The Harafish by Naguib Mahfouz

Posted by J

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385423357/ref=pd_rvi_gw_1/102-2114092-4768951?ie=UTF8

I've had this book sitting on my shelf for years, I think I picked it up towards the end of our year in the late 90s living in Cairo. I'm generally a fan of Naguib Mahfouz's writings, having read the Cairo Trilogy, Children of the Alley, The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, The Day The Leader Died, and Miramar. Not all his work is of equal quality, but I can honestly say I've enjoyed every one of his books on one level or another, and several have been absolutely fantastic. Perhaps it was his recent passing that inspired me to pick up and finally read The Harafish.

I'd put the Harafish a notch below his best works, but still quite good. It feels like something of a mix between Children of the Alley and the Cairo Trilogy. Like Children of the Alley, it follows the life of a single Cairene Alley (the quintessential Egyptian local community) through multiple generations of time, showing it with all its glories and depravities. In classic Mahfouzian style, a flood of characters bombards you. How the man manages to portray so many different personality types amazes me. The man must have spent years and years just observing in depth all the people he grew up with in the heart of Old Cairo, and his full skill is on display in this regard in The Harafish.

Also, while Mahfouz is no prophet or philosopher, he does manage a wonderful job - also fully displayed in The Harafish - of showing how all these different personalities confront the big questions of life. Who is God, why doesn't he stop all the evil in the world, why are we tempted with sin, is it really wrong to indulge a little, how do men and women rise and fall from glory to the gutter and back and forth through the generations, why do the bad go unpunished and the good suffer, why is social justice so elusive, etc, etc.?

And like the Cairo Trilogy, Mahfouz presents these issues in the flow of the life of a single family's ups and downs. Its definitely more Children-of-the-Alley-ish in that this covers a much broader swathe of time and far more people than the Trilogy (so much less individual character depth is explored), and actually moves even quicker than "Alley", but as with Si Sayyid's family in the trilogy, it is the single family (in one form of descendants or another) of the Al-Nagi's that is tracked.

If you're looking for a good introduction to Mahfouz's writings, the author is good enough that you actually have a lot of great choices to go from. This could certainly be one such entry point, though it certainly shouldn't be the final book by him that you read.

The Psychology of Trading

Posted by J

The Psychology of Trading by Brett N. Steenbarger

http://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Trading-Techniques-Minding-Markets/dp/0471267619/sr=8-1/qid=1158890793/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-2114092-4768951?ie=UTF8&s=books

After reading "Trend Following" which focused on a specific type of trading and it's practitioners, I thought the title of this book would give a different angle on trading. I was right. While it may not be a masterpiece, as a motivational book that realistically covers the core elements of self-control that a trader needs, I thought this was an excellent book. I recommended it to my wife as well as a generally great self-help book.

Steenbarger's basic thesis is simple: to succeed in trading as in life one needs to learn how to achieve self-mastery. What he does is elucidate that from several different angles from his work both as a professional psychologist and a trader. Sometimes he veers off into slightly weird angles: attaching ones' self to all sorts of electrodes or encouraging one trader to "have a stroke". But even there it's mostly just getting a bit over-enthusiastic as he does a good job of driving home some basic points about how to recognize ones' mental state, identify patterns that drive us to act against our own best interests', experience or create "wake up calls" to get out of them, and (most importantly) how to build new patterns of behavior and healthy habits.

He uses story-telling (altered to protect identities) from his psychology practice to great effect. Also he uses numerous examples from his own life and his own trading. He spends a fair amount of time (though not as much as on the self-control and psychology themes) discussing how markets are patterned. Frankly some of his market theories I'm not so sure about, but he doesn't dwell on them as much and in any case he freely acknowledges there are many ways of approaching markets and what works for one person does not necessarily work for another.

I'd recommend this book to anybody who feels they need to overcome self-defeating habits, minor or major. For traders especially, but for people more broadly as well.

Trend Following

Posted By J

http://www.amazon.com/Trend-Following-Traders-Millions-Expanded/dp/0131345508/sr=8-1/qid=1158630717/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-2114092-4768951?ie=UTF8&s=books

This is less the how-to book I presumed when I opened it up than a review of some successful trend followers from a "believing" journalist's perspective. I don't mean to make it sound like some sort of Amway promotional, but there is a fine line this author walks between promoting the notion of trend-following trading systems on what almost seems like a religious-fervor basis and simply reviewing and recounting such traders' success.

