I received a free advance copy of this from NetGalley for review.
Imagine if you could see what was in the news a year from now? Considering how the laI received a free advance copy of this from NetGalley for review.
Imagine if you could see what was in the news a year from now? Considering how the last year is gone, I’d guess it would be more than any sane person could bear.
Adhi Chaudry and Ben Boyce became friends in college even though they couldn’t be more different. Adhi is an introvert and a brilliant computer engineer. Ben is a charismatic salesman type who dreams of making it big. When Adhi develops a theory that would use quantum computing to enable a PC to show data from one year in the future, Ben immediately sees it is an opportunity to start a company that will make Apple and Amazon look like small potatoes. In fact, they even get confirmation that this is what they will do once Adhi gets the machine working and they look ahead a year to see that their corporation, The Future, has made them rich even before they start selling everyone their own machine. There are troubling aspects to the technology, but with the knowledge of what they will do in hand, Ben and Adhi press on even as problems pile up and begin to take a toll on their friendship.
There’s a lot I liked about this clever sci-fi book, and one of the best things was that it's epistolary novel told in texts, emails, and transcripts that bounce around from Ben’s testimony told in front of a congressional hearing just before The Future starts selling the machines to the public to flashbacks about how it all came about. It’s not just a clever gimmick either because there’s actually a reason why it’s told this way that becomes clear late in the book.
The idea of the glimpsing ahead to the future via a quantum computer was also intriguing and very well done. It could have been a concept that came across as wonky or even magical, but Adhi’s theory along with the development process grounds it more than enough to seem feasible.
Once the set-up is established, author Dan Frey then does some very nice work in a way that shows he thought through the implications of this technology even if his main characters haven’t. Adhi and Ben do a few tests that convince them that the future cannot be changed by them knowing the future. Although Adhi is more cautious we see how Ben’s enthusiasm blows past any notions that this is a bad idea.
This is where Frey’s themes become clear, and it couldn’t be more timely than this moment when social media companies who made fortunes by allowing anyone to say pretty much whatever they want have now been forced to reckon with the consequences because it turns out there’s a lot of people who are shameless opportunists who will lie constantly, and there’s even more people ready to swallow everything they say.
That’s why Ben’s character really struck me because he talks a good game about how letting everyone share the information about the future makes for a fair and level playing field and that it would actually make the world better. Yet, the story also shows time and again how he uses that argument to beat down rational concerns and criticisms about the technology he’s trying to sell and how much responsibility he bears for it. Sound like any tech billionaires you know?
Frey uses this to turn what could be the book’s biggest plot hole into a strength. Because if Adhi and Ben can see the future, why wouldn’t they just keep it secret and play the stock market to get rich without taking the tech public and open the Pandora’s Box of letting everyone see the immediate future?
Part of the answer is that it isn’t enough to just be rich, they want to become famous as world changers like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg. Or at least that’s Ben dream, and he can persuade Adhi that it’s his too. Which means they have to let the public know about it so the excuses about doing it for the good of the world start up. Plus, they know that they’ve already done it by looking ahead so why worry about it? They’ve set up a logic loop that demands that they do this even as the warning signs start flashing faster and faster.
On top of all this, it reads like any of those real stories about how some friends started a business, made it big, and then when disagreements come about it, everything falls apart. As you read their emails and texts you can see the cracks starting to form, and there’s a real sense of impending doom because readers can see what’s happening even if they can’t. This has impact because Frey built a real and believable bond between Adhi and Ben so that I was still rooting for these guys even as I was thinking that this was all a terrible idea.
Combine all this with a fantastic ending, and you’ve got one of the better sci-fi books that has extremely relevant themes....more
I received a free advance copy of this for review from NetGalley.
You load sixteen drones, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt…
ItI received a free advance copy of this for review from NetGalley.
You load sixteen drones, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt…
It’s the near future, and the giant company Cloud dominates the economy with its massive warehouses that are essentially cities where the employees live and work. However, the CEO of Cloud, Gibson Wells, has just announced that he’s dying of cancer so there’s change on the horizon as a couple of new employees meet during the hiring process. Paxton’s dream of running his own business was destroyed by Cloud, but now he needs a job so he finds himself on a security team. Zinnia acts like just another person looking for work, but in reality she’s been paid by a mysterious client to infiltrate Cloud and uncover some of its secrets.
Unfortunately, it’s hard for Zinnia to find holes in Cloud’s security, and even harder when she is worn out from long shifts spent running to fill orders. A relationship with Paxton might be her best way to complete her mission, but can she use him like that if she actually likes the guy?
On the surface this seems like your standard dystopian tale with some idealistic folks trying to take down an evil corporation, but this book is deeper and more subtle than that. For starters, the characters aren’t stereotypes. You might expect Paxton to be bitter and angry about his company being destroyed by Cloud and having to go to work for them, but he’s actually a guy who still believes that he can achieve his dreams by good ideas and hard work. Zinnia isn’t a radical trying to change the world either. She’s a mercenary doing a job for money, and while she has no love for Cloud she’s not looking to take it down either.
We also hear from Gibson Wells in the form of messages he’s releasing as he does a final farewell tour of the company he built, and that includes some of his history. At first his folksy tale of how he started Cloud with little more than an idea and some furniture scavenged from a closed school gives us the impression that this is the American dream taken to its fullest potential. Especially when Wells lays out that part of his goal for creating the Cloud facilities was to provide good jobs while helping to stave the increasing ravages of climate change by making the greenest facilities possible. It all sounds very reasonable, maybe even honorable. Yet as we learn more and more about how Cloud actually works Wells’ defense of his business tactics start to ring increasingly hollow.
For example, all the Cloud employees are on a rating system where their performance is constantly evaluated and a star value assigned which Wells explains came from his old grade school days when he always tried to get all the points possible on his assignments. That sounds good, but when average performance might get you fired then it’s a constant battle to be great, even perfect. Which then means that the standards shift to a point where people literally have to run themselves ragged to meet the minimum performance level.
Another thing the book does an excellent job at is showing just how falling into a routine might be the most dangerous and depressing aspect of all. There are several points where both Paxton and Zinnia get into the rut of just doing their job, returning to their small apartments, watching TV, falling asleep, and then doing it again. This, more than anything, might be the thing that lets Cloud flourish. If your employees have to expend so much physical and mental energy to get through an average workday that they just want to collapse into a stupor every night then they’re never going to have the time or gumption to try and shake things up in any way.
