TOP 100 BOOK SITES
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| Charlie Brooker in conversation with Marina Hyde WARNING: This podcast contains language which may offend. A lot of it.However, if you're not offended - you might like to purchase Charlie Brooker's new book, The Hell of it All. It's available now in all good book stores, but why not save yourself the journey by heading to the Guardian Bookshop instead.And if you still want more, have a look at our video of this interview too.Charlie BrookerMarina HydeBen Green feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Christmas gift guide: Books Christmas reads for all the family - from your dad to your teenage nephew (if he ever comes out of his room ... ) feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Too Big to Fail: Inside the Battle to Save Wall Street by Andrew Ross Sorkin Ruth Sunderland enjoys a blow-by-blow account of how the credit crunch unfolded in the USThe cover illustration to this doorstopper account of the credit crisis is a picture of a dinosaur, suggesting that within we will learn about deadly but doomed beasts, whose evolutionary deficiencies will consign them to extinction. It's not a bad visual metaphor for investment bankers, except that they are still here.Andrew Ross Sorkin's blow-by-blow account of the unfolding of events in the US, when financial titans up to and including Goldman Sachs were days, or even hours, away from running out of liquidity, gives a handy dramatis personae of those inhabiting Wall Street's Jurassic Park, in the manner of a compendious Russian novel. A reader uninitiated in the detail of the crunch will need it: there are seemingly endless descriptions of the men (and one or two women) involved. Take the following: "Jamie Dimon's black Lexus pulled away from the curb of his Park Avenue apartment to head down to the Fed at just before 8am. Dimon, who sat on the back seat returning emails on his BlackBerry, had just gotten off a conference call with his management team… telling them to prepare for the bankruptcies of Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, AIG, Morgan Stanley and even Goldman Sachs. He knew he might have been overstating the case, but figured they needed to be prepared. He was The Man Who Knew Too Much."This sort of thing can become a little wearing, as can the description of virtually any man in his mid-40s or 50s as "remarkably youthful", as if the likes of the then 47-year-old president of the federal reserve, Tim Geithner, should have been trundling around Wall Street with the aid of a Zimmer frame – but I suppose one should cut some slack for a 32-year-old wunderkind author.Sorkin's portrayal of Erin Callan, former Lehman's finance director, is typical: she is a "striking blonde" with "Sex and the City" stilettoes, suspected to be romantically involved with the man who hired her, a suggestion made without a shred of substantiation. The bigger problem, though, is the claim of authorial omniscience, admittedly based on more than 500 hours of interviews with 200 people.The book, which has been billed as the defining account of the credit crunch, has caused a media storm in Manhattan: Sorkin's colleagues on the New York Times are reported to be angry at his failure to credit the newspaper's scoops. US business reporter Charlie Gasparino of CNBC is upset at a quote attributed to Lloyd Blankfein, the head of Goldman Sachs, calling him a "rumour monger", as is the bank. Blankfein has been heard to grumble since about Sorkin's self-professed mind-reading abilities. There has been sniping, too, that the author is too cosy with the people he writes about, both in the book and the NYT: the likes of Jamie Dimon and John Mack (CEO of Morgan Stanley, nickname: "The Knife") turned up at his book party, hosted by Vanity Fair magazine.Sorkin's account deals with the frenzied few months starting on 17 March 2008, when Lehman Brothers chief Dick Fuld was summoned back by then treasury secretary Hank Paulson from a trip to India because of the collapse of Bear Stearns. It ends in mid-October of that year, with Paulson finally accepting that he had to "cross the Rubicon" with a bailout for the banks.Sorkin does offer some genuinely telling detail. Fuld, the self-centred, foul-mouthed, but deeply loyal man who took Lehman to its destruction, is summed up in one anecdote: while hiking with the asthmatic son of a colleague, the boy panicked and was being guided to safety by his father and Fuld. The party met another walker who looked at the 10-year-old boy and commented: "My, aren't we wheezy today." Fuld turned on him and shouted: "Eat shit and die! Eat shit and die!"From a UK perspective, there are fascinating insights into less-than-flattering US views of us. John Varley, the intelligent and decent boss of Barclays, is dismissed by Paulson as a "waffler" and a "weak man". Paulson declared the British had "grin-fucked us" after the chancellor and the Financial Services Authority declined to allow Barclays to take over Lehmans on the grounds it was too risky – meaning we did the dirty on the Americans while smiling to their faces (I had to look it up). Bob Diamond, the American investment banking supremo at Barclays, is equally disparaging about his adopted home, where he can claim his bonuses with non-dom tax privilege: he BlackBerried his friend Bob Steel to moan about "little England".A clue to the difficulty politicians had in dealing with the crisis is in the very small gene pool shared by the two worlds. Dubya's brother Jeb worked as an adviser to Lehmans' private-equity arm and his second cousin George H Walker IV was on the executive committee. Hank Paulson's brother Richard also worked for the firm; as a former employee of Goldman Sachs, Paulson was tied up in knots over his subsequent dealings with his former employer. And what is not in the book is as striking as what is: in these pages, we do not meet so much as a single sub-prime borrower facing foreclosure.So is Too Big to Fail the best book about the crisis? For my money, Fool's Gold by Gillian Tett is a more sophisticated read; from a UK perspective, Alex Brummer's The Crunch is more engaging; and Graham Turner's No Way to Run an Economy is more provocative. But it's unfair to expect any one book to serve such a huge, multilayered subject and Sorkin has provided an entertaining addition to the crunch-lit genre. Its final message is a worrying one. Unlike