QUICK TAKE: "The Terror Presidency" by Jack Goldsmith

The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration

by Jack Goldsmith

http://www.amazon.com/Terror-Presidency-Judgment-Inside-Administration/dp/0393065502/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-4990314-6451238?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1192850165&sr=8-1

This book is well and truly scary and deserves to be read alongside Ron Suskind's "The One Percent Presidency" (which I reviewed here). Liberals have been hailing Jack Goldsmith - former Assistant Attorney General heading the Office of Legal Counsel under Bush - as a supposed repentant conservative who thought Bush went over the top. Read the book and you'll see a man who is fine with torture and Cheney's vision of an imperial Presidency with very few checks or balances. Basically, his only fallout with the Administration was because he thought his job was to find legal excuses to let Bush and Cheney break any law they wanted to, but that at the end of the day he had a couple of issues that try as he might he just couldn't figure out a legal loophole for. He resigned because he realized he'd disappointed his evil empire overlords, not because he had any remorse of conscience over torturing people (including people he had gone to view in Bush's gulags).

That said, the man is not dense like Bush, I definitely learned a lot from him about how the executive branch's legal issues work and in particular the ways Bush and Cheney have abused and destroyed even the thin walls of checks and balances that were already there. Probably the scariest thing I learned from the book that was new was the exact mechanisms which the President can use to ensure people can break any law he wants broken and no one will ever be held accountable. Basically, the President wants to directly break or contradict a law passed by Congress. So he goes to the Office of Legal Counsel (run by one of his own appointees - traditionally the office tried to be genuinely independent but only their own sense of propriety "ensured" that, and under Bush even that paper thin protection is gone) who then writes a legal opinion stating that actually the law Congress passed is unconstitutional because the President can do whatever he wants in supposed self-proclaimed times of war (never mind the obvious falsehood of that notion or even if you believe it then never mind the fact that Congress has not declared war on anybody in Bush's years in office), or else playing word games with the language of a law passed by Congress and claiming that the President can really do whatever it was that the law was clearly meant to ban. The memo/opinion is often kept secret but disseminated to the CIA and other agencies who then proceed to break the law knowing that if they are ever called out and hauled into court that they can say "hey, we were acting in good faith under the best legal advice available" which generally means no court will ever hold them accountable. Leaving the only accountability possible left to be impeachment of the President which a feckless Congress will almost never do or succeed in doing and which by its very nature is a political circus far more than a judicial hearing. So basically, separation of powers no longer exists in reality, the Office of Legal Counsel and such procedures have rendered it null and void, the President makes the law, executes it, and judges whether his own actions are legal. Brilliant, that's some Republican Democracy we've got there. The founding fathers are no doubt turning over in their graves.

It's a quick read, very much worth it.

QUICK TAKE: "The New Market Wizards" by Jack D. Schwager

[I've been busy reading lately but haven't found time to write my normal synopsis when finished. 4 books actually. So next few "reviews" will just be quick snapshots.]

The New Market Wizards: Conversations With America's Top Traders
by Jack D. Schwager

http://www.amazon.com/New-Market-Wizards-Conversations-Marketplace/dp/0471132365/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-4990314-6451238?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1192850253&sr=1-1

The 1990s follow-up to Schwager's original "Market Wizards" written in the 80s (and reviewed by me here). Excellent like the first, good sampling of successful traders with lots of different styles, but like the first you get constant reminders of the basics required to successfully trade - control risk, control emotions, have a system you have tested and believe in, etc. I recommend it just as much as the first one to anyone who aspires to be a trader of any sort or who simply wants to understand what makes them tick. In fact, I believe the more I read books like this and try to apply the principles in my own trading and outside-of-trading life, that the traits that make a truly good trader are more or less the same that make a good person. Which may sound odd given the money-grubbing reputation of traders, but read the book and I think you'll see what I mean.

"A History of the Vikings" by Gwyn Jones

A History of the Vikings
by Gwyn Jones

http://www.amazon.com/History-Vikings-Gwyn-Jones/dp/0192801341/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-7534501-9212006?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190506418&sr=8-1

I've spent a lot of time reading up on Islamic history, but I recently decided I haven't delved nearly as much as I should into the Scandinavian side of my heritage. So I went looking for a good general history of the Viking age in particular in hopes of connecting with my ancient roots on that end, especially since I grew up with those images and motifs very much a part of my life.

I poked around on Amazon until I found this book which was labelled by a bunch of people as a classic and supposedly excellent all-encompassing work. My opinion? I started off thinking "good gravy, this author is clearly smart, but he doesn't know jack about how to write a readable history". Jones has encyclopedic knowledge, but that manifests itself in a writing style that is not only full of run-on sentences (I know, motes and beams, I'm terribly guilty of that too) but endless lists of un-referenced personal and place names. "Just like when Olaf Sigvigtrigbjornisudsiwhozenfluzenwagentragenbjornarsson went off raiding in the fjords of Trondelskaggerakskeveigen with his famous cousin Eirik Steinarsonenvovenbobbenbjornentornen for the legendary king of Upsalawalatralalalalaland..." is the kind of sentence fragment that comes to mind. The man just doesn't know how to give any context and clearly expects the reader to know long lists of names and places and important moments in history that the first-time reader just plain can't know. On top of that, he is old-school in his use of English. I believe the book was first published in the 60s (from research that went back much further) and updated again in the 1980s. He comes from a different generation in how he writes and in how he expects the reader to take it in.

All those things said, my view of the book did change as I read it and I finished it glad to have read it and genuinely feeling I got a decent broad overview of the viking era, historically and culturally. Firstly, I was determined to finish the book and not just give up after 100 pages, so I simply compartmentalized my brain to accept that I wouldn't be able to know all the names, places, and dates would just have to go with the flow. As time went on, while I didn't know all the names, enough of a framework was built up in my mind (from minimally sufficient repetition of those details in the text) to allow me to feel I understood at least generally where specific items he mentioned fit into the bigger picture. The sheer volume of his facts allowed that.

Secondly, he covers a very broad scope of topics. Historical events, personalities, economics, culture, warfare, voyages, interactions with other cultures and societies, daily life, pagan and Christian religion, archaeology, ancient primary sources and many other topics all get a decent treatment. One walks away feeling they really got a glimpse into what society on a micro and macro level was really like, at least as best as can be understood a thousand years later.

Also, I don't doubt some of his conclusions likely seem dated since the book is quite old (not that I would have enough knowledge to know which conclusions would be off), but Jones has a fundamentally humble and skeptical mind that seeks aggressively not to draw conclusions where the facts as known don't justify them. So, for example, the Viking sagas recorded mostly a couple hundred years after the end of the Viking age in Iceland - taken relatively literally by many in the past - receive very critical treatment for the vast portion of them which cannot be corroborated by other means. Culturally painful perhaps to those who have relied on them, but logically the safest thing to do to make sure what a historian does claim to know is based on solid footing and not hopeful conjecture.

Oh, and for me personally being as fascinated as I am with Islamic culture, I really like the fairly deep coverage that Viking contacts with the Islamic world received. The Vikings travelled far and wide and at this time the Islamic empires were some of the wealthiest, most powerful, and most "civilized" in the world at the time (having inherited and expanded upon much of the cultural legacy of Rome, the Byzantines, the Persians, and others). So cultural interactions were inevitable and quite interesting. It was particularly interesting to read some of the first-hand primary source accounts of such interactions and see pictures of viking hoards of wealth that included Arabic coins in readable Kufic script.

All in all, not having read any other books to compare this to on the topic and having seen the comments on the book from others who know the topic much better than I do, I would recommend it. Just be prepared to deal with the book on its own terms, its not an easy read even if it did get more readable as it went along.

"Islamic Inscriptions" by Sheila Blair

Islamic Inscriptions
by Sheila S. Blair

http://www.amazon.com/Islamic-Inscriptions-Sheila-Blair/dp/0814713289/ref=sr_1_1/002-7363174-5144854?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1187740474&sr=8-1

Ugh, ok, this was knowledge I needed to pick up and it really is a truly valuable reference book on the topic, but...ugh...it was a textbook in every sense of the word. Islamic Inscriptions is the main reference work (at least that I could find and it was well-reviewed by specialists) on the topic of...Islamic Inscriptions. Blair covers monumental inscriptions, wood, textiles, glass, and other portable objects.

It's probably worth a couple notes on what the book is and is not. It is not a detailed review of lots of examples of the various genres of Islamic inscriptions, but is really more of an introduction to the entire field. As such, rather than lots and lots of illustrations and detailed discussion of actual texts used in inscriptions and detailed discussions of stylistic developments with images - rather than all of that, it is more of an overview of everything that has and hasn't been done in the field. That does involve a decent number of images and lots of mention of different examples of specific inscriptions, but the book spends more time telling you about other sources where you can find the images, texts, and translations than it does actually showing them to you.

What you get as a result is a sense of where the field is, you get a decent overview of the structure of how inscriptions work with a decent smattering of examples, you get a good geographic overview of the differences between regions and across time and materials, and you get a good bibliography. But do you get a huge catalog of lots of examples with transcriptions and texts? No.

In all fairness, the sheer volume of examples she points to in other sources shows you the book probably could have run 1000 pages if she had included them all, if that would even have been possible (I doubt it actually given the likely copyright restrictions and rarity of many of the objects and hence likely paucity of available images). Still, it does feel like the book was more of an introduction and overview than a comprehensive study to fill one with a sense of understanding the field. Perhaps that's good, sometimes it may be too easy to think we know it all after reading a book rather than having just been introduced. This book at least gives you an honest level of knowledge.

For me, I'm looking for artistic inspiration backed by technical and historical understanding, so I value the knowledge I gained, but I'm going to have to keep looking now using this as a starting point, not an end point.

"Shake Hands With The Devil" by Roméo Dallaire

Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda
by Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire

http://www.amazon.com/Shake-Hands-Devil-Failure-Humanity/dp/0786715103/ref=pd_bbs_2/002-7363174-5144854?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1187222660&sr=8-2


I was 18 and in college when the Rwandan genocide occurred. Like most people who saw it unfolding on TV I was shocked and horrified, probably more so than most of my friends and family as I was always very interested in world affairs and couldn't get the image out of my head of reporters measuring the scale of the genocide by counting the bodies per hour floating down the river across the Rwandan border. But, like most folks, I chalked it up as some tragic event in an inexplicably complex corner of Africa and mostly forgot about it as I went on with my life.

Fast forward to 2006. Sometime last year I'm channel surfing and see something on the satellite guide called "Shake Hands with the Devil" on the Documentary Channel and saw it was something about Rwanda. Curious, I started watching, and before long not only was I pulled back into remembering the savagery of the genocide, but I found myself sucked into the personality of the man whom the documentary was about - the head of the small UN mission in Rwanda at the time, General Roméo Dallaire.

I've actually never seen that entire documentary, just large chunks of it. It actually was about his return to the country 10 years after the genocide and followed him as he visited old friends and places where events had occurred, with lots of space for flashbacks and commentary from others. The visual imagery was disturbing and moving, I actually just ordered the DVD so I can watch the whole thing (you can order it here - http://www.newsreel.org/nav/title.asp?tc=CN0175&s), but when I heard Dallaire had written a book, I wanted to read that too.

The book is in some ways a mini-autobiography, followed by a detailed account of Dallaire's year in Rwanda. There are numerous instances of descriptions of the more gruesome events he witnessed, but it is not a catalog of attrocities. It is events as he experienced them, and clearly going through something so harrowing while simultaneously struggling day in and day out to do something - anything - to save people and stop the killing, he became numb for a while to much of what was occurring (though he paid for it dearly with post-traumatic stress disorder, alcoholism, and nightmarish flashbacks for years since).

Not insensitive though, not by a long shot. Dallaire strikes me as a fundamentally humble, decent, hard-working, and dedicated man. And utterly and completely color-blind, a through-and-through believer in the common humanity of us all. He grew up living between the French and English-speaking worlds of Canada and often found himself trying to be the conciliator or else someone castigated by both sides for failing to march to one extremist drum or the other. But he stuck it out and clearly his dedication to hard work combined with his genuine affection and caring for others is what turned him into an admired and respected leader in the Canadian military and ultimately as head of UNAMIR (the UN mission in Rwanda). He wouldn't and doesn't say that himself in his book, he is more apt to focus on his failings and point out where he is responsible for mistakes, but it shines through. With 100 generals like him running UN operations (if backed up by proper troops, political will, and logistics), an amazing amount of good and conflict resolution could clearly be accomplished in the world.

But back to the book. He runs through his life and Canadian military career pre-Rwanda, and then from his copious notes (and those of his dedicated staff) constructs an almost day-by-day account of what happened. What emerges is a story of multiple failures by almost every party involved in the conflict that allowed it to happen and play out as disastrously as it did. No one who screwed up escapes blame, the UN bureaucracy, the US, France, Belgium, NGOs, the pre-war Rwandan government, the rebel RPF force that became the new government, the Bangladeshi military (for pete's sake!), and many others. On the other hand, the men Dallaire commanded and many individuals and some organizations shine through as having remained tiny flickers of light in the darkest days. The Rwandan Red Cross somehow managed to keep operating throughout the conflict despite many of its workers themselves and the patients they were ferrying being massacred. The troops Dallaire commanded including an amazing pair of contingents from Tunisia and Ghana and many individuals from other countries saved thousands of lives, but the men were permanently scarred by the massacres they couldn't stop (sometimes right in front of their eyes) and some they even indirectly helped cause (being sent to a place to rescue someone, being unable to find them because they were hiding in fear of their lives, leaving, then coming back the next day to find the people slaughtered because the Interahamwe militia had seen the UN troops and realized someone was hiding there).

Anyhow, these are just some broad impressions from the book. His conclusions at the end are perhaps the weakest part of the book - well intentioned, but perhaps not the most practically thought out. But I count that as a minor error and it doesn't change the fact that if the politicians would have listened to him more they would and could have done far better for Rwanda and the entire Great Lakes region in the decade of misery that has followed. What comes through is a man who genuinely and deeply cared for the people and country he was trying to save, was blocked and ultimately used as a pawn by conniving forces bigger than him (especially France and the US), but who nonetheless showed great courage and truly showed the spirit of what UN forces are ideally trying to be - studiously neutral, but genuinely out to try to create the conditions for peace and not afraid to wield a stick when necessary. And in an incredibly practical way. This is no flower child speaking, he is a military man, but a military man with a heart, a brain, and an ability to work with people with an incredible intensity that is sorely needed in the world. Read the book, you'll never look at Rwanda, the world community and powers that be in Rwanda, or the UN quite the same. And you'll thank the Lord that there are men like Roméo Dallaire in this world.

"Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling" by Richard Lyman Bushman

Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling
by Richard Lyman Bushman

http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1400077532/ref=s9_asin_image_1/002-7363174-5144854?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=19GFH3A1D6PEW1WSK8A8&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=278240301&pf_rd_i=507846


I'd heard a great deal about this biography of Joseph Smith and was quite curious to check it out. I am Mormon and the author's approach and background appealed to me - a believing Mormon but also a serious scholar of American religion at Columbia University who wasn't afraid to show the reality that honest scholarship and research on Joseph Smith's life revealed.

The results for me were eye-opening in a very positive way. Fair enough, there are criticisms that can be raised of Bushman's approach, some say he took kid gloves to some topics, others say he gives credence to accusations they don't believe. Personally, I think the only really fair criticisms (admittedly speaking as someone here who is not terribly steeped in primary sources from the era beyond the scriptures Joseph Smith produced) are those of which any good scholar who has produced a good work may be accused of: i.e., that as many questions are raised and left hanging as answered, that some minor points can be argued where the brevity necessary in any book required a more certain-sounding statement, etc. In other words, I find this a good, credible book and work of scholarship and would rather focus on what I learned than the minor concerns some folks would like to get all bent out of shape over.