That critique aside, I enjoyed the review of many of those successful traders whom I had not known of before. Several large hedge fund managers and successful traders seem to have liked the book enough to endorse it as well. And while it's not a how-to book, Covel does do a decent job of reviewing the (very) basic concepts of trend-following for those unfamiliar with the topic. It was enough to get me thinking about whether or not this is a style of trading I should pursue learning more about since it sounds like the sort of data-based process which I would enjoy. A decent read and not a long one. Oh, and it's cheesy, but he sticks a couple inspirational or informative quotes on every page, so keeps things interesting. That and lots of charts and table help keep the book moving along (book looks bigger than it is).

Ornament Of The World

Posted By J

http://www.amazon.com/Ornament-World-Christians-Tolerance-Medieval/dp/0316168718/sr=1-1/qid=1158375558/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-2114092-4768951?ie=UTF8&s=books

A fascinating book, part history, part (dramatized but true) story-telling, part lament. The author tells snippets of the history of medieval Spain describing the manner in which a world most of us have forgotten flourished in a fit of creative zeal and then vanished under the weight of internal and external intolerance and greed. Most in the West have forgotten that 1492 was the end of a golden era for the Arab/Islamic world and for Spain itself in favor of our rememberances of the new world and an era of gold. (Aside: reading "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" right after finishing this book was a fascinating exercise in "what ifs"). The book is a hard to put down page turner with fascinating stories of Arab-Ladino-Hebrew speaking Jewish warriors, self-Arabizing Norman kings, transmissions of knowledge across cultural boundaries in translation factories that were the envy of Europe and Baghdad, and numerous others.

Arabs and Muslims still look upon medieval Spain as a Golden Era painfully lost (often correlating the loss to the modern loss of Palestine). While many in the West may see this as some sort of latent threat, a read of this book will explain just why it was a Golden Era, how it was sharing and cultural exchange which enriched Spain and ultimately Europe, and how the downfall of that Golden Era bears great lessons that neither east nor west seems able to fully grasp to this day.

Mao: The Unknown Story

Posted By J

http://www.amazon.com/Mao-Story-Jung-Chang/dp/0679422714/sr=8-1/qid=1158372816/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-2114092-4768951?ie=UTF8&s=books

Clearly a well-researched book (tons of primary sources - though I didn't care for the way the references were all dumped at the back instead of footnoted or endnoted), a devastating portrait of Mao that shatters myths (the long march narrative of the Chinese government for example is debunked), but the authors have such a hard bent against Mao that by the end of the book it's clear that their thesis no longer properly explains Mao's later life at least. He was selfish, ruthless, violent, manipulative, and cunning and this allowed him to become the master of his Maoist/Stalinist state. But after detailing periods where no one could so much as think outside a Maoist framework suddenly movements of a million people protesting against Mao's policies emerge seemingly out of nowhere if the author's framework is to be believed. The book they produced effectively shatters myths and explains the first half to two-thirds of Mao's life, but the latter years and the interaction between Mao and the China he ruled don't fall neatly into the author's thesis.

I also have to say that the book opened my eyes up to just how horrendous the extent of China's violent turmoil in the 20th century was. People who spend so much time these days harping on how supposedly inherently violent the Arab world is and looking for derogatory cultural and religious reasons to blame and Arabs and Islam would do well to read this book. Zarqawi and Bin Laden had nothing on the Communists, Nationalists, warlords, Japanese and others who turned China into a sea of blood that far outstripped even the horrors of today's Iraq (the Congo of the past decade may be a far better comparison point, but then who in the West could care less about the Congo?). And yet China has emerged into something better. That is not to say that China isn't full of problems or that Iraq is destined to rise like a Phoenix, but rather to make the point that cultural or religious factors are clearly not good core explanatory factors and that we're far better off looking to the motives of groups and individuals who operate on remarkably similar bases the world over - for good and evil, in Mao's case mostly evil.

All that said, a book worth reading, I just feel I need to read some more modern Chinese history to round the picture out. I've copied a much more succinct Amazon review below.




Communism is not for the faint-hearted, August 31, 2006
Reviewer:
Thomas Koetzsch (Hong Kong) - See all my reviewsJung Chang and Jon Halliday's book is a rather detailed account of Mao's life. The authors describe the life of a master schemer - in another life he may have made a good chess player - and manipulator. Occasionally one feels that every aspect of China including her population is just another factor in his schemes to be manipulated because on a number of occasions he mentions re-shaping the population into a more useful tool. 80 million people killed is a most horrendous figure, however, one does feel on a number of occasions, that it could have been a lot worse. What did put me off a bit is the one-sidedness of the book. Mao was a character with few positive qualities; having read this book I can't think of a single one except perhaps that of unifying China into one entity (well almost). The myth of Mao continues to legitimise the present Government of the People's Republic. In that respect I find the authors' epilogue a bit naïve. What other choices would the People's Republic's Government have without jeopardising its existence. On a more positive note one can almost feel the tremendous amount of research that must have gone into this book.