So this is a well written book with a timely message that I thought it was excellent. It also depressed the hell out of me because I read it on device I got from the company that Cloud is obviously based on. Now I’m posting a review on a website owned by that same corporation. Even though I don’t directly work for that company it’s changed my life in many ways, and I went along with it because it was cheap and convenient without wondering too much where it all ends. Oops.
Even worse is that after reading this now, at a time when billionaires make the rules and the bottom line is used to justify everything they do, I don’t see a way that it gets better without humanity going all the way down Fury Road and just starting over.
But hey, it’s still a good book so go ahead and read it. Just maybe try to find a copy in an independent bookstore....more
The main reason I wanted to read this is because I’m such a huge fan of the TV show Fargo. Noah Hawley is the main producer and writer responsible forThe main reason I wanted to read this is because I’m such a huge fan of the TV show Fargo. Noah Hawley is the main producer and writer responsible for transforming the great Coen brothers’ movie into something that has risen to the top of my viewing list even during this Golden Age of Television which has filled so many DVRs. If you haven’t seen it yet then watch it right now. Go on. We’ll wait. It’s only two seasons of ten episodes each so it won’t take you that long. Then you’ll be ready to properly appreciate Hawley’s talents. All done? Good. Let’s talk about the book then.
A private plane carrying eleven people crashes in the ocean shortly after takeoff from Martha’s Vineyard. A middle-aged painter named Scott Burroughs survives the impact and saves both himself and a small boy by making a miraculous swim to shore. Scott is at first hailed as a hero, but he wants only to be left alone. Since the plane was also carrying a media tycoon who ran a cable news network and a wealthy financial advisor who was about to be indicted for shady dealings there are a lot of questions about why it crashed. An opinionated bully of a political commentator from the news network uses his show to spin wild conspiracy theories as well as inciting a witch hunt against Scott for having the unmitigated gall to survive while rich and important people died.
There’s two parallel stories going on here. The first is a Bridge of San Luis Rey kind of thing where we follow the lives of the people on the plane as well as others impacted by the crash. The second involves Scott trying to cope with the crash and its aftermath. There’s also a mystery lurking in the background of what ultimately did happen on board the jet.
A lot of the history and reflections of the characters have to do with wealth. As a person who wasn’t rich and was essentially just hitching a ride because of a chance encounter there’s an interesting dynamic in that Scott was in this bubble of privilege for only moments before being thrown out of it violently. His lack of money and yet being with people who had it in that moment where their bank accounts couldn’t save them is seen as suspicious. The lingering presence of wealth hangs over the backgrounds and actions of the other characters, too. Everyone has to come to terms in some way with how money - serious money – is what makes the world go round. Here’s a bit I particularly liked:
“But money, like gravity, is a force that clumps, drawing in more and more of itself, eventually creating the black hole that we know aswealth. This is not simply the fault of humans. Ask any dollar bill and it will tell you it prefers the company of hundreds to the company of ones. Better to be a sawbuck in a billionaire’s account than a dirty single in the torn pocket of an addict.”
I wasn’t entirely happy with the ending which seemed rushed and as if it was kind of what Hawley wished could happen in this situation rather than what actually would. Still, this was a very well written story with many profound bits of wisdom about life, death, art, money, media, and air travel gone wrong. It’s the same kind of story telling skill he’s shown himself to be a master of on Fargo.
(I received a free copy of this from NetGalley for review.) ...more
“Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful.” - Warren Buffett
Some of the most essential financial lessons I ever learn “Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful.” - Warren Buffett
Some of the most essential financial lessons I ever learned came from comic books back in the ‘90s when a bubble fueled by idiotic speculation on crappy books marketed as ‘collector’s editions’ eventually burst. It left me with several copies of all the variant covers for Jim Lee’s X-Men #1, and the realization that something is only as valuable as what someone will actually pay you for it. It was also eye opening to discover that a large company like Marvel would cut its own throat in the long term by compromising quality which alienated its most loyal readers for a short term gain and resulted in the company filing for bankruptcy in ’96. (Don’t worry. They landed on their feet.)
A decade later I didn’t pay much attention to the real estate market because I wasn’t a home owner at the time, but occasionally I’d see or read some news about the fantastic housing market that was booming. People were seeing the value of their homes skyrocket, house prices were soaring, they were still selling, and a whole lot of people were getting very rich as analysts promised that the gravy train would roll on forever.
“Well, that’s not gonna end well,” I’d think remembering all those bagged copies of The Death of Superman and Image comics sitting in my parents basement. Sadly, it didn’t occur to me to try and capitalize on those idle thoughts, but I’d like to think that if I had met any of the guys featured in this book about that time I’d have drawn on that experience and handed them my every dime I had to bet on the whole thing falling apart.
Michael Lewis has written a succinct and fascinating explanation as to why and how a handful of people recognized the coming financial crisis years before it hit and found ways to profit enourmously from it. Some were smart and cynical Wall Street insiders who knew that a whole lot of people in their industry didn’t even realize the risk that their institutions had taken on when they were buying up blocks of subprime mortgages. An eccentric former medical doctor turned hedge fund manager was sure mortgages being handed out to anyone who asked would became a wave of defaults when the low teaser interest rates expired after a couple of years. A couple of outsiders who had made a small fortune by playing stock market longshots saw the upside in laying out a relatively low amount of cash that would pay off big if things went south.
You might wonder at why no one sounded an alarm if they saw the collapse coming, and the short answer is that they couldn’t get anyone to listen to them when they tried. It was so inconceivable to the banks and Wall Street that the real estate market might collapse that these people pretty much had to invent ways to bet on it happening. Even the ones who could see the writing on the wall would find themselves frequently shocked at the levels of greed and stupidity they’d encounter as well as the utter lack of government oversight that might have prevented it.
There’s a lot of fascinating human elements behind all of these stories, and Mike Burry, the doctor turned financial guru, is a particularly interesting person to read about. Obviously there’s many complex financial pieces that have to be explained and much of it was so complicated that even the people involved didn’t understand all of it. So there's a few parts where I found myself scratching my head. However, just as he made the story of finding new ways to measure the performance and value of baseball players in Moneyball interesting Lewis also manages to make his explanations of things like credit default swaps readable.