So, what did I learn? Joseph Smith emerges here as a real human being to me for almost the first time. I won't say the first time, part of my faith has always seen some of his human foibles and struggles as an integral part of why I believe. But here, the full reality of Joseph Smith's personality and failings is laid out side-by-side with his accomplishments. A truly three-dimensional individual emerges. The man really did have a bit of a temper and hot-headed personality that sometimes caused him to act in ways that I probably would have had a tough time dealing with. But then in that way, I've had church leaders today that I've had the same struggles with. In both cases for me as a believer, I realize that I need to turn to higher spiritual principles and the guidance of the Holy Ghost to know how to act. I for one am glad to see Joseph Smith's place in the same spectrum of life as I live today rather than in some unrealistic deified sphere. A deified sphere is where I think he's gone to since and where I hope to get to, but there's not much point in pretending that he or anyone else who ever lived on the earth except Jesus was perfect in this life.

Another thing I always find valuable and which this book gives in spades is the breaking of false assumptions. Now, I'm not one to yell fire in a crowded theater and neither is Bushman: the point is not to say "you've all been duped, look at this stuff Joseph Smith did", but rather to say "here's a full account of what Joseph Smith did in life" and then let the reader sort out for themself what it means. So the subjects are handled in my view honestly and tactfully, and often-times with the questions of the meaning of it all and the why's left hanging where no clear answer is obvious. In other words those searching for either the debunking of certain claims about Joseph Smith (i.e., "he didn't really drink wine or marry already married women, right?") or a justification for them to use aren't going to find Bushman straining to force theories or answers where the evidence doesn't provide them. Instead Bushman is simply the honest scholar, laying out the historical record as best as he can and where no further answers are forthcoming he at best lays out a maybe or two or quite often says "I don't know based on the evidence available at present". That is honest, and that allows a reader like myself to come to these topics and explore them as best as possible with my own mind and theories.

Anyhow, a great read, eye-opening, not faith-destroying in any way for me but faith-building as I think I am in agreement with Joseph Smith himself in consider anything that gives me further knowledge faith-building even if it provides new challenges I have to sort through. Indeed, intellectual challenges if handled right are just like weights in the gym, they build strength when part of a broader strength-training program. For those who feel like this book was an expose which tore up their faith (of whom I think I know at least one), I honestly think they have misread the meaning of Joseph Smith's life and Bushman's attempt to give a comprehensive portrayal of it, but then that is far more a matter of an attitude of faith than of scholarship per se. As a work of scholarship quite aside from faith, I think believers and non-believers can learn a great deal from this book. As a believer, one can similarly gain a much greater understanding of the facts and history of Joseph Smith's era and then go on to build a more complete edifice of faith using that knowledge.

"In the Belly of the Green Bird" by Nir Rosen

In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq
by Nir Rosen

http://www.amazon.com/Belly-Green-Bird-Triumph-Martyrs/dp/0743277031/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-2352339-5517608?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1181506633&sr=1-1

I’ve been a definite fan of Nir Rosen’s reporting from Iraq for several years now. Depending on your point of view, the guy either has a reckless disregard for his own life or nerves of steel. I’d vote for a bit of both as I think he would probably agree, having been the only western reporter getting the story from inside Falluja before the Americans flattened the town in late 2004 (a time when other westerners and lots of Iraqis were getting beheaded and tortured in the town). All the more incredible given that Nir is actually Israeli by birth, a fact which on its own you’d think would have been enough to get him killed anywhere he went in today’s Iraq. Credit his apparently excellent spoken Iraqi Arabic and his complete disavowal of Zionism for giving him the ability to get around and be trusted despite a background which typically would have excluded him from the places he’s been and reported well from.

So, given the guy’s amazing reporting, command of Arabic, wide-ranging travels in Iraq off of the typical western reporter’s beat, etc., I had high hopes for his book. Unfortunately, as with “Against the Gods”, I have to give it a mixed review and for somewhat similar reasons. First off, while Nir is a great reporter, he’s not an author and as with Bernstein it shows in a book that comes off as incoherent in aggregate and feeling much more like a series of anecdotes than a comprehensive whole. I’m not quite sure if the book was meant to be a history, a sort of memoir, a journalist’s travelogue, or some mixture. It just felt disjointed.

Also, as with “Against the Gods”, Nir’s writing seems quite lacking in an understanding of the broader historical context. For Bernstein, this meant a heavy western-centric focus on the notion of risk management, for Rosen it means the repetition of a lot of clichés about ‘eternal’ conflicts and how things have supposedly always been this way, how “Sunnis” have always been in charge and “Shia” always persecuted and lots of other broad-brush explanations for what is fueling the conflict in Iraq. Not that it’s hard to see why Nir might slip into this mode. I at least give him the credit for being on the ground where people speaking in raw, rough words and actions make it feel like the simple explanations have some merit. I contrast that with your standard Green Zone-based western reporter who hears some ignorant US military or State Department official parroting ignorant senior officials about Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds, and then just copies down the US government press releases verbatim calling it reporting. At least Nir was falling victim to the same mentality that most Iraqis were being slowly dragged into as opposed to parroting clueless USG officials (of course there is a link, US officials having basically unleashed the sectarian genie, but from a micro perspective of individual reporters that’s less the issue). Another reason Nir may have fallen into the trap is that at least from what is in the book, it appears he did spend most of his time with the more extreme elements. That is entirely appropriate on one level: it is the angry and violent men that rule Iraq today and who make things happen and they tend to have the most extreme view of things.

Still, also as with “Against the Gods”, the book remains a valuable read. It is at least a compilation of lots of anecdotes and stories from on the ground in Iraq. Nir attended many clerics sermons and sat down with lots of Mujahideen, tribal sheiks, clerics, US foot soldiers, and others. Even if I don’t necessarily trust his explanations and conclusions, the raw material he has gathered here offers a view of the war that few others are able to offer. Some have suggested this book is a critical "Iraqi viewpoint" companion piece to well-written books on the American experience in Iraq. I wish I could give that endorsement, but I can't quite. I can still recommend it though as attempting to be that and offering a lot of unique material, but it remains to raw and disjointed to really be "essential" reading.

Rosen has some maturing to do as a writer and as an analyst if he wants to move beyond (his excellent) magazine pieces, but at least he does have the raw material. I hope he grows in the right ways, because he could produce some very good material. Unfortunately, this book isn't there yet.

"Against the Gods" by Peter L. Bernstein

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

by Peter L. Bernstein

http://www.amazon.com/Against-Gods-Remarkable-Story-Risk/dp/0471295639/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-2352339-5517608?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1181506599&sr=8-1

This book was a bestseller following it’s release in the 90s and one I’ve been meaning to read for sometime. Basically it purports to be a history of the concepts of risk and risk management, veering more and more over the course of the book towards financial risk management (though touching on health and other fields as it goes along). Author Bernstein has received all sorts of critical acclaim and so I came into this with high hopes. But, I have to give the book a mixed review.

Yes, Bernstein is the only one I know to have attempted to tackle this topic and it is a daunting one with its mixture of mathematics, personalities, and history. However, Bernstein is not a historian and it shows. Rather than feeling like a unified work with a solid thesis (theses) and a well-structured narrative, it comes across as a series of almost random anecdotal stories. I didn’t walk away feeling that I had a strong sense of how these concepts had truly evolved from one stage to another to finally bring us to the state of risk management today. Or maybe I should say, I walk away with only vague notions of how that occurred.

The other major criticism is Bernstein’s western-centric approach. He pays brief homage in the beginning to forebears of concepts of risk in other civilizations (Arabs, Indians, Chinese, Greeks, etc.) but ultimately dismisses them and their entire civilizations as having failed to grasp the key concepts. Now, not being a historian of risk, he may well be right, he may well be wrong. But I for one can’t help but think that given the heights other civilizations and their far-flung economies have reached in the past, that they may well have had a far more sophisticated understanding of risk management than Bernstein gives them credit for. I find the hypothesis that they had knowledge which was lost a far more plausible notion than Bernstein’s basic and poorly supported thesis that they simply never figured the basics out. That impression is made all the more powerful by the way Bernstein uses some pretty old-fashioned (and quite frankly erroneous in my view) notions about religious dogma and overwhelming belief in fate in various cultures as the root fault behind other civilizations’ supposed failures to achieve mastery of risk.

