Reader’s Diary

Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis, author of “Liar’s Poker“, returns to Wall Street to tell the story of the big crash.  He focuses on several people who were smart enough to short (i.e., bet against) the housing bubble. On almost every page I found myself amazed at just how crazy things were.  Even the subjects of the book found themselves wondering if they’d missed something as the bubble got bigger and bigger and they seemed to be the only ones in the casino who realized that it was already burning down around the gamblers.  If any book every proved that truth is stranger than fiction, this is it.

This is a great read full of interesting people doing arcane things while making and losing billions of dollars.  Lewis does a good job of explaining how the whole corrupt system worked.

Piers Paul Read

This novel about a plan to kill the pope reminded me of “Day of the Jackal” in that character, setting, and plot are more important than frantic action.  It’s an old-school thriller, short, not terribly surprising,  but enjoyable

John Birmingham

The premise of “Without Warning” is, to put it mildly, far-fetched: a curtain of energy of unknown origin descends around most of the United States, and, within it, everyone disappears.  From this beginning, John Birmingham tells a compelling story of what happens to the remaining US citizens, military forces, and the rest of the world.  I had feared this would be a right-wing screed to show how important the US is, but I was pleasantly surprised.  This is a good read, reminiscent of the best of Stephen King’s work. I’m looking forward to the sequels.

Russell Roberts

Two high school teachers, a libertarian and a liberal, fall in love against a background of corporate fraud.  Interesting, until it’s revealed that the corporate fraud is a fiction-within-a-fiction, the plot of a popular TV show that exists only to show how stupid the liberal’s liberal friends are.  At this plot turn it becomes obvious that this is nothing more than a libertarian parable.  You might enjoy it if you’re one of those naive fools who thinks that markets are the solution to all our problems.   Russell can safely spout this nonsense, since he’s a presumably-tenured professor insulted from the depredations of the corporate oligarchy.  The real world never has and never will fit the libertarian pipe dream.

Frank Gohlke

This is a collection of short pieces by and interviews with photographer Frank Gohlke.  Some of the chapters are more useful then others, and there is some repetition, but most of them have insightful things to say about landscape, particularly the problem of presenting nature as it exists in the man made environment (a theme that Gohlke convincingly argues was a concern of Thoreu’s).

It’s hard to find books that talk sensibly about non-technical and non-historical aspects of photography.  This is one of those rare books.  While it’s not quite as widely applicable or as tightly edited at Robert Adams’ “Beauty in Photography“, it belongs next to it on the shelf.

Robert Conroy

This is a competent alternate history in which the US and the USSR go to war over the remains of Germay at the “end” of WW II.  The plot has few surprises, but it was plausible enough and written well enough to draw me in and keep me interested.