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Quick Review - Ali and Nino, A Love Story by Kurban Said  Ali and Nino is a grand love story in the tradition of the grandest of love stories. There is childhood romance, warring families, murder and war - all rolled up neatly in a short 270 page book. I was led to this little classic through the enthusiastic recommendation of Paul Theroux who provides a glowing afterword in the current edition. It is the story of a romance between a Muslim, Ali Khan Shirvanshir and the lovely Christian, Princess Nino Kipiani. It is also the story of Ali Khan's confusion over his identity - is he Asian or European? Ali and Nino's romance kindles in the city of Baku as the city awaits its fate at the hands of the big European and Asiatic powers fighting all around it. Kurban Said, the book's pseudonymous writer is supposedly a composite of two distinct personalities - Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels and Lev Nussimbaum (whose profile on Wikipedia makes for interesting reading - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Nussimbaum). I enjoyed the book. Recommended. Labels: 2010, april 2010, azerbaijan, book review, fiction, kurban said, love story, paul theroux, reviews
Book Review - The Big Short, Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis  I just finished reading The Big Short, Michael Lewis' thrilling account of three hedge funds that managed to see the crisis in the financial markets years before others had a clue as to what was going on. At a mere 250 pages, I was skeptical. I like my books to be fat and detailed, an obviously unscientific measure that failed miserably in the case of Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big To Fail. Sorkin's essentially journalistic account of the events of 2007 and 2008 compares poorly with Mr. Lewis' work. At the very least, The Big Short gives a fleshed out account of the events that exacerbated the financial crisis through the actions of four major players - big Wall Street banks from Goldman Sachs to Merrill Lynch, the three major rating agencies, hedge fund managers who predicted the crisis, and investors around the world who got suckered into buying some really shitty financial products that they did not quite understand. We've heard two of these stories in the last couple of weeks - the Magnetar trade as covered by This American Life and ProPublica and the SEC case against Goldman Sachs involving ABACUS and John Paulson's hedge fund.The heroes of Mr. Lewis' account are a quirky group of hedge fund managers with rather unconventional backgrounds. It is testament to Mr. Lewis' abilities as a writer that you end up rooting for a bunch of guys who saw the delusion of the wider market and made hundreds of millions of dollars by betting against just about everyone. Dr. Michael Burry is a neurologist by training, has one functioning eye and suffers from Asperger's syndrome - he's the guy who saw the housing bubble coming back in 2003 and ended up making hundreds of millions through his fund, Scion Capital. Jamie Mai and Charlie Ledley were a couple of 30 year olds with no obvious training or talent in money management. They started a hedge fund from a garage in Berkeley and ended up making some legendary profits by successfully betting that the upper, double-A rated tranches of mortgage CDOs backed by subprime loans would fail. The third hedge fund manager, with a more conventional background was Steve Eisman of FrontPoint Partners. All of these talented but also lucky men were connected by another interesting character, Greg Lippmann of Deutsche Bank. If the idea of betting against the subprime mortgage industry was a virus then it originated with Dr. Michael Burry who infected Mr. Lippmann, who in turn spread it to a whole bunch of other money managers on and off Wall Street. So far I've given the benefit of the doubt to the TARP rescue package and its necessity towards 'saving the American ecnomoy'. After reading The Big Short, I'm not so sure. There are passages in the book that inspire incredulous disbelief. I'm not a fan of populist anger at a single behemoth called "Wall Street" but it is hard not to feel disgust at the greed and incompetence of some of the most gilded names in modern capitalism. The Big Short is required reading for anyone wishing to understand what happened on Wall Street in the last three years. Highly recommended. Additonal recommended reading and media Dr. Michael Burry's April 2010 Op-Ed in the New York Times - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/opinion/04burry.html?scp=12&sq=burry&st=cse Michael Lews and Dr. Michael Burry on CBS News' 60 Minutes - http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6298038n&tag=contentBody;housing Dr. Michael Burry's "A Primer on Scion Capital's Subprime Mortgage Short", published in November 2006 - http://www.scioncapital.com/PDFs/Scion%202006%204Q%20RMBS%20CDS%20Primer%20and%20FAQ.pdf Labels: 2010, april 2010, ben hockett, book review, charlie ledley, cornwall, finance, frontpoint, greg lippmann, history, jamie mai, michael burry, michael lewis, scion capital, steve eisman, wall street
Book Review - Riding the Iron Rooster, By Train Through China by Paul Theroux  Reading Mr. Theroux' travelogue of Chnia made me realize I should know more of Chinese history than I do (which is practically nothing). School history textbooks in India focus mostly on local, state and national history. In higher grades you deal with European history, India's colonial past and some American history - for example, we learned of the Boston Tea Party and the Declaration of Independence. Of communism, our textbooks focused mostly on the USSR. However, besides the common knowledge that China had a communist government and India fought a war with the Chinese in 1962, our history textbooks were woefully inadequate in their coverage of contemporary Chinese history.Mr. Theroux' twelve month journey through China takes place in 1986 and 1987, as the country is still dealing with the effects of Mao's Cultural Revolution. The author's journey, like many of his other great travel stories, begins in London as he heads to Mongolia by train. From Mongolia he takes a myriad of trains to explore the most far flung reaches of that immense country. From the freezing city of Harbin to the mostly inhospitable and deserted Tibetan Plateau. The book is funny, caustic and filled with the kind of absolute generalizations that Mr. Theroux excels at. He talks to fellow travellers, government orderlies, train conductors and hustlers in tourist towns. You get not just his perspective, but also of the people he meets and finds interesting. Unlike most of the author's other travels, he is forced to travel here with a Chinese "guide" who is there to ensure the author is not up to any kind of mischief. Mr. Theroux extracts his revenge by subjecting his handler to interminable train rides through the remotest parts of the Middle Kingdom. Because of the timing, the book also adds color to understanding the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. I learned a few things about the Cultural Revolution I was never aware of - my knowledge of that event is restricted to a few books and the Zhang Yimou movie, To Live. Some of the author's cultural observations are worth repeating - he ascribes a hidden meaning to they way the Chinese laugh, because they don't laugh with mirth but to convey something they'd rather not express verbally. The Chinese landscape is almost completely devoid of birds, trees and wild life - because the Chinese have cultivated and subjected all of the land to human use and eaten everything that can be masticated. And finally, the Chinese were enthusiastically adopting capitalism and the free market in the 1980s - it is not something that just happened. The last section on driving to Lhasa from Golmud is the funniest - it is filled to the gills with ridiculous comedy. I've often asked myself while reading a Theroux book, why does he do this? In this instance he is in a near fatal car crash and then spends the night in a prison like hotel with stairs covered in human excrement and run by a crazed looking Tibetan man. Maybe that's why. Highly recommended. Labels: 2010, april 2010, book review, china, cultural revolution, history, non fiction, paul theroux, reviews, tibet, travel, travelogue, xinjiang
Days of Being Wild, directed by Wong Kar Wai
 Five Stars |
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