Ok, but those faults aside, it is still a book worth reading. If those problems are understood and kept in mind as one reads, the book still remains the only decent attempt I have ever heard of to write a history of how risk management as we know it today developed. I may walk away with mostly just anecdotes from it, but I at least have a whole lot of useful anecdotes I didn’t before!

"Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" by Edwin Lefevre

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
by Edwin Lefevre

http://www.amazon.com/Reminiscences-Stock-Operator-Investment-Classics/dp/0471770884/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-3340297-4786500?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1177976442&sr=8-1

Ok, so I continue to work through my traders' classics' library and this was the next. A lot of people would say it should be the first book on trading anyone should read. In a nutshell, it is the only lightly fictionalized account of legendary early-20th century trader Jesse Livermore. The author here refers to him as Larry Livingston and writes in the first person as if he were the trader himself. But the book was written after several weeks of interviews and more or less tells the life (or at least trader's life) story of Livermore. Originally serialized in The Saturday Evening Post back in the 20s, it was very quickly published as a book and has been considered a must-read classic ever since.

And for good reason. While Livermore was no trained psychologist, he essentially teaches all the key lessons of individual and group psychology that the successful trader needs to know. Understand hope, fear, greed, ignorance and knowledge and when and where they are important. Many of the specific tactics and tools of trading are now, almost a century later, quite outdated - but the psychological element endures. Livermore went through numerous booms and busts in his personal trading and was astute at recognizing and examining his own failures and understanding the risks he should and should not take. When he took justified risks and lost, he was ok with it as every trader should and had a plan for how to deal with it. When he took unjustified risks and hurt himself, he was able to do a post-mortem and examine why. He tried never to get angry at the market, but to examine how it was he made mistakes in the market. Key lessons for any trader in any age, and many more lessons are found throughout this book. If you want to be a trader, I join the legions of others who call this book a must read.

"Market Wizards" by Jack D. Schwager

Market Wizards: Interviews With Top Traders
by Jack D. Schwager

http://www.amazon.com/Market-Wizards-Interviews-Top-Traders/dp/1592802974/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-6640961-8433428?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1176989354&sr=8-1

A highly recommended read, 4 stars. I'm steadily trying to work my way through a library of traders' "classics", and Market Wizards comes highly recommended from many sources. Wizards was author Jack Schwager's project to find and interview some of the best traders in the world back in the 1980s to try and glean the factors that made them successful. He includes a broad swathe: floor traders who measure their trades in minutes or seconds, long-term traders who measure trades in years, commodities, equities, currencies, rates, and all sorts of combinations of the above and more.

As with Murphy's Technical Analysis, Wizards has been around for a long time. Despite the newer edition, it is the same book that was first published in the mid-80s and its age shows. That is a positive and a negative. A negative because yes, markets have definitely changed, many of the specific strategies and issues of the day are no longer relevant even if they remain a sometimes fascinating historical look-back. But a positive because once one sifts through the differences of the eras, certain key principles stand the test of time. That to me is the real value of the book: seeing how a broad variety of traders, with sometimes polar-opposite personalities and strategies, all managed to list many common elements of success. The need for intensive research and strategy testing, the discipline to stick with a plan and not second-guess, self-confidence, conquering the fear of losing, money management, risk control, and coming up with a style of trading that works for your own personality.

It has been said that trading is a less than zero sum game, that on net everyone loses. I don't doubt that is true. But Schwager's book shows that there are elements of success that can allow the disciplined trader to beat the odds consistently over time. There is no magic formula, and these elements are not easy and require incredible discipline. But you walk away from Wizards with the definite impression that these traders are no statistical anomaly, that they have indeed earned their success through right application of difficult principles. Not through one strategy or formula, but by learning how to apply these principles to their personalities and then work, work, work. Then, at the end of the day as trader Ed Seykota says in the book (paraphrasing here, perhaps not the exact quote): 'everybody gets what they want from the markets'. If you don't want to put in the work, then you ultimately find something more important than winning and you subconsciously want to lose. If on the other hand you want to put in the work, then winning is what you ultimately want and through work, perseverence, and intelligence, you can extract your wins from an ever-changing market.

"Technical Analysis" by John J. Murphy

Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets: A Comprehensive Guide to Trading Methods and Applications

by John J. Murphy

http://www.amazon.com/Technical-Analysis-Financial-Markets-Comprehensive/dp/0735200661/ref=cm_lmf_tit_1_rdsssl0/103-6640961-8433428

"The Bible" as many a trader refers to it. Murphy's "updated" version of the technical trading techniques classic is now a bit dated itself (often referring to the wonders of "CD-Rom" drives and the like), but nonetheless retains all its punch. Basically Murphy gives a comprehensive beginner's overview of pretty much all the main tools of technical trading: chart reading, trend following, oscillators, systems design concepts and the like. He doesn't always go into hyper-detail (despite the book's size, it is actually a pretty quick read with big text and lots of charts and illustrations) and you'll need to go elsewhere in some cases to see how a technical indicator is calculated/built or to get a comprehensive review of things like candlestick patterns. However you will absolutely get a thorough introduction and now how to look for deeper knowledge with the next book you hit.

The book also comes in handy as a good basic reference source. You don't need to read it cover to cover (though I did and certainly recommend it for those new to the topic), you can go straight to the relevant chapter and get a quick refresher on the key principles on any given tool or technique. A must-read for any trader or anyone who needs to understand basic trading principles.

"America's Kingdom" by Robert Vitalis

America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier
by Robert Vitalis

http://www.amazon.com/Americas-Kingdom-Mythmaking-Frontier-Stanford/dp/0804754462/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-6640961-8433428?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1175477671&sr=1-1

Highly, highly recommended reading. Despite the fact that I consider myself a well-informed individual on Saudi Arabia, I clearly was nowhere near as well-informed as I previously thought as this book completely changed my view of the kingdom and its relationship with the US. America’s Kingdom essentially covers the US-Saudi relationship up to the 1960s with a heavy emphasis on the role of Aramco (the Arabian-American Oil Company, nowadays the nationalized “Saudi Aramco”). Vitalis ruthlessly and efficiently tears down a long litany of myths: the notion of the magnanimity of the company, that its cultural standoffishness and segregation policies were the Saudis’ wishes, that King Faysal was a genuine reformer, that the kingdom was anything other than a US client or that the US ever treated as anything but. All these myths come tumbling down.

Instead Vitalis (seemingly oddly at first) starts with the opening of the American west and the industrialists who came in with their racist segregation policies against Native American and Latino workers. He spends a good deal of time focused on the Arizona copper mines, the racist policies there, and the hard core union busting of the companies who used the “company town” model not out of a motivation to provide well for their employees but to divide their employees on racial lines (white workers got the nice houses, Mexicans and Native Americans got treated like dirt, only the white workers got remembered in the official company histories) and to engage in union busting at all costs (subtle or violent as needed) so that they could maintain the lowest possible wages for the bulk of their non-white workers.

From there Vitalis shows how this racist labor model was exported by the oil industry around the world, finally landing in Saudi Arabia in the 1930s and onwards. Aramco implemented it while simultaneously building up a myth (which many of the company’s white workers truly believed themselves) that they were treating the Saudis well and helping their development. Meanwhile the Saudi workers rapidly recognized they were being treated like dirt (for example, Aramco was herding them into segregated trailers they labeled “buses” at the same time the Saudi workers were reading news about Rosa Parks helping to end bus segregation in the US south) and tried from a very early stage to voice their complaints and eventually to organize unions to fight for equal treatment and a genuine development model for the kingdom. Aramco fought back tooth and nail, labeling strike and labor leaders as Communists, Nasserists or other outside agitators - never admitting that the workers had a right to be angry that they lived in dirt-floor huts in 120 degree heat while the Americans had air conditioned southern California-style homes. Eerie echoes of the way any opposition to ruling classes in the Middle East today is instantly labeled “terrorism” or “al-Qaeda” so that Americans and corrupt dictators can ignore the very real and legitimate problems that opposition represents. Eventually Aramco and the Saudi royal family (who more than once leaned “dangerously” close to siding with the workers from an Aramco perspective, especially in the early days) found ways to work together to keep the royals fat and happy while the company minimized or delayed the inevitable demands for better pay, housing, training, and eventually nationalization.

