Kurt Eichenwald: Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story

In April of 2005, The Slate had this to say about the book and author: Kurt Eichenwald's version of the Enron drama, Conspiracy of Fools, does not waste breath on unsubtle introspection. The painstakingly researched book is written in the popular (and gripping) fly-on-the-wall style, with recreated dialogue, actions, and scenes. For me, this style sets off warning bells—I unfortunately know firsthand how warped such accounts can be—but Eichenwald's admirable lack of editorializing leaves the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. Conspiracy is also mercifully light on the insipid class caricatures that often color such tales, in which private jets, expensive suits, boardroom struggles, hubris, and other facts of corporate life are ridiculed as symbols of "excess." (They may be excessive, but they aren't limited to companies that disintegrate.) Find the rest of that article here. See also: The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Power Failure: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron, Enron: The Rise and Fall, The Crooked E: The Unshredded Truth About Enron.

"The Investment Answer" by Daniel C. Goldie, Gordon S. Murray

In November, 2010, The New York Times wrote this about the book and author:

[When] Mr. Murray, a former bond salesman for Goldman Sachs who rose to the managing director level at both Lehman Brothers and Credit Suisse First Boston, decided to cease all treatment five months ago for his glioblastoma, a type of brain cancer, his first impulse was not to mourn what he couldn’t do anymore or to buy an island or to move to Paris. Instead, he hunkered down in his tiny home office here and channeled whatever remaining energy he could muster into a slim paperback. It’s called “The Investment Answer,” and he wrote it with his friend and financial adviser Daniel Goldie to explain investing in a handful of simple steps. Why a book? And why this subject? Nine years ago, after retiring from 25 years of pushing bonds on pension and mutual fund managers trying to beat the market averages over long periods of time, Mr. Murray had an epiphany about the futility of his former customers’ pursuits. He eventually went to work as a consultant for Dimensional Fund Advisors, a mutual fund company that rails against active money management. So when his death sentence arrived, Mr. Murray knew he had to work quickly and resolved to get the word out to as many everyday investors as he could.

Read the rest of that NYT piece here. The Associated Press had this to say about the book and author: A self-published best-seller co-authored by a terminally ill financial executive has a book deal. "The Investment Answer," written by former Lehman Brothers managing director Gordon Murray and financial adviser Dan Goldie, has been acquired by Business Plus, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing. The publisher said Thursday it will have a new edition out by Jan. 25. The "Investment Answer" became an instant hit after an article appeared last week in The New York Times. Murray has been diagnosed with brain cancer. Financial terms were not disclosed, but two publishing executives with knowledge of negotiations said bidding had reached at least $1 million. Find that syndicated AP piece here. The book and author were also featured on NPR's All Things Considered:

"In fact, I tell my kids now, 'If you start to feel sorry for yourself, do something for someone else.' If this had happened to me 10 or 20 years ago, I would have been wallowing in self-pity and 'life is unfair,'" he says. "I was 58 when I was diagnosed. But the thing is, I had a chance to get some perspective, the chance to give something back. And that I've lived this long, and experienced so much closure, planning, love and friends and family. Boy, everybody should be so lucky as to have a phase like this. "The fact is, we're all going to die. I'm going to beat you across the finish line, most likely. But in the whole scheme of things, it's not by that much. And when you realize you're not your body, it doesn't really matter that much whether you live short or long."

Find that feature story at NPR.org. Download the podcast to that show here.

Bill Bryson: A Short History of Nearly Everything

In 2005, The Guardian wrote:

Bryson has been chosen as one of the winners of the prestigious EU Descartes prize for science communication for his rough guide to science, A Short History of Nearly Everything. The Descartes is a 'prize of prizes' and Bryson was nominated by the Royal Society after winning the Aventis prize for science writing for the book in 2004. Accepting his award, Bill Bryson said: "Never has someone been more generously awarded for his ignorance. I'm very grateful to all the scientists who, without exception, helped me to discover the wonder of their science. "I'm especially grateful to the Royal Society for nominating me for this award and in recognition of that, plan to return a small portion of the prize to the Society, in the hope they'll be able to buy the staff a seasonal drink."

Find that Guardian story here. In 2003, NPR featured the book and author on All Things Considered. You can find that webpage here.