It’s slightly depressing to read since it’s a reminder of the whole meltdown in 2008, but it’s nice to hear that at least a few deserving people got something out of the whole mess.
I’d also highly recommend the film adaptation of this which mined the story for black humor and found very clever ways to explain the financial pieces....more
"When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza-pie...That’s amore!"
Dean Martin certainly sang how we see the the moon here on Earth. It’s a brilliant l"When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza-pie...That’s amore!"
Dean Martin certainly sang how we see the the moon here on Earth. It’s a brilliant light in the night sky that is the symbol of romance as well as a tantalizing beacon of wonder and discovery that inspired one the greatest scientific and engineering achievements in human history. However, that’s looking at it from a distance. On closer examination it’s a lifeless hunk of rock in a vacuum that is irradiated constantly by the sun. And since people suck, when you send a bunch of us there it only gets worse.
In the future the moon has been opened for business and after a couple of generations it’s now developed into a feudal state where the five families (a/k/a the Five Dragons) who control its most profitable businesses reign supreme under the watchful eye of the Lunar Development Corporation. The Corta Hélio company mines helium-3 for Earth’s energy needs, but the founder and matriarch Andriana Corta is elderly and ill. She fears that her children will fight for control once she dies, and their most bitter rival seems to have made an assassination attempt on one of the family that could turn into open warfare.
It took me a while to warm up to this story, but eventually it did grab my attention thanks to its well thought out sci-fi elements as well as detailed ideas about how a human society would function in that environment. I was particularly intrigued by the notion that their are no laws on the moon, only negotiations where everything is controlled by contracts with a court system dedicated to parsing the fine print, and where a duel might be used to settle a dispute.
Another interesting aspect is that since oxygen and water are the most precious of commodities that everyone is charged for every breath and every drop of water. So having a contract that allows you to pay for these things is very important, and unemployment could turn into an extended death sentence. Everything from the health effects of living in low gravity, the future version of the internet, fashion trends, sexuality, and the best way to make a cocktail are brought up ways that show that McDonald put a great amount of thought into this story.
The one piece I felt short changed on was a sub-plot that involved one character being a ‘wolf’ who seemingly gains extra intellectual and physical prowess when the Earth is in certain positions. Obviously, this is meant to be a kind of reverse werewolf thing, but it really seems to come out of left field and is never as fully explained as most of the other details.
The story has invited comparisons to other works like Game of Thrones, Dune, and The Godfather and you can certainly see elements of all of those and more in this, but the one that really caught my eye was in an interview that McDonald did where he cited the old TV show Dallas as one of his main inspirations. That makes a lot of sense because for big chunks of this I was thinking that it felt like a soap opera with a big wealthy family fighting each other and outsiders, and like a soap opera you’ll find yourself rooting for and against various characters.
So that’s what this is: Dallas on the moon, and just as Dallas once captivated the country with its ‘Who shot JR?’ cliffhanger McDonald tries a similar thing here by not wrapping anything up and leaving the reader with multiple storylines hanging. That’s not a fatal flaw, especially since this is supposedly going to be just a two-book story. (Although the sheer number of characters suggest that McDonald may be hoping for a TV deal of his own.) Still, it’s irksome to read all of this and end in such an open ended way.
I’ll call it three stars for now while reserving the right to adjust once I read the second part.
On a side note, isn’t it weird when you get through a whole book and don’t realize you read something else by the author? I got all the way through this one without realizing that I had also read his Brasyl....more
It’s amazing that a book called The Porkchoppers doesn’t have an ounce of fat.
Porkchopper is actually a slang term for a union official who is more inIt’s amazing that a book called The Porkchoppers doesn’t have an ounce of fat.
Porkchopper is actually a slang term for a union official who is more interested in helping himself than the labor he represents, and there’s a couple of them on display here. Don Cubbin is an aging president of a powerful national union who is facing a serious challenge in an upcoming election by his secretary-treasurer Sammy Hanks. Cubbin is an alcoholic who is bored with the job, and Hanks has a tendency to fly into tantrums that will literally have him pounding the floor and screaming gibberish. So neither one of them seems like the ideal guy to entrust with the livelihoods of thousands of workers.
Still, there’s big money and careers at stake so plenty of people have an interest in getting their guy elected. A wealthy glutton hires a fixer and his lackeys to make sure that Cubbin wins in the interest of continuity and stability. Hanks’ people are working overtime to steal the election in one critical city. Someone has even kicked things up to the next level by hiring a hitman to take out Cubbin.
I’ve got a soft spot for ‘70s sleaze, and it doesn’t get much sleazier than this story with a bunch of bagmen, fixers, and political tricksters working every angle they can think of to swing the election. There’s an enormous amount of money and influence involved so it’s no surprise that people are willing to play dirty, but the thing that makes it all so delightfully squalid is that it feels so cheap and small time at the same time. Even the hitman works at a grocery store as a produce manager as his day job.
Another factor that makes me love this story is that it’s just so well told. There’s a large cast of characters and Ross Thomas provides enough backstory and personality to make each one feel vivid and alive, and he accomplishes all that in a brief 216 pages. That’s writing tight enough to be used for a tourniquet.
This was published in 1972, the same year that the Watergate scandal was just beginning, but Ross Thomas was apparently ahead of the general public in knowing the kind of underhanded tactics can be used to great effect in a political campaign. It’s a look behind a stained curtain at what seedy people do to win, and I enjoyed all of its grimy glory. ...more
In 1952 the National Football League started an expansion franchise called the Dallas Texans, but the team was a miserable failure and played only oneIn 1952 the National Football League started an expansion franchise called the Dallas Texans, but the team was a miserable failure and played only one year there. They were eventually sold and moved to Baltimore where they became the Colts. Only the Colts would later leave Baltimore for Indianapolis, and the Cleveland Browns moved to Baltimore and became the Ravens, then Cleveland got an expansion team again named the Browns. In 1960 Lamar Hunt started another team in Dallas and again called them the Texans, but they eventually had to leave town for Kansas City and became the Chiefs. However, there is again a NFL team called the Texans only they play in Houston because they got an expansion team after their Oilers moved to Nashville and became the Tennessee Titans.
