Author Quinlan on Superpowers, `New Globalization’: Audio from Bloomberg - All Podcasts

The author, Joseph P. Quinlan, recently sat with Bloomberg. Listen to the show.

Author Philipp Blom on ``The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914'' from Bloomberg - All Podcasts

Author Philipp Blom sits with Bloomberg Radio, to talk about his latest book, The Vertigo Years. Listen to the podcast.

David Winner: Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer

The author, David Winner, was recently mentioned in a Salt Lake Tribune article about independent publishers and the "gems" that they tend to publish.

The Cannibal of Guadalajara by David Winner is a quirky comedy of manners set in New York and Mexico. Its central character is Margaret, a realistically drawn, sympathetic over-50 divorcee, whom we first encounter feeling ungainly and out of place at a singles bar in the Meatpacking District. To her surprise, a dark and handsome young man appears to woo her, bringing her martinis and returning to her apartment. She and Dante begin seeing each other, though he soon reveals himself to be ridiculously stubborn and deeply damaged by the childhood experiences that give the book its title. By then, however, Margaret has fallen in love with his charming upper-class Mexican immigrant family in Brooklyn, in whose elegant home they dine every Friday night. Meanwhile, her ex-husband, Alfred, reappears, first via e-mail dispatches from his world travels, then on her doorstep. A road trip and a platonic, quasi-familial ménage à trois ensue. Warning: The book is marred by a hideous cover and poor copy editing, though at times the typos add to the humor, as when a character’s “huge breasts overflow unappealingly from her glittery brazier.”

Read the rest of that Salt Lake Tribune article here. The author, David Winner, also wrote these interesting books: The Cannibal of Guadalajara, Those Feet: A Sensual History of English Football. The author was also featured on this Bloomberg Radio podcast.

Perry Mehrling: The New Lombard Street: How the Fed Became the Dealer of Last Resort

The author was recently quoted as stating that the United States' Federal Reserve Bank was acting, in fact, as the world's central bank; this is a relatively straight forward notion, and actually rather self evident when you think of the greenback as the world's base currency (in terms of volume and stability and liquidity, and in terms of currency reserves held by sovereign banks). In the Sun Herald, Bradley Keoun and Hugh Son invoked the author this way: “Things would have been worse if they hadn’t lent to foreigners,” said Perry Mehrling, senior fellow at the Morin Center for Banking and Financial Law at Boston University and author of “The New Lombard Street: How the Fed became the Dealer of Last Resort.” “We’re finally getting to understand the role of the Fed in the world.” Fed spreadsheets showed the central bank became the world’s lender of last resort as dollars flowed to European banks as well as Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co, among top borrowers from the Term Auction Facility at $45 billion each. Read that Sun Herald piece here. Recently, the author was a guest on Bloomberg Radio; download the podcast of that show here.

The Great Recession in Historical Perspective, Part 1: Introduction from Committee on Global Thought on Vimeo.

Author Wheatcroft on Book `Enemy at the Gate': Lewis Lapham from Bloomberg - All Podcasts

Check the Bloomberg podcast of the interview with the author, here. Also, The Telegraph recently reviewed the book; the review itself is excellent, and serves as a great primer for those that are studying the topic (say in high school or college, for some project). In the article, Noel Malcom writes:

[...] Andrew Wheatcroft shows, an Ottoman army moving forward on campaign had two major advantages: the Ottomans' logistics were much better than those of the West European armies, and they also derived great benefit from their use of Tatar auxiliaries - large numbers of highly mobile light cavalry, ideally adapted for raiding, foraging and reconnaissance. Once they had arrived at the theatre of war, however, there were two quite different forms of fighting to be undertaken. Siege warfare played to their strengths: efficient logistics on a huge scale, disciplined (and relatively hygienic) camps, and highly skilled miners and engineers. A stronghold well stocked with food, water and ammunition (as Vienna was) could hold out for a long time, but tunnels could reach under even the mightiest bastions, and gunpowder would then bring them down.

See that review, here. See also: Victory at Vienna: The Ottoman siege of 1683 : a historical essay and a selective list of reading materials, The Islamic World in Ascendancy: From the Arab Conquests to the Siege of Vienna, Historic Print (L): [Siege and relief of Vienna in 1683, with portraits of Ernst Rudiger von Starhemberg, Em, The Siege of Vienna: The Last Great Trial Between Cross & Crescent

The best of the fiction year – review Justine Jordan rounds up our critics' recommendations - from The Guardian

Of course, Freedom is on this list. But here are a few other interesting tidbits, from this "best of" list. For example:

Surely the year's most pleasurable read and now a Costa contender, Skippy Dies by Paul Murray, charted teenage highs and lows at an Irish boarding school: Patrick Ness called it " a rare tragicomedy that's both genuinely tragic and genuinely comedic".

Jeffrey Burke from Bloomberg, had this to say about the book, last month:

For his second novel, Murray has gone from impressive to world-class. “Skippy Dies” concerns a few months in the life of a Catholic boys high school in Dublin called Seabrook College. There’s sex and drugs and high jinks, wimps, bullies, queen bees and brains, jaded teachers, a questionable coach and an administrator so perfectly full of himself that I was reminded of Stephen Dedalus’s bloviating Mr. Deasy in “Ulysses.” This is far from the musical TV series “Glee,” though. Characters that verge on cliche prove unpredictable. A teacher ripe for burnout finds inspiration in a World War I uniform. A femme fatale reveals the stony investment adviser within. The punk selling diet pills isn’t the worst pusher in school.

See that Bloomberg piece, here.

Christopher Tayler applauded Ian McEwan's "elegant and surprising" response to global warming in Solar (Jonathan Cape, £13.99): "instead of applying doom and gloom, he reaches for a lighter, more comic mode than usual".

In March, The New York Times reviewed the book:

Ian McEwan has long had a penchant for creating unsavory, disreputable characters: children who bury their mother in the basement (“The Cement Garden”), a Machiavellian sadist who preys on a pair of middle-class tourists (“The Comfort of Strangers”), a dead woman’s conniving former lovers (“Amsterdam”), an adolescent girl who makes false accusations against a man that will alter his life and the life of her entire family (“Atonement”). In his latest novel, “Solar,” Mr. McEwan’s protagonist — a fat, middle-aged Nobel Prize-winning physicist named Michael Beard — joins this gallery of distasteful antiheroes. In the course of the book he will not only cheat on five wives and innumerable girlfriends and send an innocent man to jail, but he will also steal another scientist’s plans for stopping global warming and try to turn them into a big, moneymaking machine. This self-deluding scientist will come to embody just about everything that has brought about the climate-change crisis in the first place: greed, heedlessness and a willful refusal to think about consequences or the future.

See the complete Guardian list here. Jordan breezes right by the titles, so it's a quick run-down.

Simon Winchester Discusses His Book `Atlantic': Lewis Lapham from Bloomberg - All Podcasts

Listen to the full Bloomberg podcast here. See also: Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms,and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (P.S.), The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom, The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology (P.S.)