Bird Songs Bible: The Complete, Illustrated Reference for North American Birds

[A] copy of the new "Bird Songs Bible," a visual and audio treasure trove of the 747 breeding birds in North America. The hefty tome comes with a nifty digital audio player that quickly fills your ears with an amazing range of bird songs and calls, including the rarely heard shearwaters, who only vocalize at sea. What are shearwaters? The "Bird Songs Bible" (Chronicle Books, 536 pp.) will tell you that, too, in addition to having lovely illustrations of all the birds and maps of their habitats. The field recordings are from the esteemed Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and the book is edited by Les Beletsky, a noted bird biologist. I quickly found it's great fun to flip through the book and then punch in the number in the audio player for any bird that caught my eye. It took about two seconds for my cats to start walking all over the book, looking for the birds.

Read that full San Jose Mercury piece here. NPR's All Things Considered also did a full story on the book and author.

There's a new book out that is unlike any other — it features characters with names like Hawaii creeper and bufflehead — and strangest of all: it tweets. And it doesn't tweet in the 21st century, social media sense, but in the good, old-fashioned bird-call sense. The Bird Songs Bible is a massive volume that comes with a built-in audio player featuring hundreds of bird songs. The 10-pound, $125 tome was edited by bird expert Les Beletsky and features recordings from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. It is billed as "The Complete, Illustrated Reference for North American Birds." "I think 'bible' really says it all," Greg Budney, audio curator at Cornell, tells NPR's Robert Siegel. "It covers over 728 species of North American birds including birds of Hawaii."

See the full featured webpage on that NPR story, here. Download the podcast to that show here.

Pairing Ron Paul with Paul Krugman - Economics and Politics

Texas congressman Ron Paul has long been a fierce critic of the Federal Reserve. In fact, last year he published a book called End the Fed, calling for an end to the central bank and a return to the gold standard. Now, Paul has been appointed head of the House subcommittee on domestic monetary policy, which, among other things, oversees the Federal Reserve. So, does Paul see this as his chance to try to end the Fed? "In a partial sense, but not directly," he tells NPR's Guy Raz. "What I'm really asking for is competition, to get rid of the monopoly power of the Fed, because they don't have legitimate power to do what they do."

This snippet's from NPR's All Things Considered. The podcast for this show can be found here. The full All Things Considered story can be found here. Here are some other books that are also by Paul: The Revolution: A Manifesto, A Foreign Policy of Freedom: Peace, Commerce, and Honest Friendship, Liberty Defined: The 50 Urgent Issues That Affect Our Freedom, Pillars of Prosperity. According to ABC News, Paul recently said, "Now that doesn't mean that the first week in January I send over a subpoena for (Fed Chairman Ben) Bernanke and demand that he come over with a pile of papers, I don't think that would be logical." View that full ABC story here. Paul Krugman opposes Ron Paul's ideas. [Funny how they both have "Paul" in their names.] He writes a regular column at The New York Times, and recently, he's said that "[Paleomonetarism] I used that term — it’s probably not original, but who knows? — in a recent post about the increasingly obscure meaning of the money supply. The best example would surely be Ron Paul, who’s now going to have oversight over the Fed. If you read his stuff, it’s very clear: money is a well-defined quantity that the Fed controls, and inflation comes from — indeed is defined as — increases in that quantity." Read that full NYT post here. Here are a few Krugman titles that you can pair Paul with: The Conscience of a Liberal, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century (Updated and Expanded), A Country Is Not a Company (Harvard Business Review Classics)

"Is Your E-Book Reading Up On You?" from NPR by MARTIN KASTE

E-books are quickly going mainstream: They represent nearly one out of 10 trade books sold. It's easy to imagine a near future in which paper books are the exception, not the norm. But are book lovers ready to have their reading tracked? Most e-readers, like Amazon's Kindle, have an antenna that lets users instantly download new books. But the technology also makes it possible for the device to transmit information back to the manufacturer. "They know how fast you read because you have to click to turn the page," says Cindy Cohn, legal director at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It knows if you skip to the end to read how it turns out."