Got all that?
OK, let me try to simplify it.
Once upon a time there was a guy named Lamar Hunt who was the son of an uber-wealthy oil tycoon. Hunt was a sports nut who dreamed of owning his own professional football team, but at that time the NFL had no interest in expansion. With the league giving him the cold shoulder, Hunt came up with the idea of starting his own. After rounding up some other rich folks to help him out, Hunt’s vision of the American Football League became a reality with his own Dallas Texans among its teams.
However, the NFL panicked at the idea that a rival league might drive up salaries and attract their fans so they tried to put Hunt out of business by starting another team in Dallas. After recruiting another Texas oil millionaire named Clint Murchison to pay the bills, the Cowboys were born and the war to win the hearts and minds of football fans of Dallas was on.
The two teams fought in courts and the media but oddly enough never on the football field. The Texans managed to win more games in those early years and Hunt was a tireless promoter who worked every angle he could think of to attract fans, but the Cowboys had the backing of the established league as well as the Dallas business community. After winning an AFL championship but playing in a mostly empty stadium, Hunt cut a deal to take his team to Kansas City. He lost the battle but won the war since the league he formed went on to merge with the NFL and become the version of pro football that has gone on to dominate the American sports landscape.
As a Kansas City area resident and Chiefs fan (And do not take that as an invitation to mention that last play-off collapse against the Colts. I’m still not speaking about it.) I was pretty familiar with most of this story, and I’d watched a fun documentary series about the old AFL vs. NFL war called Full Color Football that had tons of interesting history and anecdotes about how the two leagues fought over players and territory. I was hoping that this book would provide more juicy tidbits about the fight to become Dallas’s team, but I’d heard most of this already.
While it gives a decent overview of the situation and the key figures involved, the book spends far more time providing blow by blow recaps of action in individual games the Texans and Cowboys played rather than detailing the war between them off the field. Several lawsuits are mentioned, but few details are provided. Plus, while some effort is made to show how some players and fans hated the other team, there’s no real heat between Hunt and Murchison. In fact, the two men liked each other and would often engage in pranks like Hunt jumping out of a birthday cake at a party to surprise his rival. In the end this feels less like a war than a civilized battle for market share that eventually found both teams thriving.
Another thing that had me scratching my head is that a lot of focus is put on Abner Haynes, a terrific running back for the Texans who was an early AFL superstar. We get a lot of material about what he thought about the situation as well as many accounts of spectacular plays he made on the field. Then he suddenly vanishes from the book, only to get the casual revelation in one sentence that the Chiefs cut him after the 1964 season. It’s really odd that so much time was spent on him as a player, but then have almost nothing about his leaving or what he did after that.
If you don’t know much about the AFL/NFL or Texans/Cowboys feud and are interested in it, then this is an entertaining book, but if you already know the basic story and are looking for something more in depth, it won’t tell you much you didn’t already know.
It’s probably a bad idea for the US military to allow the troops overseas to get the news from back home. I have this fear that someday the service meIt’s probably a bad idea for the US military to allow the troops overseas to get the news from back home. I have this fear that someday the service men and women in places like Iraq and Afghanistan will finally snap after seeing the people they’ve pledged to defend are less interested in what they’re doing than TV reality shows and celebrity gossip. If the military ever decides that the pack of assholes back in America isn’t worth fighting and dying for, we could find all that hardware aiming back at us someday. I really wouldn’t blame them.
Billy Lynn is a young soldier who was serving in Iraq with Bravo squad. After Bravo got into a hellacious firefight with a band of insurgents that was captured on camera by an embedded Fox News crew, the members of Bravo become national heroes. To capitalize on their popularity, the Bush administration has Bravo brought back to the US and sent them on a ‘Victory Tour’ (Which just so happens to run through critical electoral states for the next election.) to drum up support for the war.
The Victory Tour culminates at a Thanksgiving Day pro football game at Texas Stadium in which Bravo is supposed to play a part in the half-time show. While Billy and the other Bravo members have been enjoying some of the perks of being heroes on tour, it also means putting up with the people who want to prove their support of the troops by fawning over them as well as being used as PR props by anyone with an agenda like the owner of the Cowboys.* Bravo would also like to sign a film deal before they have to deploy back to Iraq in a few days so they can at least get a nice payday for their efforts, but the producer they’re working with is having problems getting Hollywood interested in a war movie set in Iraq.
(*Ben Fountain avoids a lawsuit by creating a fictional asshole owner of the Cowboys instead of naming Jerry Jones, the actual asshole owner of the Cowboys.)
I started noting passages I wanted to quote in this review, but I hit a point where I was finding something on every page so I gave up on that plan. There was so much about this one that I loved, that I don’t really know where to start.
Young Billy Lynn is one of the best and most sympathetic characters I’ve read in a long while. He’s a 19-year-old virgin who can’t legally drink, but he’s gone to war and had more experience with death than most would have in a lifetime. Billy is nervous when dealing with the older, wealthier good old boys who want to glad-hand Bravo at the game, and he has a somewhat naive belief that there is someone wiser than him that can explain all the feelings that combat and the aftermath have stirred in him. However, he also has a grunt's hyper-awareness of hypocrisy and bullshit.
As Bravo endures a long day of being used as props for photo ops and a half-time show, Billy’s musings and observations about the people and events in the stadium showcase a society that will spend billions on sports but pays it’s soldiers a pittance while patting themselves on the back for the way they support the troops by offering them applause and trinkets before sending them back to war.
That’s a powerful point, but what makes this so great is that the message is delivered so deftly and without the heavy handed political left or right wing political manifesto that is part of almost any writing done about these kinds of subjects. It’s also funny and absolutely nails many things that are great and ridiculous about America.
It’s only March, but I think I may have an early winner for Best Book I Read This Year....more
Super-heroes have gotten darker and more violent over the years, but compared to some of the people in charge of Marvel during that time Wolverine andSuper-heroes have gotten darker and more violent over the years, but compared to some of the people in charge of Marvel during that time Wolverine and the Punisher seem about as threatening as a glass of non-fat milk. Killers with razor sharp unbreakable claws and large guns are no match for the carnage a corporate executive worried about the stock price can create.