If you don’t know who Abdallah Tariki or Abdul Aziz Ibn Muammar are, you will walk away from this book duly impressed by these men who along with a number of other Saudis Vitalis profiles gambled (and frequently lost) their lives and livelihoods trying to force the Americans into the 20th century. That’s right, Vitalis basically shows how it wasn’t the Americans pulling the Saudis into the modern world, but rather that the backwards old Jim Crow and “Seven Sisters” attitudes of the American oil companies were the ones who had to be pulled into the modern world by supposedly “12th century” Saudis. Along the way a compelling tale of relations between local workers and segregationist Americans in Dhahran, Egypt’s Nasser, the foundation of OPEC, American intelligence scheming, Aramco’s internal spy service, and many other tales is woven.

The book does have its flaws: Vitalis admits up front he couldn’t write everything and while he provides extensive endnotes and a bibliography, it is a relatively short book aimed at telling a compelling story and not a 1000-page-thick academic treatise. The loss is that oftentimes he provides repeated anecdotal evidence for points which is powerful and in my view believable, but lacks any broader empirical presentation of data. For example, he says Aramco always grudgingly and minimally provided programs for development of Saudi workers’ skills, and the fact that those workers repeatedly went on strike and protested for those programs is powerful evidence in itself, but it would have been nice (if he had it) to show a table or two of budgets for those programs and correlated the numbers with the worker action. A minor issue but one that irks given Vitalis’ excellent presentation of the racist injustices visited on Saudi workers by the Americans is his frequent dismissal of the Israeli issue. Yes, there was and is lots of anti-Jewish racism in the kingdom which Vitalis rightly points out where relevant. However, he also frequently makes what amount to academic snide remarks showing ignorance of the fact that the Israelis are fundamentally guilty of the same and worse types of racism. I expected better from him, but it is a very minor issue given it is in no way the focus of the book.

Anyhow, you have to read the book to get the juicy details. Do it, you will learn a great deal and you won’t be sorry.

"Palestine" by Joe Sacco

Posted by J

Palestine
by Joe Sacco

http://www.amazon.com/Palestine-Joe-Sacco/dp/156097432X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/103-6640961-8433428?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1175477629&sr=8-2

4.5 stars. It may be a comic book, but this one might well be the best book I know to introduce people to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Basically the author is a cartoonist who took a trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories in the early 90s just as the first Intifada was winding down. He spent a few months there, met as many people as he could, and recorded his experiences in comic book format.

The result is powerful. He doesn’t leave anything out from his experiences, positive or negative about the Palestinians or the Israelis, and the result is a really good way to understand the human dimension of what Palestinians go through and how callous Israelis are to that reality. And in a way that doesn't get bogged down in maps and history lessons. What you see is the routine brutality Israelis mete out on Palestinians every day which never makes the headlines, the way Palestinians have learned to live with it, the negative stereotypes Palestinians and Israelis have of each other, and bottom line the sheer misery with which Palestinians live under Israeli occupation while most Israelis simply couldn’t care less or else are actively engaged in creating the misery (though don't get me wrong, Sacco presents Israelis honestly and notes things like the Israeli soldier in Nablus who points out how nice the old town is while intoning he wishes he wasn't there as an occupying soldier, or the Israeli girls he meets at the end and enjoys hanging out and discussing his experiences with).

Two of the more poignant parts are a long description from one Palestinian of how the Israelis tortured him in jail (worked especially well in comic book format somehow) and at the end after wading through Palestinian misery for so long, Joe Sacco’s time spent hanging out with some cute Israeli girls who – while nice enough – show just how ignorant they are of how Palestinians are treated and how little they care. There's tons more. While I wouldn’t recommend “Palestine” as a genuine primer on the history (it’s not that at all), there is simply no substitute for understanding the human dimension and this is as good a book as I’ve ever come across to show that.

Oh, and it’s worth mentioning: Sacco clearly doesn’t have an axe to grind, he approaches the thing from a “pox on everyone’s houses, I’m just an outsider anyways” attitude, is not afraid to let Palestinians he meets know it when he thinks they’re saying disgusting or stupid things, and yet what he sees and shows is so overwhelmingly powerful, you can’t help but come away understanding the fundamental issue here: the abuse of power by the powerful (the Israelis) and the misery and desperation of the weak (the Palestinians). That is the core of the conflict, and showing it so effectively is what makes this comic book so good.

"The One Percent Doctrine" by Ron Suskind

Posted by J

The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11
by Ron Suskind

http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0743271092/ref=pd_rvi_gw_1/102-8358167-0404956

3.5 stars. This book was recommended to me by a political science professor as "scary" and certainly didn't disappoint. The sort of book that both right-wingers and left-wingers could both agree that the term "scary" is appropriate, though for different reasons. Those on the right looking for corroboration of their fearful view of the world and of an Al-Qaeda and terrorists supposedly threatening our very existence will find what they consider justification and a sympathetic ear from the author in this book. Those on the left (and old school Constitutional literalist conservatives) seeing abandonment of civil rights/the Constitution and an immoral embrace of tyrants, torture and political poisoning of the intelligence process will similarly find justification and a sympathetic author.

Book is well-written, but the last 100 pages or so (out of about 350) drag on and are filled more with rather aimless musings. Most of the book has as much stitched-together detail and revelations of how the USG has operated since 9/11 as you're likely to find anywhere.

The key thesis is that America's "war on terror" has been guided by Dick Cheney's "One Percent Doctrine" which states essentially that if there's even a 1% chance that a threat could be real, it must be treated as absolute certainty and physically and forecefully attacked regardless of whether it ever comes to fruition. Right alongside this goes the belief by Cheney that it is the forcefulness of American actions above all, not the actual proof of a threat that is countered, which will deter terrorists from striking. Bush is portrayed as a gut-instinct actor who (never one for detail) found he liked the opportunity this theory gave to act in his natural manner of aggressive, always certain of some vague core belief, never-wavering leader acting from his gut. In a nutshell: the one percent doctrine doesn't require facts to be right, they require America in Cheney and Bush's view to scare "the terrorists" and their sympathizers so much, and keep them so busy responding to mad-dog America, that the new terrorists are scared out of existence and the existing terrorists are too busy to strike America again.

Of course, the flip sides are numerous. The ones Suskind raises focus on the manner in which reality is thrown out the window, the professionals in the intelligence gathering process are ignored for purposes of making policy and only used to justify Bush's "gut" and Cheney's bunker mentality, a war was launched in Iraq (as a supposed example which would scare the Arab and Islamic world into submission) which has made things much worse, the real terrorists have gotten smarter and more strategic and left the USG increasingly blind to what they're really up to, and other such issues.

What Suskind doesn't get into at all is the broader strategic failings of Bush, Cheney and Co. By which I refer to (1) their inability (and complete lack of desire) to understand how things look from the Arab and Islamic worlds. That there is a long history of bad American policy which has created the rage that built terrorism (primarily a decade of Iraqi sanctions, support for secular Arab dictators who do America and Israel's bidding, and above all blind allegiance to Israel and callousness towards the Palestinians) and that Cheney's shoot-first-and-never-ask-questions-especially-not-of-the-civilians-you're-killing-in-the-process is throwing gasoline on that fire. Exacerbated by the most blatant and ugly embrace of Israeli brutality of any American administration ever (and there's stiff historical competition). (2) Suskind never questions the notion that America is genuinely under mortal threat. Yeah, there's dangerous guys running around with dangerous plans to commit some heinous plans, but folks, America itself can't be destroyed by any of these guys attacks. Yes, they need to be fought and countered as with any other mass murderer, but the Sarin gas attacks on Tokyo didn't destroy Japanese democracy, 9/11 never had any hope of bringing down the Constitution of the United States, and even the worst nightmare scenarios the CIA can conjure up don't of themselves involve the abandonment of our system of law and democracy or for that matter even outpace heart disease for the number of deaths they would cause. Priorities people, priorities. The only way Al-Qaeda wins (which Suskind does hint at several times in the book, especially near the end) is if they alter the worldview of Americans to the point that we ourselves undermine the Constitution and our long-fought rights. And again, not mentioned by Suskind, but the only way Al-Qaeda wins is if they manage to switch the majority of people in the Arab and Muslim world that there is an inevitable apocalyptic clash between them and America coming. Bin Laden was never able to do that on his own (9/11 created more sympathy for America in the Middle East than anger at first), but Bush and Cheney's wars, torture, secrecy, and destruction of rights at home in America are convincing more and more people in the Arab worlds that such is the case and fuelling the ranks of those who want to join the fight.