Listen to the NPR All Things Considered podcast on this story. Read the full NPR feature story here. See this story from the Economist, as well; it's on the state of the retail side of the book business, in which it states, in part:

The context for all this activity is a technological transformation in bookselling that has devastated bookstores. Amazon, whose Kindle became the first e-reader to achieve critical mass, ahead of Apple’s iPad, announced a further innovation on December 8th, making books published on the Kindle available through web browsers. This came hot on the heels of Google’s announcement that it is launching its own e-books and online e-reader. Borders, which has lost money in each of the past ten quarters, has only recently launched its e-reader, called Kobo, in partnership with Indigo, a Canadian bookseller. One of the apparent goals of Borders in offering to buy Barnes & Noble is to get its hands on its rival’s superior e-book technology. That includes the nook, an e-reader which hit the market far sooner than the Kobo, though later than the Kindle.

Read that full Economist article, here.

"Voyager 1 Spacecraft Heads For The Outer Limits" from NPR's All Things Considered

The Voyager 1 spacecraft is moving through the very outer boundary of our solar system, and moving into interstellar space. Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 accomplished its initial goals of exploring the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, and is continuing to send back interesting data. NPR's Melissa Block talks to astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson of the Hayden Planetarium about the spacecraft and the outer limits of our sun's influence. [...] Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson directs the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He's also author of the book "The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet."

Download the NPR All Things Considered podcast for this show, here. Read the transcript for the show here. See also: Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution, The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet, NOVA - Origins, The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist

"'The Gun': How AK-47s Changed The Nature Of War" - from NPR News and the NPR program, All Things Considered

The image is iconic: the stubby barrel, the inverted arc of the banana clip. Osama bin Laden included one in his video after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Saddam Hussein had a pair with him when he was captured. It appears on the flag of Mozambique and Hezbollah. The AK-47 — or versions of it — can be found in every major conflict of the past 50 years. In his new book, The Gun, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter C.J. Chivers traces the history of the lethal firearm. Chivers, a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, tells NPR's Audie Cornish the gun is one of the principle weapons of insurgents in Afghanistan, where he's been reporting.

Download the podcast here. Read the full NPR All Things Considered feature story, here. Newsday posted a few pages of the book, here. And The New York Times had this to say about the book, recently:

It is no accident that C. J. Chivers opens “The Gun,” his bold history of the AK-47, not with the loud crack that is the report of the rifle but with the monstrous bang of the first detonation of a Soviet nuclear bomb. As Mr. Chivers’s detailed history then skirts as far back as the United States Civil War and brings us right up to the current conflict in Afghanistan, the message of his prologue is clear: For all that the escalating cold war shaped the last 60 years, no one was ever killed in conflict by a Russian nuke. By contrast untold millions have been wounded and killed by the AK-47 and related weapons, as they have proliferated and mutated from tools of engineering ingenuity, honestly wrought in defense of the socialist motherland, to the firearm of choice for both oppressor and oppressed.

Find that Times piece, here. The Los Angeles Times also plugs the book:

If somebody were to tell you that the long tragedy of human warfare entered a new and deadly phase in the fourth decade of the 20th century, the historically literate mind almost certainly would jump to the invention of the atomic bomb, which ushered in an age of anxiety and the long balance of terror between the United States and the Soviet Union. C.J. Chivers makes a convincing case in "The Gun" that a far more lethal and consequential weapon was devised at about that same time in a sprawling Soviet military design facility — the first Avtomat (Automatic) Kalashnikov assault rifle. "The Gun" is the author's exhaustive history of the rifle's origins, development and astonishing influence on global security. The banana-clipped Kalashnikov is by now a familiar sight to anyone who watches a few minutes of television news footage; it's the weapon clasped to the chests of Kim Jong Il's goose-stepping legions, waved high by Somali pirates, clutched by Africa's wretched child soldiers, leaning up against a mud-washed wall in Osama bin Laden's infamous videos.

You can find the Los Angeles Times mention, here (it's a few paragraphs; nothing meaty). And the New York Post had this to say about The Gun:

In his fascinating book, “The Gun” (Simon & Schuster), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist C.J. Chivers shows how the world was forever altered by the pursuit of automatic weapons and especially the invention of the Kalashnikov — an easy-to-use automatic rifle that allowed any one man to possess the firepower of an army.