Sean Howe gives a comprehensive history of how the pulp publishing company founded by a Depression-era hobo named Martin Goodman eventually became a comic book empire that was bought by Disney for $4 billion in 2009. The book tells the familiar story of how Goodman’s nephew Stan Lee working with artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko saved the struggling company in 1961 by coming up with a line of new characters like the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, X-Men, and others that you can see at your local movie theater on a regular basis today. Then it details the many trials, tribulations and triumphs the company would have as its characters became iconic parts of pop culture.
As a perpetually cheerful and energetic editor and spokesman, Stan Lee built a myth via the Bullpen Bulletin and Stan’s Soapbox column that appeared in the comics that Marvel was a wacky wonderful place where the writers and artists worked in a happy state of constant brainstorming about their stories. In reality during these early years, Lee worked with a small staff in cramped offices while Jack Kirby drew in the basement of his home, and things were never as merry as Stan portrayed them to the fans. After Goodman sold the company Marvel would be bought and sold to various corporations and business people most of who had no interest in doing anything other than squeezing every dime possible out of the characters while denying any kind of ownership or royalties to the people who created them.
The stories of how creators were screwed out of rights have become legendary, and the constant law suits and bickering over who actually created the characters have become so common place as to not even be newsworthy any more. (A fun fact that I learned in this is that at one time Marvel put a boilerplate waiver on the backs of paychecks so that signing it to get the money became a forfeiture of potential royalties.) The battles over the rights between the company and the creative people would pale in comparison to the many financial and legal fiascos Marvel would get into over the years due to the many buy-outs and chronic mismanagement.
Howe does a nice job of showing how all the behind the scenes turmoil impacted the stories being churned out. The Secret Wars mini-series started out as a promotional tie-in for a new line of toys, but became the prototype for the crossovers that are all too frequent events today. The surprise success of rolling out a specialty cover on Todd McFarlane’s new Spider-Man book had the corporate execs and Wall Street demanding sales increases every year and forced the editors to come up with a parade of gimmick covers and new #1 issues constantly to hit those numbers. This led to the speculator bubble of the early ‘90s that nearly destroyed the industry when disgruntled fans stopped buying.
With the sale to Disney and huge success of movies like The Avengers, you might think this story has a happy ending, but Marvel still faces challenges today. In the digital age, the idea of buying pricey paper comics that can be read in minutes is a tough sell, and many question whether the money made in movies and merchandising has made the comic book obsolete. Aging fan boys grumble over the constant character deaths and crossovers, yet those remain the top selling books. Balancing the continuity demanded by long-time fans while still being accessible to new readers has become a nearly impossible task. (Dan and I have some great ideas on how to resolve this issue if anyone from DC or Marvel reads this and would like to pay us a consulting fee.)
Many of these individual stories have been told before, but Howe gives not only a history, but a detailed picture of the ways that all the creative, business and legal issues have had a profound impact on the characters and the industry. That’s what really makes it an informative and interesting read.
Having the misfortune of being a Kansas City Royals fan, I thought I’d had any interest in baseball beaten out of me by season after season of humiliaHaving the misfortune of being a Kansas City Royals fan, I thought I’d had any interest in baseball beaten out of me by season after season of humiliation. Plus, the endless debate about the unfairness of large market vs. small market baseball had made my eyes glaze over years ago so I didn’t pay much attention to the Moneyball story until the movie came out last year and caught my interest enough to finally check this out.
Despite being a small market team and outspent by tens of millions of dollars by clubs like the Yankees, the Oakland A’s managed to be extremely competitive from 1999 through 2006. They did this when their general manager Billy Beane embraced a new type of baseball statistics called sabermetrics that had been championed by a stat head from Kansas named Bill James.
James had pored over box scores and started seriously questioning the traditional ways of measuring the performance of players with his initially self-published digests that eventually became must reads for hardcore baseball nerdlingers. As the digital age made mountains of baseball stats available on-line, fans with a mathematical frame of mind (And there are a lot of them.) started coming up with ways of looking at the data that called the old ways of evaluating players into question.
Beane had plenty of reason to distrust the old way of scouting since he had once been identified as a can’t-miss prospect who ended up quitting as a player to take a job in the front office after his career flamed out. By coming up with new ways to grade performance and ignoring things that other teams deemed flaws like being overweight or having a peculiar throwing motion, the A’s went after low dollar high-impact players who made them one of the winningest teams with the lowest payroll in baseball.
The sport has always had a weird intersection of nerd and jock, and this story illustrates that dynamic very well as Beane and his staff decided to trust the numbers rather than conventional wisdom. The conflict between the two worlds is a fascinating story, and the brash Beane makes a great focal point.
It’s a great book not just for sports fans, but for anyone who likes stories about people trying to shake up an established way of doing things. And if you’re a math geek or have a thing for hard nosed business deals, there’s a lot to like here. By framing the story in terms of the people involved, Lewis keeps it relatable in human terms and not just a dry recitation of on base percentages.
The movie is also extremely well done and entertaining (Hence the Oscar nomination for Best Picture.),but the Aaron Sorkin screenplay vastly simplifies the story and Hollywoodizes it to an extreme degree. Still, it’s a great flick for anyone who has a soft spot for stories about underdogs. ...more
After I read Too Big to Fail, I just hadn’t gotten enough stories about greedy assholes so I figured I‘d read this to angry up my blood some more.
ActAfter I read Too Big to Fail, I just hadn’t gotten enough stories about greedy assholes so I figured I‘d read this to angry up my blood some more.
Actually, Too Big to Fail began after the Bear Stearns meltdown so even though there was some background there, I felt like I hadn’t gotten the whole story so I picked this up to try and complete the picture. The two books dovetail nicely with this one concentrating on the history of Bear Stearns and how it became the warning alarm that something bad was coming when it started circling the drain and had to be bought out by a joint deal between JP Morgan and the federal government.
It’s got kind of an odd structure in that the first third of the book details the collapse of the firm, and then the rest of the book gives the entire history of the company and how they got to that point. I get that Cohan wanted to lead with the disaster part everyone was interested in, but by saving the details on the history of the major players until the history in the rest of the book, you don’t really understand who the players were or the internal politics at play while they’re all scrambling around.