"Poems of Arab Andalusia" translated by Cola Franzen

Posted by J

Poems of Arab Andalusia
Translated by Cola Franzen from the Spanish versions of Emilio Garcia Gomez

http://www.amazon.com/Poems-Arab-Andalusia-Cola-Franzen/dp/0872862429/sr=8-1/qid=1165764182/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-5253685-8654347?ie=UTF8&s=books

This is a truly magical little book. Poetry was an art form in which the Andalusian (Spanish) Arabs excelled. Kings, ministers, scientists, warriors, farmers, and pure poets alike all excelled and it was said that the most common of folks could voice their daily complaints, praises, and musings in poetry. The walls of the Alhambra itself in Granada are lined with the verse of the royal minister Ibn Zamrak.

This book represents an English rendering of one of the first "recoveries" of that Arabic poetic legacy into the languages of Europe. In the 1920s a Spanish Arabist by the name of Emilio Garcia Gomez came upon (in Cairo) a 13th century collection of Andalusian poetry compiled by one Ibn Said. He went about translating and publishing these in Spanish hoping to provide a small example of the richness of Arab Andalusian poetry. He thought it a small work, but a generation of Spanish poets hungry for new inspiration was enthralled by what they read. The so-called Generation of 27 in Spain was heavily influenced by this little work of translation "for being at one and the same time very old and very new".

But to take it back to its original: Ibn Said living in the 13th century was looking back to several centuries of the best Arab poets of the peninsula. This collection, now available in English, does indeed provide real gems, with a richness of metaphor and attention to minute detail that in many ways mirrors the Alhambra itself - i.e., an ability to take a wide expanse (i.e., the field of Arab poetry) and then drill down into small corners of meaning to find rich and deep meaning (ink on paper, the curves of one's love, a cup of wine, a lance in the midst of battle, etc.).

What made it even more magical to me personally was as we recently travelled through Al-Andalus to be able to pause overlooking Seville or Cordoba or Granada and then open this book up and read the words which the poets of a millenium ago wrote in those very locations. The translator provides the names and dates of each of these poets, and my own historical background knowledge let me know a little something more about the conditions they lived in. King Al-Mu'atamid of Seville writing from Almoravid exile in Morocco, Cordoban poets writing in the heyday of the Caliphate and later in the turmoil of the Taifa kingdoms or the last troubled days before the fall to the Christians, Valencian poets writing of the beauty of the land shortly after intensive agriculture had taken root in the region, etc.

The translations of the poems, being as they are English translated from Spanish from the Arabic, undoubtedly lose much of the original. But I must say as others have that I still find them enthralling. The imagery is vivid and the language highly readable. Something of the rhythm still survives even if all the rhyme can not. If other books I have read recently focused so much on politics that they missed the culture, this is a wonderful nugget of that culture. Put it together with the imagery of Islamic art of Andalusia that is widely available, and one can start to get a decent feel for the rich culture which flourished off and on for almost 8 centuries in Islamic Spain/Al-Andalus.

"Muslim Spain And Portugal" by Hugh Kennedy

Posted by J

Muslim Spain and Portugal: A Political History of al-Andalus
by Hugh Kennedy

http://www.amazon.com/Muslim-Spain-Portugal-Political-al-Andalus/dp/0582495156/sr=8-1/qid=1165529206/ref=sr_1_1/104-5253685-8654347?ie=UTF8&s=books

This book does an excellent job of covering from the Andalusi (i.e., "Moorish") perspective the political history of Al-Andalus from right before its beginning at Gibraltar in 711 to the fall of Granada in 1492. Unlike Fletcher's "Moorish Spain" which left a feeling of an outsider European's perspective, Kennedy does an excellent job conveying the history from primary Arabic sources (as well as highlighting the deficiencies that result from their relative paucity). After reading (and I finished it as I was touring Al-Andalus, an excellent experience), I feel I have seen history as it was felt inside the kingdoms of Al-Andalus.

There are shortcomings though: this is a purely political and military history and it frequently reads like a textbook jumping from fact to fact. Historical anecdotes and tales which could bring the history more to life are there, but not in enough number I felt. Also, there is little to no coverage of cultural life and very limited coverage of economics and demographics. To be fair, that would have expanded the scope of the book enormously and Kennedy states up front that he chose not to do so. Fair enough, he wrote what was within his ability and resources to do and we need to turn elsewhere for those other issues. Still, I felt a little bit more of the cultural, economic, and demographic issue coverage -- even on a tangential basis -- would have brought the book much more to life.

Nonetheless, an excellent review of the political history of Al-Andalus, heavy usage of primary sources and discussion of the other secondary sources, and I heartily recommend the book so long as the reader also acquires a broader perspective on other aspects of the country from other books.

"Islamic Spain: 1250 To 1500" by L.P. Harvey

Posted by J

http://www.amazon.com/Islamic-Spain-1250-1500-Harvey/dp/0226319628/sr=8-1/qid=1164162817/ref=sr_1_1/002-0670725-0807254?ie=UTF8&s=books

Wow, wow, and WOW! What a fantastic book. This is basically two books in one. The first is a survey of the "Mudejar" or Islamic communities living in the Christian kingdoms of Spain (primarily Castille, Aragon, and Navar), the other is the history of the last Islamic kingdom of Spain, Granada. Both cover the period 1250-1500, or from the time of the decline of the Almohad empire and the main wave of Christian Reconquista that occurred at the time (resulting in the loss of the fabled cities of Seville and Cordoba from Muslim hands) until shortly after the final fall of Granada in 1492.

I'll quickly point out a few minor complaints: there are only two maps in the book and they're not very complete, so they left me frequently guessing or dealing with geographical ambiguity. Also I do wish there had been greater discussion of the cultural and everyday life of folks in these worlds (particularly in Granada), the cultural richness of the Granadan kingdom is certainly mentioned, but not at all fleshed out. I presume that scope of the book was the main limiting factor.

Those points aside, did I say WOW?! Here is an author who has written a comprehensive survey of the two topics listed above and in an amazingly engaging manner. Here are what I felt were some of the real strong points of the book:

• Heavy use of primary sources. Harvey quotes extensively from the original sources, selecting relevant and engaging sections in very readable translations. Moreover, while Spanish (particularly Castilian) sources are much more readily available, he has brought in a large number of original Arabic sources which (unlike the weakness I felt in Fletcher's "Moorish Spain") left me feeling like I had seen many of these events through Granadan/Moorish eyes and not just European eyes.
• Vivid descriptions of the military campaigns and technology. Those not interested in military history may not be as interested on these points, but I really loved the sense of "being there" Harvey gives (again often through his use of primary sources) of sieges, battles, and frontier raids. I felt I got a true sense of the suffering, chivalry, treason, and honor that people back then felt they were living through. And just as crucially, of what military technology of the era did and did not mean. All of a sudden those battle scenes from the Lord of the Rings movies seemed a little more believable and real :) Though sadder as well.
• The mood of the era. Harvey's ability to convey the mood and air of the era is phenomenonal. Not just of Moorish loss and Castillian triumphalism, but the back and forth of personal loyalty and betrayal, and the consequences these actions of a few had on the lives of so many ordinary people.
• Even-handedness. I felt Harvey did quite a good job of trying within his abilities to balance his sources and judgements (which he keeps reasonably limited) between sides. He can see the pain of the losses of the Moors and the bravery of the Castilians, along with the foolishness of Granada internecine violence and follies of Christian knights.
• Religious insight. No, this is not a religious book nor attempt to pass judgement on religions, but Harvey raises extremely interesting points about how the Mudajer communities weren't even supposed to exist under traditional Islamic law (and indeed, North African and even Spanish Islamic clerics encouraged emmigration out of lands that came under Christian rule) and how this created very interesting dynamics and strains of both religious co-existence and the need for Muslims to define a new set of rules for living. Sometimes Orthodox, sometimes bending the rules a bit. Also, some interesting discussion of how Granda as the surviving rump-state of the past glories of Al-Andalus became instead of the old Andalusian melting pot, a last bastion of Orthodoxy and purist thought. While Granada's survival allowed in many ways the Convivencia experiments of other Mudajer communities to go on (i.e., toleration of Moors in Christian kingdoms was more important when a Muslim community fairly nearby could press for their fair treatment), its final collapse was part of the death knell of co-existence. I felt more and more as I read that there was less of what today we'd call "tolerance" and more mere side-by-side existence. As time went on, even that faded away, with disastrous consequences for Jews and Muslims.
• A sense of the changing times. Great coverage of how military technology and tactics were changing with the introduction of the cannon for example and what that meant for the relative effectiveness of Granadan versus Castilian military strategy. Also at the end how the weakness of North African Islamic states combined with the rising strength of Castille and the discovery of the Americas to preclude any Islamic attempts to recover al-Andalus. And many others.
• Discussions of the weaknesses of the various societies. I felt I gained a good sense of the economic, social, political, and other factors which steadily weakened Granada

I could literally go on and on (and already have to some extent), but I highly, highly recommend this book. He has a follow-up book I hope to read soon on the final era of Islam in Spain covering the 1500s until the final expulsion of all the Moors in the early 1600s.

On a final note: the book felt alive, real, like something happening today. Perhaps this is part of why Arabs have such an attachment to the idea of Granada and Al-Andalus: the destruction of Palestine is before them today and there is a historical precedent. I wish I could say that folks in the Arab world really understood what the loss of Granada was all about and the lessons it gives for Palestine. The truth I think is that many of the same weaknesses are at play, and many Arabs see this in the corruption of their leaders today and merciless foreign conquerors as occurred in the past, but over-zealousness internally is also an ongoing weakness. It seems the answers then were no easier than the answers today, but it does seem clear that Christians, Jews and Muslims all have a thing or two to learn about the importance of valuing the fruits of cooperation over those of conquest.

"Trickster Travels" By Natalie Zemon Davis

Posted by J

http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0809094347/ref=pd_rvi_gw_3/002-0670725-0807254

Al-Hassan Al-Wazzan. Giovanne Leone. Leo Africanus. Yuhanna Al-Asad. Many names, one man. This book is an attempt, full of conjencture which enlightens the entire world of the 16th century western Mediterranean, to follow the life of the man known in Christian Europe as Leo Africanus (along with other names). A decade before, the Lebanese author Amin Maalouf had written in historical fiction form another book under the title "Leo Africanus" which sought to do something similar. I have yet to read that book but it comes highly recommended as well (it is in English), so this was really my first introduction to the man and the topic. For a quick summary of the book, see the brief editorial reviews from the Amazon site which I copy at the bottom.

Trickster Travels fails and succeeds. It fails in only a superficial way - the reality is that trying to put together the details of just about any single individual from the 16th century, even a reasonably well documented life, is virtually impossible. We get quite a few factual snippets - one gets the sense all the ones that are available - from Yuhanna's life, but most of the book consists of "could have", "may have", "possibly" and other such guesses.

But that is also the book's success. You can only know so much about Al-Hassan Al-Wazzan Al-Fasi (or is it al-Gharnati?), but we can know a great deal about his world. This is where Davis really shines, because this becomes just as much a book about the 16th century realms of North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa (to a lesser extent given that it is told through the eyes of North Africans often then filtered through Europeans and not Sub-Saharan Africans themselves), and Mediterranean Europe. One gets a real flavor for life in Fes circa 1500, in Rome, in travels in the Atlas mountains and the Sahara, in Timbuktu, on the seas of the Mediterranean, in the Ottoman Court, in Cairo, and other places. Suddenly these seem accessible places you or I could travel to and figure out as much as we could different countries of the world today. Suddenly time seems more like distance than time itself, and crossing it a bit less difficult.

Not to get too romantic about it, the point is actually that Davis brings these very different times and places down to earth. She makes them accessible and imaginable instead of just dusty pages in a long forgotten and incomprehensible book. Sometimes that gets into the downright raunchy (a medieval doctor providing a cure and a scolding for a farmer's penchant for his sheep for example), but most of the time it is just about the normal foibles, functions, and curiosities of life. This was in many ways what Giovanne Leone was trying to do when he wrote his Geography of Africa for European readers: let them know that Africa and the world of Islam were neither exotic or barbaric, but places just as ordinary to their inhabitants as the Europe they knew.

*****

From Publishers WeeklyDavis (The Return of Martin Guerre) performs a sterling service in disentangling the twisted threads of al-Hasan ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Wazzan's fascinating life. Better known in the West as Leo Africanus, he was one of the Renaissance's greatest geographers and the author of a Europe-wide bestseller, The Description of Africa (1550). Born a Muslim in Granada in 1492, al-Hasan al-Wazzan traveled widely as an ambassador and merchant throughout Africa, a continent then a mystery to Europeans, but was captured by Spanish pirates in 1518, presented to Pope Leo X and ostensibly converted to Christianity while explaining Islam to his bewildered audience. Al-Hasan al-Wazzan had the (mis)fortune to live in "interesting times": the Ottomans were on the march, the Habsburgs were on the rise and the Protestants were alarming the pope, yet al-Hasan al-Wazzan managed to flit among a myriad of worlds (including, Davis speculates, taking a formerly Jewish wife). Eventually, he returned to a North Africa riven by turmoil and slaughter, and disappeared from our view. He rose above hard-drawn lines and presented "himself simply as an independent polymath," says Davis, and his life provides a lesson in the "possibility of communication and curiosity in a world divided by violence." 16 pages of b&w illus., 2 maps. (Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New YorkerIn 1518, al-Hasan al-Wazzan, a diplomat of the Sultan of Fez, was kidnapped in the Mediterranean by pirates, who brought him to Pope Leo X. Al-Wazzan had travelled extensively in Africa, and was able to provide firsthand intelligence on the geography and politics of the infidel region. Leo Africanus, as he became known, remained in Rome for the next nine years, converted from Islam to Christianity (he was baptized by the Pope himself), and compiled his "Description of Africa," a collection of learning, hearsay, and personal anecdote that shaped European ideas about Africa for centuries. Few facts exist to illuminate Leo's actual life in Rome, but Davis fills us in on the scholars with whom he may have conversed and the social mores to which he would have had to adjust, arriving at a portrait of "a man with a double vision," straddling two warring cultures. Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

"Oil Markets And Prices" by Paul Horsnell and Robert Mabro

Posted by J

Oil Markets and Prices: The Brent Market and the Formation of World Oil Prices
1993 - by Paul Horsnell and Robert Mabro

http://www.amazon.com/Oil-Market-Prices-Paul-Horsnell/dp/0197300138/sr=11-1/qid=1163553492/ref=sr_11_1/002-0670725-0807254

Painful. Excruciatingly, agonizingly, boringly painful reading. Yet a masterpiece as well. This is not light reading, it's not a book someone merely curious about oil markets should even bother to pick up. It is, however, a now classic foundational book for anyone who seriously wants to understand how oil markets work.

Paul Horsnell (and doing a smaller amount of the writing, Robert Mabro) went to the core of how oil prices are formed. In 1993 oil market data was not nearly as widely available as it is today (and it's not exactly the most transparent market today either), and crunching numbers was a much more laborious task. But give credit to the authors, they dug into the raw data of the Brent market in particular and come out with a convincing academic review which explains just why the Brent (today the Brent-Forties-Oseberg or "BFO" market which Horsnell at least partially predicted back in 1993 it would evolve into) market is so important. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, the United States, etc may produce far more oil, but the Brent stream, its infrastructure, its taxation structure, its geography, its liquidity, and its transparency are what was needed to produce a viable basis for global oil pricing as the era of OPEC administered prices (and before that the prices of the international oil companies) was shattered in the mid-80s.

