Roger Lowenstein is one of the most consistently insightful yet energetic chroniclers of the financial world; I loved When Genius Failed (2002) and Origins of the Crash(2004) and he has also written about Warren Buffet. That he generally tackles financial disasters and is a savage critic of basic tenets of the modern financial priesthood must be [...]
My 2008 ‘return to roots’ trip to Estonia and Siberia haunts me still, so I was naturally drawn to Maria Tumarkin’s Otherland. Tumarkin is an adventurous, cerebral researcher/writer who couples an exuberant style with a personal frankness that seems to me very brave. I loved her first book Traumascapes, bold and opinionated, and found Courage [...]
Paul Mees, passionate campaigner for public transport and researcher into transport planning, is back with his most cogent, convincing work yet, Public Transport for Suburbia: Beyond the Automobile Age. After being sacked by Melbourne University for criticizing Victoria’s archaic, petrol-focused transport bureaucracy, Mees has found a home at RMIT, and a real sense of peace [...]
Also posted in Coal's End |
What a strange, unlovely book Siberian Education: Family, Honour, and Tattoos: An Extraordinary Underworld Life is. A memoir by Nicolai Lilin of his early and teen years, during the 1980s and 1990s, in a criminal community of displaced Siberians in Transnistria (a lawless semi nation within Moldova). There is much to find fascinating in the earnest [...]
Eric Maisel is a humble, brilliant writer on creativity, a guru (though he would argue against the very term) to the stumblers like me. Brainstorm: Harnessing the Power of Productive Obsessions breaks no new ground but instead takes Maisel’s notions of ‘making meaning’ and living through creativity to prod us towards obsession. Not the destructive [...]
Also posted in Creative Life |
A lifelong fascination with ants led me to read one excellent book last year (see my review of The Lives of Ants) but now I’ve chanced upon an even more remarkable book. Adventures among Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of Trillions, by famed wildlife photographer and writer Mark W. Moffett, is just the [...]
Before Bill McKibben started 350.org, his grassroots organization (he makes quite explicit it’s for young people, implying us older folks have dropped the ball) campaigning to roll back global warming, he asked climatologist James Hansen what number he should choose. Having just read James Hansen’s compelling semi-memoir Storms of My Grandchildren (see my review), as [...]
Also posted in Coal's End |
The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism, by distinguished American historian Joyce Appleby, is a tour de force of broad historical writing. We all imagine we ‘know’ what capitalism is and how it must have arisen out of older ways of societal organization, but of course we know nothing. From the very start of her [...]
Michael Lewis is one of our most compelling, original chroniclers. He combines instinctive storytelling and fascination with the hidden interstices of the human world. All his books are gorgeous reads but it’s when he explores and explains conceptual material that he soars. And in The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, he has a sublime [...]
Years ago, when I read Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s Dogs Never Lie About Love and When Elephants Weep, I recall being impressed by his wide-ranging, compassionate mind. So it seemed natural, after Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals (see my review) profoundly affected me, to read Masson’s new book The Face on Your Plate: The Truth About [...]