It’s a well documented book that gives you a pretty good idea of how a firm once known for being fairly conservative and one of the best at risk management became the first major domino to fall in the 2008 financial collapse. It mainly seems like the leadership of the firm, particularly CEO Jimmy Cayne, became far more concerned with bridge tournaments and playing golf than running an investment bank.
One of the things that made me scratch my head the most was the story of Ralph Cioffi. Considered a dynamic salesman but with no patience or head for details, Cioffi convinced Bear’s leadership to let him launch a couple of supposedly conservative hedge funds. At first, the funds did well before 2008 while Cioffi’s monthly statements always stressed that he was predicting a lot of future issues in the sub-prime mortgage market and that the fund had less than 6% of those types of investments while he prepared to make a fortune off the coming crisis. What this guy actually did was continue to buy sub-primes until they made up 60% of the funds while telling everyone that disaster was coming to anyone holding the exact shit he was buying at the same time. WTF?
I guess that’s why I’ll never be rich. I just don’t understand high finance.
Anyhow, of the two books, I’d say that Too Big To Fail gave a better and more complete picture of what happened during the meltdown, but people interested in the subject or Wall Street shenanigans will probably find this well worth their time, too....more
If fans of the HBO series Boardwalk Empire read this hoping just for more stories about corrupt politicians, gangsters, bootlegging, sex, violence, anIf fans of the HBO series Boardwalk Empire read this hoping just for more stories about corrupt politicians, gangsters, bootlegging, sex, violence, and a disfigured hit man, they’re probably going to be disappointed. However, anyone looking for an interesting history of Atlantic City from its humble beginnings of a second rate resort town through it’s glory days of as a popular destination point during Prohibition because of it’s total unwillingness to enforce anti-booze laws to it’s current state as a gambling town that is still plagued by urban decay would probably find this book interesting.
While the author spends plenty of time on the reign of political boss and part time racketeer Nucky Johnson, the inspiration for the Steve Buscemi’s character Nucky Thompson, and the way that the corrupt Republican machine built and ruled Atlantic City for decades, this is really a history and not a true crime book. While the links between organized crime and the politicians is documented extensively, the book centers on the political corruption instead of gangland shenanigans.
So while there’s no Martin Scorsese-style violence, it’s an interesting history of a unique city....more
"The only problem with capitalism is all the capitalists.” Herbert Hoover
There’s a school of thought out there that many, if not most, people buy into"The only problem with capitalism is all the capitalists.” Herbert Hoover
There’s a school of thought out there that many, if not most, people buy into. It goes something like this: The U.S. government is full of a bunch of stupid bureaucrats who do nothing but pass restrictive laws that keep businesses from making money and prevent the growth of the economy. Obviously, the businesses should be allowed to do their thing with no government interference because they know what’s best, and if they should happen to step on their dicks, then they should just fail without the government trying to save them. To do anything else is socialism!
That’s a nice theory, but there’s a huge flaw with it. For the most part, a large business is made up of a bunch of short sighted people who will cut their own throats in the long term if it means making money next quarter. Don’t believe that? Enron. Worldcom. Tyco. AIG. Bear Stearns. Lehman Brothers. Etc. Etc. In 2001 and 2008 we saw what happens when someone doesn’t keep a close eye on the companies chasing the quick buck, and the accounting fraud of 2001 was only about ten years after the savings and loan scandals that cost the U.S. around $120 billion.
Where we really get into trouble is when these fucktards have been allowed to run amok, and then the chickens finally come home to roost. That’s when Joe or Jane Taxpayer, who a few years earlier were sitting there grumbling about the damn guvment keeping the businesses from earning an honest buck, will lose their goddamn minds over the possibility of the government providing cash to these companies to keep the entire economy from going into a death spin. They’d rather see their 401K shrink to a $1.76 rather than let those greedy bastards get a dime of taxpayer money! But no government regulation either!
So rather than holding our noses and spending $50 billion dollars to save Lehman Brothers and AIG and shore up a few other companies and then passing some sensible regulations to keep it from happening again, the government, fearing what Joe or Jane would say, tried to force a private sector solution and ultimately let Lehman go into bankruptcy. Yet after the first domino fell, the panic that spread would end up with the U.S. spending over $750 billion to try and stop another Great Depression.
This book does a great job of laying out the chaos and confusion that occurred and how we were all teetering on a brink that could have been far worse in 2008. Most of the book is just a straight retelling of the events with what the major players were thinking and what they did, but there’s a nice summary at the end that lays out what the author thinks about how it played out and does a fair job of assigning some blame.
A couple of things especially stuck out to me. When the Lehman Brothers execs realized that there would be no government bail out of them, several of them gave angry speeches denouncing the government for not doing more. I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume that a top executive at Lehman Brothers had probably been a hard core guvment-sux Republican up until the point they didn’t get a check. Oh, the irony.
The other thing that made me scratch my head was that these companies kept going back to billionaire Warren Buffet to try and get him to invest so they could raise capital. Buffett made a few half-hearted offers on things he thought he could turn a buck on. Late in the game, when TARP had been passed and the original plan was for the government to buy the toxic assets that were dragging down everyone, Buffet sent a letter to the secretary of the treasury where he laid out a plan that would have created a hybrid of a public and private company to buy up those assets, get a fair market value for them, take them off the troubled companies balance sheets and potentially provided a decent return on the tax payer money. Buffet even pledged to invest $100 million of his own money and help administer it. The plan was shelved when it was decided to invest capital in the banks, but out of all the schemes hatched over those desperate days, it seems like one of the more plausible ones.
So why in the name of Alexander Hamilton didn’t anyone ask Warren Buffett for a plan earlier? They all knew he’d been too smart to get involved in the mess that was dragging them all down. (One reading of a Lehman Brothers stock report that the industry had praised just weeks earlier convinced Buffett that he wouldn’t loan them any capital.) All of these companies tried to beg money off him, but no one asked him if he had any ideas to get them out of the mess. WTF?
Here’s the best part. It’s going to happen again. Think it can’t? There’s still been no meaningful regulations passed and I will bet a six-pack of Boulevard Pilsner that there will be yet another meltdown that will tank the economy and cost taxpayers huge before 2020. Any takers?...more
“Hello, this is Slick McGee, agent to the stars. How can I help you?”
“Sli 3/21/13 - Floating this one to warn Jimmy Fallon.
