From time to time on this blog, I like to direct readers’ attention to noteworthy endeavors by my colleagues and peers and, fortuitously, this month three new books have crossed my radar that I can wholeheartedly recommend.
I covered Haiti alongside former National Public Radio Latin America corespondent and now Public Radio International Europe corespondent Gerry Hadden from 2000 to 2004. Though based in Mexico City, Gerry’s reportage took him to Haiti many times as well as many other locales throughout the region. Gerry’s new memoir, Never the Hope Itself: Love and Ghosts in Latin America and Haiti, (in which, full disclosure, I make a small cameo) is a compelling picture of a tumultuous time in the region while the world’s attention was focused elsewhere after 9/11.
Reading the book as a fellow international journalist, in addition to recounting the political trajectories of countries such as Mexico, Guatemala and the aforementioned Haiti, I think it does a masterful job of illuminating some of the attractions and pitfalls of the journalist’s life - the feeling of on-the-road exhaustion, the mental state of constantly having to negotiate other cultures, the pangs of romance on the run - and it does so while bringing the reader front and centre to some of the most tumultuous events in the first few years of our violent new century.
My dear friend Nomi Prins - a journalist and Senior Fellow at the public policy research and advocacy organization Demos - has authored a trio of excellent books on cooperate malfeasance in the United States: It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bonuses, Bailouts, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street, Jacked: How "Conservatives" are Picking your Pocket (whether you voted for them or not) and the highly prescient Other People’s Money: The Corporate Mugging of America. This fall she expands her range into fiction with Black Tuesday, a tale of fraud, obsession and economic devastation set amid the backdrop of the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929. Vividly recreating the immigrant and ethnic potpourri of 1920s New York, the book is a gripping read and a very atmospheric one, as well. Somehow I feel that the music of John Zorn circa The Circle Maker - to me redolent of the immigrant Jewish experience on the Lower East Side - would make the perfect soundtrack to reading this finely-tuned novel with its echoes of our present grim economic state.
A longtime observer and analyst of Russia and the Caucasus, Lawrence Scott Sheets has penned what promises to be a most interesting account of 20 plus years spent there. I have just started reading Eight Pieces of Empire: A 20-Year Journey Through the Soviet Collapse, but if the initial chapters are anything to go on, it will be a most compelling ride. Characters such as the Chechen terrorist leader Shamil Basayev flit in and out of a story of hope and despair as the exuberance of liberation gives way to something far tougher and darker throughout the region, an area that I have promised myself to visit for the first time during 2012.
All in all, three excellent additions to any bookshelf this fall.
Showing posts with label Nomi Prins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nomi Prins. Show all posts
Monday, September 12, 2011
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Books for autumn
As we head into fall, and I work on my own pair of new books, several friends of mine have books coming out that are well worth checking out.
It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street , by my good friend Nomi Prins, should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand last year’s financial collapse, centered in the United States but with its repercussions felt worldwide. It outlines how last autumn’s domino-like collapse of banks was linked to Wall Street’s conversion of loans into assets that allowed it to borrow far more than it could ever afford, how bankers gobbled up more than $5 billion in profits while siphoning off more than a trillion dollars in federal bailout subsidies and how, in short, the financial system in the United States has become so rigged that it penalizes ordinary working people with ever-expanding fees and penalties while the barons of commerce like Bank of America’s execrable Ken Lewis get away with barely-disguised theft and extortion on a grand scale.
A former managing director at Goldman Sachs and chief of the international analytics group at Bear Stearns who now serves as a Senior Fellow at the progressive public policy research organization Demos, Nomi knows intimately of what she writes. I highly enjoyed her previous two books, Other People's Money: The Corporate Mugging of America and Jacked: How "Conservatives" Are Picking Your Pocket (Whether You Voted for Them or Not), and very much look forward to this third installment
Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910, penned by Jeffrey H. Jackson, Associate Professor of History at Rhodes College, is a fascinating account of a natural disaster that befell Paris when the Seine overflowed its banks in January of that year. Combining exhaustive archival research and such primary sources as the diary of the city’s chief of police, the book creates a compelling image of what at the time was viewed as an epochal event in one of the world’s great cities. It shows, in compelling fashion and with shades of Hurricane Katrina, how a city that has been often riven by divisions managed to come together to face a body blow from nature and how the City of Light managed to shine once again.
And finally, Benjamin Moser’s Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, presents a sweeping and dramatic account of the life of the Brazilian writer, at once iconic and iconoclastic, who overcame hurdles that most people can’t even begin to imagine to become a tremendously important influence on novelists such as Caio Fernando Abreu. Transplanted from the anti-Semitic pogroms of Ukraine to Recife in northeastern Brasil, then to Rio de Janeiro and Europe and beyond, Lispector was a citizen of the world in every sense of the world, and a writer with a very original and powerful vision. Moser does an excellent job of humanizing this at-times inscrutable character who, to paraphrase an old saying, may have made her greatest work of art in the creation of herself.
It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street , by my good friend Nomi Prins, should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand last year’s financial collapse, centered in the United States but with its repercussions felt worldwide. It outlines how last autumn’s domino-like collapse of banks was linked to Wall Street’s conversion of loans into assets that allowed it to borrow far more than it could ever afford, how bankers gobbled up more than $5 billion in profits while siphoning off more than a trillion dollars in federal bailout subsidies and how, in short, the financial system in the United States has become so rigged that it penalizes ordinary working people with ever-expanding fees and penalties while the barons of commerce like Bank of America’s execrable Ken Lewis get away with barely-disguised theft and extortion on a grand scale.
A former managing director at Goldman Sachs and chief of the international analytics group at Bear Stearns who now serves as a Senior Fellow at the progressive public policy research organization Demos, Nomi knows intimately of what she writes. I highly enjoyed her previous two books, Other People's Money: The Corporate Mugging of America and Jacked: How "Conservatives" Are Picking Your Pocket (Whether You Voted for Them or Not), and very much look forward to this third installment
Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910, penned by Jeffrey H. Jackson, Associate Professor of History at Rhodes College, is a fascinating account of a natural disaster that befell Paris when the Seine overflowed its banks in January of that year. Combining exhaustive archival research and such primary sources as the diary of the city’s chief of police, the book creates a compelling image of what at the time was viewed as an epochal event in one of the world’s great cities. It shows, in compelling fashion and with shades of Hurricane Katrina, how a city that has been often riven by divisions managed to come together to face a body blow from nature and how the City of Light managed to shine once again.
And finally, Benjamin Moser’s Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, presents a sweeping and dramatic account of the life of the Brazilian writer, at once iconic and iconoclastic, who overcame hurdles that most people can’t even begin to imagine to become a tremendously important influence on novelists such as Caio Fernando Abreu. Transplanted from the anti-Semitic pogroms of Ukraine to Recife in northeastern Brasil, then to Rio de Janeiro and Europe and beyond, Lispector was a citizen of the world in every sense of the world, and a writer with a very original and powerful vision. Moser does an excellent job of humanizing this at-times inscrutable character who, to paraphrase an old saying, may have made her greatest work of art in the creation of herself.
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