Finally, for a little over a year now, Chivers has been maintaining this blog at The New York Times. The blog's central theme is war and small arms. And on that note, there's a pairing that we can do here, though not with another book; a 2005 film starring Nicholas Cage, "Lord of War." The movie's theme is closely aligned with the sentiments in Chivers' book, and it's hard to not think of the movie, while reading the book, and vice versa; mainly because of the weight of the AK-47, the credit and the responsibility that's placed on this sole item. IMDB carries this storyline description:

This film charts the rise and fall of Yuri Orlov, from his early days in the early 1980s in Little Odessa, selling guns to mobsters in his local neighbourhood, through to his ascension through the decade of excess and indulgence into the early 90s, where he forms a business partnership with an African warlord and his psychotic son. The film also charts his relationship through the years with his younger brother, his marriage to a famous model, his relentless pursuit by a determined federal agent and his inner demons that sway between his drive for success and the immorality of what he does.

Find the that IMDB profile here. Wikipedia has this to say, about the film's historical accuracy:

Plot details on the illegal arms market, particularly regarding purchases for Tropical Africa in early 1990s, are closely based on real stories and people originating from the former Soviet Union. The main protagonist's name, Yuri Orlov, corresponds to the last name of Oleg Orlov, a Russian businessman arrested in Ukraine on suspicion of smuggling missiles to Iran. The real Orlov was strangled in Kiev's Lukyanivska Prison in 2007 during the investigation.[7] The character Andre Baptiste, Sr. is partly based on Charles Taylor, the President of Liberia until 2003.[8] The character of Colonel Oliver Southern is evidently hinting of Oliver North, most famous for his involvement in the Iran-Contra Scandal. However, the scenes of direct shipping of weapons from Ukraine's army storages is fictional.[7] Portrayal of the Interpol as an acting security agency is also entirely fictional.

Amnesty International supported and endorsed the film. There's an internet movie firearms database, the IMFDB (sort of like the IMDB, no relation). The site lists all of the firearms, along with the AK-47, that were featured in the film.

"Unauthorized Biography" - an On The Media episode of WNYC Radio

In the hierarchy of journalistic respect, the "unauthorized biographer," we might agree, falls somewhere above the gossip columnist. How far above is a matter of debate. And author Kitty Kelley, who has sold millions such biographies, fired off an eloquent salvo in that debate recently in an essay she published in "The American Scholar." Kelley defends the unauthorized.

Download the podcast here. See the On The Media webpage for this episode, here. Kitty Kelly was also on NPR's All Things Considered recently:

Kitty Kelley chronicles the lives of public figures — politicians and celebrities alike. She does so without her subjects' permission and sometimes without their blessing. In fact, when news got out that Kelley was going to write Frank Sinatra's unauthorized biography, he sued her before she wrote the first word. "I've been doing these books for 30 years and I have never ever lost a lawsuit. I have never been successfully sued," Kelley tells NPR's Audie Cornish. "I want to tell you, though, that Frank Sinatra got my attention." Sinatra is on a long list of public figures who have not been pleased with Kelley's writing. While her books may spend weeks on the best-seller list, they are never without controversy. Kelley's been called a "poison pen" writer and her books dismissed as "Kitty litter." Kelley writes exclusively about living people. Her subjects include everyone from Jacki Kennedy Onassis to Nancy Reagan and the British royal family.

Download the All Things Considered podcast here. Read the full All Things Considered feature here. See these other unauthorized biographies by Kitty Kelley: The Royals, His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra, The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty, Jackie Oh!, Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography, Elizabeth Taylor: The Last Star. And a fit of irony, there's this unauthorized biography, on the Queen of Unauthorized Biographies: Poison Pen: The Unauthorized Biography of Kitty Kelley

And finally, Kitty Kelly recently published a piece in the well respected literary periodical, The American Scholar. In the piece, Kelly defends unauthorized biographies. Find "Unauthorized, But Not Untrue," here.

Sex, Drugs And 'Life' — The Year's Best Guilty Reads from NPR All Things Considered by SUSAN JANE GILMAN

We've talked about Jay-Z on this site, and his book, but this; this is inexcusable. LOL Ew!