A Phone Conversation in 2020
“Hello, this is Slick McGee, agent to the stars. How can I help you?”
“Slick, it’s Garfield Lawlerly, president of NBC.”
“Garfield! How are you? Why, I haven’t heard from anybody at NBC since your last scripted show Law & Order: Omaha went off the air.”
“Yes, finding new scripted programs has been challenging.”
“Really? FX, HBO, CBS, Showtime, AMC and a dozen other networks seem to find good shows to put on the air all the time.”
“Here at NBC, we pride ourselves on our prime time slate of game shows and reality TV.”
“Whatever gets you through the night, Garfield. So why are you calling?”
“We’ve got an exciting opportunity here, and we need someone funny with mainstream appeal. You represent all the top comics on our list of possibilities so I….”
“You’re not trying to replace Leno again are you, Garfield?”
“Well, actually yes, we are.”
“Forget it. None of my clients are interested.”
“But it’s The Tonight Show, Slick.”
“So what? The last guy who gave a damn about the history of The Tonight Show was Conan O’Brien and everyone knows what you did to that poor bastard. All of my clients are too young to even know who Johnny Carson is. Besides, they all know you’d just cut their throats and give the show back to Jay the second the ratings dipped. No one is interested. Especially after what that big chin maniac did to Jimmy Fallon.”
“Now, Slick, you know that Jay was cleared of all charges in Fallon’s death.”
“Save that shit for the tourists, Garfield. We all know Jay had him killed when you hinted that Jimmy might replace him soon.”
“Leaving that aside for a moment, Jay is 70 now and we feel it’s time for a change.”
“Then call someone else. None of my clients are going near that bucket of shit you call a late night show. Call me when you decide to start trying to be competitive and make prime time TV shows again, Garfield.”
A Phone Conversation in 2030
“Slick? It’s Garfield Lawlerly from NBC here.”
“No.”
“Oh, come on, Slick. Hear me out.”
“Nope. No way. You just want to talk about trying to get Leno off of The Tonight Show. None of my people are interested in getting Conaned by NBC.”
“Jesus. I can’t believe that the word Conan became a popular verb.”
“That’s what happens when you give someone an epic fucking over, Garfield. You make them immortal.”
“Listen, Slick. Jay is 80 goddamn years old. He just comes out and drools most nights. We’re down to about 20 elderly viewers who still find him funny. We really want to go younger.”
“Forget it. He’d still kill somebody’s family to keep The Tonight Show. We aren’t going near it.”
A Phone Conversation in 2040.
“Slick, it’s Garfield Lawlerly.”
“No.”
“For Christ‘s sake. Jay has been dead for over a year, Slick.”
“Yeah, and you fuckers would still find a way to screw over a host to give that show back to him, Garfield. We can’t take a chance that science may find a way to animate corpses. Because if they do, the first one out of the grave would be Jay Leno wanting to get The Tonight Show back. None of my clients will take that chance. So just prop his old bones up in the chair every night and roll the cameras. It‘d probably be funnier that Leno‘s actual act was.”
Conan O’Brien was being wooed by rival networks in 2004. He’d already turned down one attractive offer from Fox before, but he wasn’t interested in money. He had the same fever that had driven David Letterman crazy. He wanted a chance to host The Tonight Show. This gave NBC a dilemma. Conan may have been the flavor of the month, but Jay Leno was still comfortably # 1 in the ratings. Just like the debacle of 1993, NBC had two guys who wanted the same chair.
An NBC executive named Jeff Zucker came up with the idea of a five year transition. Give Leno an end date that let him go on for several more years. Placate Conan with the promise of the show. Both men agreed to the deal. What seemed to be a reasonable plan of succession for one of NBC’s most valuable properties would become a nightmare that would humiliate O’Brien, drag Leno’s name through the mud and make the entire network look clueless.
When I read Bill Carter’s book The Late Shift back in the ‘90s, I never dreamed that NBC would be so stupid as to give him material for a sequel in 2010. Like the first time around, Carter provides a clear and fascinating account of not only the decisions that led to a public relations nightmare, but how these decisions seemed reasonable to the people involved at that moment.
Leno was painted as a villain during the mess, but what’s interesting about the book is that Leno’s biggest sin may have been not being a bigger dick about the idea of handing off the show to begin with. When approached in 2004 about it, Leno swallowed his hurt and anger and went along with the plan. He only launched a series of passive aggressive hints about his plans to jump to ABC or another network during his last year of The Tonight Show. That led to the horrible plan of having him do an hour of prime time that tanked in the ratings, incited an affiliate rebellion and helped drag down Conan’s ratings. (Which Leno and NBC would then point to as justification for pushing Conan out.)
If Leno would have pitched a screaming tantrum in 2004 when NBC brought up the idea of pushing him out for Conan, the network would have had two tough choices:
1) Inform Conan that Leno would be the host of The Tonight Show for as long as he wanted, and Conan would either have to stay on Late Night or jump ship and try to launch a new show on another network.
2) Push Jay out once and for all and turn the show over to Conan, knowing that they’d take a short term ratings hit, but hope that Conan would build a new generation of fans. This meant risking Leno starting a new show somewhere else.
Unfortunately, NBC took the chickenshit route and waffled mightily by trying to keep both men on the air.
While the book makes it clear that there was a touch of arrogance and entitlement to the Conan crew that contributed to the problems, I find Leno a weird and fascinating figure in all this. Leno used to be a comedian respected by his peers. Now, he’s considered a sell-out who cares for only one thing in the world: telling jokes on The Tonight Show. He’s become a kind of comedic Terminator writing half-amusing jokes as his mission. And since he only cares about staying on the air to keep doing this, he left behind any notions of artistic integrity or concerns about anything other than ratings behind long ago.
To Jay, keeping the show on air and # 1 is the only measurement that matters. Fellow late night host Jimmy Kimmel has a great line in the book where he says that Jay has taken joke writing and turned into a factory job. He doesn’t seem to take any joy in it or try for anything new or innovative. The only really important thing to Jay is churning those jokes out daily.
Some may say that it was silly for the public to get so wrapped up in the battle between a couple of rich comics. True. But NBC taking The Tonight Show away from Conan and giving it back to Jay symbolized much more than that. It was Gen X & Y getting pushed aside for baby boomers again. It was new media versus old media. It’s the old network model versus cable. It was critical acclaim versus mass appeal.