the dinosaurs on the cover, the Wall Street raptors are far from extinct, despite their greed and folly; those who remain are doing better than ever. "Perhaps most disturbing of all, ego is still very much a central part of the Wall Street machine," Sorkin says, noting that the survivors have been left with a genuine sense of invulnerability. Jurassic Park may be less populous, but how long before the sequel?Ruth Sunderland is business editor of the ObserverBusiness and financeCredit crunchGoldman SachsLehman BrothersRuth Sunderlandguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Running: A Global History by Thor Gotaas | Book review As well as being vital to our early survival, running is a universal form of play, as this fascinating study shows. By Christopher McDougallEven though running is the world's most popular hobby, the running bookshelf is curiously empty. Of the few books on the subject in print, nearly all fall into one of two categories: either how-to tips or personal accounts of one man's perseverance against pain. Both share one weird feature: as celebrations of running they make running seem pretty awful. It comes across like performing home surgery – it'll hurt, require expensive equipment and leave scars.The same tired fantasies are endlessly repeated – about the Greek messenger Pheidippides dying after 26 miles (he ran at least 300, in fact, and there's no account of his death), and our feet being so dainty that they require highly engineered trainers (there's actually no scientific evidence – none – that running shoes do anything to prevent injury). Running fares just as poorly in film and fiction. It's always the misery the protagonists have to endure to win the fight, win the girl, or escape diamond-hoarding Nazi dentists who resemble Laurence Olivier.Thor Gotaas, a Norwegian writer who specialises in folklore and cultural history, comes from a different starting point. Recreational running, he points out, has been around since the dawn of recreation time. It's not some modern punishment we invented to burn off excess pints and pizza; it's our most ancient and universal form of play, and has been rhapsodised and dramatised for thousands of years. Gotaas combs the world for true running tales, and comes up with some beauties. Who knew that naked running was the vogue in 18th-century England, with men and women racing separately and thousands of spectators lining the race course? Or that in ancient Egypt, Ramses II legitimised his hold on the throne by performing a long-distance run every few years, a ritual he performed until he was over 90?Gotaas's span begins with prehistory, arguing that because of our sweat glands and springy leg tendons, humans are the greatest distance runners on earth. Our tremendous efficiency at venting heat and maximising caloric energy allows us to run big game to death by chasing them across the savannah until they collapse from heat exhaustion. Access to meat allowed us to grow big brains, while tracking animals allowed us to use this cerebral hardware to develop abstract thinking, verbal communication and cooperation strategies, the mental skills we'd later use to come up with intravascular surgery and iPods.Gotaas's research ranges as freely across the globe as it does through time. He pays as much attention to modern African champions as he does to European greats, carefully and colourfully describing the lives of overlooked luminaries such as Abebe Bikila, the barefoot Ethiopian who won the 1960 Olympic marathon in Rome, and Henry Rono (Kenya's "Mr Comeback").One of Gotaas's best tales is about Mensen Ernst, a Norwegian sailor who, in the mid-1800s, came ashore to take a bet that he couldn't run from Paris to Moscow in 15 days. Not only would Ernst have to average 115 miles a day but he'd also have to stop along the way to scavenge food and shelter, periodically hauling a compass, maps and wooden quadrant out of his backpack to figure out where he was. He not only won the wager but did it with swagger; imprisoned by suspicious villagers towards the end of his run, he escaped by climbing up a chimney, jumping off the roof and racing off towards the gates of the Kremlin, arriving a full day ahead of schedule.But because these passages are so strong, they make Running's two weaknesses all the more glaring. Gotaas is trying to get his arms around a subject that could fill volumes, so he skips all too briefly over areas that really demand a deeper dive. Some sections of the book read like online abstracts of articles you can't access without paying a subscription fee; you're enticed, then frustrated. Take the account of King Shulgi of Sumeria. In 2088BC, Gotaas tells us, the king promised to attend religious feasts in two cities on the same day, even though it required a 200-mile round trip. Shulgi ran the entire distance between one sunset and the next, but he was accompanied every step of the way by servants carrying snacks and drinks. Were they also running? Was running such a way of life in Sumeria that a 200-mile jog wasn't such an outlandish way for a head of state to commune with the common folk?Gotaas alludes but doesn't investigate. One of the great physiological mysteries of all time, for instance, is how the "marathon monks" of Mount Hiei in Japan manage to run 50 miles a day for up to seven years while somehow surviving on a diet of thin soup and veggies. You won't find the answer in Running, and you'll likewise be left hanging with this great tease from ancient Greece: "Magic and spells were part of the runners' tactics and some of them were unbelievably cunning."Ordinarily one wouldn't snipe at this amazingly wide-ranging study because it's not deeper. But Running's second weakness could have remedied the first: what it lacks is a unifying theory of distance running, a thread that unites this singular human skill beyond the fact that it explodes into a boom every generation or so. Gotaas is great at gathering up the clues. All we're waiting for is a detective to show us what they mean.Christopher McDougall is the author of Born to Run: The Rise of Ultra-running and the Super-athlete Tribe (Profile). HistoryRunningguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Joshua Ferris' 'The Unnamed' goes nowhere fast Ferris's second novel, about a man whose compulsion to walk overtakes him, resembles less a sophomore slump than a cliff dive. ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |