps – those of a person who is extremely smart in one dimension and handicapped in almost anything else. Wonderful insight in into the mind of a child with a psychiatric disorder – or, as the protagonist would say, we don’t know whether it is an insight or not, since we can’t get into other people’s minds. But it feels right, which is something he would not say.
Highly recommended.