In the end, it was a story about people put in impossible positions (sometimes due to their own hubris) with hundreds of millions of dollars and careers on the line in a national spotlight. It’s crazy that there was so much drama over people trying to do comedy, but it makes for a helluva an interesting book....more
One of the problems when reviewing Cryptonomicon is that you could easily end up writing a short novel just trying to summarize it. Here’s my attempt One of the problems when reviewing Cryptonomicon is that you could easily end up writing a short novel just trying to summarize it. Here’s my attempt to boil the story down to its essence.
During World War II, Lawrence Waterhouse is a genius mathematician who is part of the effort to break Japanese and German codes, and his job is to keep them from realizing how successful the Allies have been by faking events that give the enemies reasons other than compromised codes to pin any losses on. Marine Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe had to leave behind the woman he loves in the Philippines when the war broke out in the Pacific and after surviving some brutal island combat, he finds himself assigned to a unit carrying out dangerous and weird missions that seem to have no logical goals.
In the late ‘90s, Waterhouse’s grandson Randy is an amiable computer geek who has just co-founded a small company called Epiphyte that has big plans revolving around the booming Internet in the island nations of southeast Asia. As powerful people with hidden agendas begin showing an interest in Epiphyte’s business plan, Randy hires a company in Manila owned by former Navy SEAL Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe to lay an underwater cable. That’s just a sideline for Doug and his daughter Amy who primarily work as treasure hunters. When they make a startling discovery, it links the personal history of the Waterhouses and the Shaftoes to a lost fortune in Axis gold.
That makes it sound like a beach thriller or airplane read by someone like Clive Cussler, right?
But I didn’t mention all the math. And code breaking. And the development of computers. And economic theories. And geo-politics circa 1999. And how it was ahead of the curve about personal privacy. And it’s about a thousand pages long. And there's some other stuff, too.
Plus, Neal Stephenson doesn’t feel the need to conform to anything close to a traditional three act narrative structure. He’s also often the writing equivalent of Clark W. Griswald in the movie Vacation since he’ll cheerfully divert his readers four short hours to see the second largest ball of twine on the face of the earth.
Sprinkled among all this are appearances by real historical figures like Alan Turing and Douglas MacArthur. So what you get is a book that should be a mess of infodumps and long tangets that ultimately don’t have anything to do with the story. And quite frankly, the ending is kind of a mess, too.
So whenever I read criticism of Neal Stephenson, I shrug and concede that there are many things about the guy that should make me crazy as a reader. However, the really odd thing is that he doesn’t. I’ve pretty much loved every book of his I’ve read despite the fact that I could list his literary sins at length.
What’s great to me about Stephenson is that it’s so obvious that he loves this stuff. When he takes up a whole chapter laying out the mathematics behind code breaking, it’s his enthusiasm for the subject that helps carry my math-challenged ass through. He’s not giving us elaborate histories or explanations because he did the research and wants to show off, he’s doing it because he’s a smart guy who is excited about something so he can’t help but go on at length about it.
The other factor that redeems him for me is his sense of humor. No matter how enthused Stephenson is, it’d still break down in the delivery if he didn’t pepper his books with some hilarious lines. Sometimes even his long digressions are done solely in the interest of delivering the funny like a parody of a business plan that includes gems like this:
“Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, savvy as a half-blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average nuclear missile submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near this document. Please dispose of it as you would any piece of high-level radioactive waste and then arrange with a qualified surgeon to amputate your arms at the elbows and gouge your eyes from their sockets. This warning is necessary because once, a hundred years ago, a little old lady in Kentucky put a hundred dollars into a dry goods company which went belly-up and only returned her ninety-nine dollars. Ever since then the government has been on our asses. If you ignore this warning, read on at your peril--you are dead certain to lose everything you've got and live out your final decades beating back waves of termites in a Mississippi Delta leper colony.”
It’s also easy to overlook how these seeming digressions help build the entire story. When Randy is trying to retrieve some of his grandfather’s papers from an old trunk, he gets embroiled in his family’s attempts to divvy up his grandparent’s belongings. Since the family is made up of academics a whole chapter becomes a description of a mathematical formula based on an x-y grid laid out in a parking lot that allows family members to place items according to both sentimental and economic value while Randy has to try to find a way to diplomatically claim the papers. There’s no real reason for this scene, and it could have been cut entirely or boiled down a few lines about a family squabble. But the whole chapter is funny and tells us a great deal about Randy and his background by putting him in this context. It doesn't accomplish anything else plot wise, but it’s the kind of scene that makes this book what it is.
Even as a fan of the way he works, I still wish Stephenson could tighten some things up. The goals of Epiphyte and Randy shift three or four times over the course of the novel, and the drifting into and out of plots gets very problematic late in the game. It also seems like Stephenson had a hard time determining exactly who the bad guys in the 1999 story should be. (view spoiler)[ The stuff with Andrew Loeb, a litigious asshole who once drove Randy into bankruptcy, showing up as an arrow shooting/knife wielding attacker wearing a business suit in the jungle at the end seems to come out of the blue since he’s really only appeared in flashback form before that. Even though he's the lawyer suing Epiphyt there aren't any scenes directly showing him in action except for Randy viewing him from a distance during the raid on their server. And while most of the book seems to operate under the idea that the rich dentist is the main threat to Epiphyte, he suddenly tags out and a Chinese guy that we’ve only seen as a slave during WWII is revealed as the hidden hand behind it all very late in the book, yet we have no present day scenes with him. (hide spoiler)]
I should also note that although this is billed as a sci-fi novel as well as being nominated for and winning some prizes like the Hugo and the Locus, it really isn’t. There’s one small supernaturalish element that gets it that reputation, but I’d call it historical-fiction if I had to put a genre on it.
Even though this is a book that really shouldn’t work, the great thing about it is that it mostly does, and it’s just so damn clever at times that I can’t help but admire Stephenson.
Related material: The Baroque Cyle is the follow-up/prequel to this that delves even further into the history of the Waterhouse and Shaftoe familes. These are my reviews to the three hardback editions, but those were such kitten squishers that it was also broken up into a longer series of paperbacks.
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