A lot has changed in the market since 1993, and Paul has told me he's been asked to do an updated version of the book. His reply was "life is too short". Can't blame him, plenty more he can and does do in the markets. And in any case, for the professional who would (and should) pick up this book, it remains viable on its own and professional experience should then fill in the gap to the present. Of course, one has to stay awake long enough to read the book -- no offense to Paul, but there's a reason British academics aren't the stuff of action movies. That said, no pain, no gain!

"Moorish Spain" by Richard Fletcher

Posted by J

http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0520248406/ref=s9_asin_image_1/102-1762748-7350520

Following up on my reading of "The Quest for El Cid" and looking for a good general history of Islamic Spain, I picked this book up. Lonely Planet recommended it and it seemed as good as any. Silly me, didn't realize until I got a few pages in that it was the same author who wrote The Quest for El Cid.

I'd give the book 3 1/2 stars. It is a good general overview of the era, I walk away feeling that I now understand the basic outlines of the history of Al-Andalus. In a nutshell: Islamic/Berber conquest - instability - Umayyad Caliphate - Taifa states - Almoravids - Almohads - steady losses to Christian kingdoms and an era of mixed populations - Granada the last stronghold - the end and final expulsion of the Moors. If I have any disappointments, one would be the general lack of detail beyond anecdotes. I would like to have seen not just more anecdotes, but attempts to present some data and discussion of agriculture, more depth on the economy, how the Islamic, Christian, and Jewish non-upper classes interacted, etc. But Fletcher can't really be blamed for this. He set out to write a summarizing history and in this he succeeded, it is merely the limitation of the genre.

Another more serious disappointment would be the relative weighting of his focus. Yes, you cannot write the history of Islamic Spain without spending a good deal of time discussing the Christian kingdoms with whom they were in constant interaction, but I had a near constant feeling that as a historian Fletcher was far more comfortable discussing the Christian history and the more human motives of the Christians than the Muslims. Not in a discriminatory way, just that the Muslim kingdoms came across subtlely more as "the other" and the Christian kingdoms as the understandable half. Perhaps this is because of a relative paucity of sources from the Islamic side (I might hazard to guess that far more Islamic bureaucratic record keeping was lost to time as they were the ultimate losers than Christian records), or perhaps Fletcher's Arabic was limited or non-existent. I can only guess. It is not a fatal flaw in the book, but certainly a weakness.

Finally, I wish more focus was placed on the cultural interactions and the cultural riches Islamic Spain and mixed-faith Spain produced. Menocal focuses heavily on this in her book Ornament of the World, which made the lack of discussion here feel like something crucial was missing from the history.

But again, having focused on these weak points, I did walk away feeling I understand the basic outlines of the region's history now and would recommend the book as a primer. And not to belittle it as nothing more than a primer, he does have interesting insights and anecdotes throughout. Primary sources are referenced more than is common for a summary history, and I found a few of his tantalizing historical analyses really interesting - for example the notion that when the Spanish conquered and colonized the Americas, they not only had a model of religious discourse with which to engage societies such as the Aztecs (as "conquering equals" I might describe it and which Charles C. Mann gets into in his book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus), but also a model of colonization of the land which they had gained from engaging Muslims religiously and depopulating and re-colonizing their land.

A good read, a cut above the rest, but not the best ever.

"The Quest For El Cid" by Richard Fletcher

Posted by J

http://www.amazon.com/Quest-El-Cid-Richard-Fletcher/dp/0195069552/sr=8-1/qid=1162088667/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-1762748-7350520?ie=UTF8&s=books

First to save the descriptive part, let me give this summary from an Amazon editorial review then after that a paragraph of my own thoughts:

*****

From Library JournalBeginning students, sophisticated scholars, and the general reader interested in Spanish medieval history will benefit from this provocative, learned, and elegantly written study of Rodrigo Diaz (c.1043-99)--El Cid--the 11th-century soldier of fortune who became the Spanish national hero. Fletcher begins by sketching the historical scene in Spain and Europe. After an imaginative discussion of the complicated sources of El Cid's life, he describes his aristocratic family background, knightly education, early military campaigns, service at the court of king Sancho II, exile spent as a mercenary soldier in Muslim service, and ultimate triumph as Prince of Valencia. The concluding chapter, as exciting as a murder mystery, explains the growth of the El Cid legend. As an important story fascinatingly told, and as a rich mine of information about many facets of Spanish and Muslim medieval cultures, this book is highly recommended.- Bennett D. Hill, Georgetown Univ., Washington

*****

I've been reading up lately on the history of Islamic Spain (we're planning a trip to southern Spain shortly) and a scholar friend of mine highly recommended this book. I was not disappointed by the recommendation. Other books I've read to date have focused on the Islamic regions (Al-Andalus), or the cultural interactions between Islamic and Christian regions in the Middle Ages with a healthy dose of the Jewish communities. This is squarely focused on those aspects of Spanish history (Christian and Islamic) which shed light on the Christian soldier Rodrigo Diaz who became El Cid in fact and legend. In so doing it definitely focuses on the Christian Spanish point of view. Some have said this book shatters the myth of El Cid to the degree that he comes off as pure unprincipled mercenary. While it definitely does not allow the Spanish national myth to survive (but then, Fletcher is hardly the first author to discredit it), I think it rather gives a more complex view of a man and a world where co-existence and enmity managed to live side by side, both between communities and in the person of El Cid. He comes across to me as a man who lived a typical aristocratic warrior's life of the era, trading loyalties between masters Christian and Muslim in ways that would have largely been considered honorable (even if not always so) and also self-interested. He was respected if also despised by some Muslims for his pillaging, but then those traits crossed both ways along the Muslim-Christian divide of the time.

Above all, what this book did for me was to remind me of the nature of pre-nationalism Europe where loyalties were of a very different nature but the raw elements of what were to become Spanish nationalism were taking form. And of the nature of the unique place Spain was 1000 years ago at the frontier of Islam and Christianity.

"The Hobbit" by J.R.R. Tolkien

Posted by J.

http://www.amazon.com/Hobbit-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/0618260307/sr=1-1/qid=1161909475/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-1762748-7350520?ie=UTF8&s=books

I read Tolkien's Lord of the Rings Trilogy back in High School - having discovered it quite by accident - and quickly fell in love with it. For many years I told myself I should read the little prequel The Hobbit (especially after the Lord of the Rings trilogy came out on the big screen) but never quite got around to it. This past week I had a business trip and decided to take it along and read it over three days. And I was not disappointed. It bears many of the same characteristics which so endeared the the Lord of the Rings books to me:

• It is wonderful story-telling that can be enjoyed on that simple level alone.
• Beneath the story there is real moral and theological depth. The various characters, creatures, and races of beings show mixtures of traits and choices which reflect very much on reality and serve as a mirror of our own good and evil.
• The contrast between despair and hope. Dark episodes resulting from both bad choices and uncontrollable circumstance at times envelope the story, but basic positive traits of perseverance, hope, and help when least expected shine through much as they do in real life to those who will grasp them (and fail to shine through for those who fail to grasp them).
• The fascinating world of Tolkien. His storytelling ability and his theological and moral depth are made all the more convincing by his ability to construct a world which has real depth. Languages, landscapes and geography in particular give the opportunity to see the depth of the world Tolkien imagined. And what I really like is the way that world seems to have a tenuous connection to reality. "Beorn" the bear-man whose name means bear in Scandinavian languages comes to mind, but also the descriptions of landscapes so similar to northern and western Europe.

A good read no doubt, Tolkien genuinely deserves a place in the pantheon of the great authors of western literature. Like a lot of people, I'm disappointed that the fantasy genre he wrote in is so easily dismissed by many literary critics. Scratch the surface just a little bit and the richness of his thought, skill, and art are boundless.