Reader’s Diary

Benjamin Roth

Benjamin Roth was a young lawyer in Youngstown, Ohio who kept a diary during the Great Depression.  Starting in June of 1931, he used it to try and puzzle out what was happening and how he might deal with the situation.  His diaries through the December, 1941, were edited by his son and published as “The Great Depression: A Diary”.

The familiar narrative of the Depression is about out-of-work factory workers and migrant Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl.  Roth reveals another side of the experience, the Depression as experienced by a professional man.  Despite his relatively high status, Roth suffered from a severe loss of income and didn’t participate in the periodic short-lived recoveries.  Reading his diary, I got a strong sense of the confusion and uncertainty of the times.

Rick Lax

Like the same author’s “Lawyer Boy“, I’d characterize this as “mildly amusing”.  It’s about Las Vegas and all the people there who are in the business of  deceiving people.  I enjoyed his stories of a Las Vegas magicians’ club, but most of the other chapters weren’t terribly interesting.

Rick Lax

This is a mildly amusing account of a slacker’s first year in law school.  Lax tries too hard to be funny, but some of his self-deprecating humor does work. Lax Scott Turow’s “One L” is a much better book on the same subject.

Steven Levy

“The Perfect Thing” is the interesting but now-dated story of the development of the iPod.  Those who are fascinated by Apple’s workings will enjoy the book.

Giles Whittell

On a bridge near Berlin in 1962 the United States exchanged Soviet spy “Rudolf Abel” for downed U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers and an American graduate student who had been held as a spy in East Germany.   “Bridge of Spies” is the story of these three men.  The author reveals the “Abel” was actually a British-born KGB agent name William Fisher.  He suggests that Fisher wasn’t nearly as effective a spy as the FBI claimed he was and that Powers’ capture was the result of ineptitude the the CIA chain of command.

Bill Barich

Bill Barich is an American living in Ireland.  Despite his expat status, he doesn’t hesitate to judge various Irish pubs’ “authenticiy”.  An “authentic” pub seems to be one that is the way he imagined it would be, or perhaps the way it might have been a few decades ago.   While his laments about the lack of authenticity get tiresome after a while (do Irishmen come here and expect every Friday’s to be like “Cheers”?), his tales of his pub crawling are entertaining even if he’s a rather sober pub patron.

The book is implicitly about globalization.  There’s an industry building Irish pubs to order for the world, and the changes in the world’s economy mean the native Irish pub has changed.  Me, I go to several “Irish” pubs here in Minnesota, and they’re pleasant enough places, whether the pass the Barich authenticity standards or not.