The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing AND The Case of the Missing Servant

Tarquin Hall's mystery is light, comical and very entertaining.  Distinguished scientist and Guru Buster, Dr. Suresh Jha, receives a very specific death threat. The next morning, the committed rationalist attends his regular exercise/self-improvement group, the Rajpath Laughing Group, at a public park.

Suddenly, while Professor Pandey is telling a knock-knock joke that convulses the group members, a mist begins to form around their ankles and rises to their shins, and then higher.  The sky darkens, dogs bark, and then, appearing out of the mist, high above the ground, is the hideous face of Kali, the Indian goddess of time, creation, destruction and power, the destroyer of evil forces.  Facing Dr. Jha, she screams "You who have dared to insult me! You who have dared to mock my power!You will taste blood!", and thrusts a sword deep into his chest.

Kali

A video, taken by a passing French tourist, is broadcast on the all major news stations and the impossibility of any material explanation for these startling events convinces millions that Kali has miraculously appeared and wreaked vengeance on Dr. Jha.

Later that day, Most Private Investigator Vish Puri is visited by Inspector Singh, who asks for his help in investigating the circumstances of Dr. Jha's death.  Most Private Investigator Puri kicks into action, with frequent food breaks for his favorite Punjabi dishes; thanks to a glossary at the end of the book, this provides a valuable catalog of Indian snacks.

A very entertaining mystery, with a couple amusing side-plots, lots of colorful characters, and whimsical commentary on life in India - a quick and diverting read!

Just ran across another Vish Puri mystery on our library's Staff Picks shelf...once again, I thought the story was lively and very amusing - and I enjoyed The Case of the Missing Servant even more than the first one I read.  These are wonderful, light reads - highly recommended!

The Fifth Risk

Michael Lewis is extraordinarily talented - he's whip smart, a terrific story-teller, and has a great sense of humor.  His books are seemingly quite diverse - Liar's Poker and The Big Short are about Wall Street, Moneyball describes how data analysis revolutionized baseball, Blind Side explains why offensive left tackles were the second-highest paid position on a football team, The Undoing Project profiles two psychologists who overturned widely accepted theories about how the mind works - but a common thread is that these books generally deal with economic issues and how they impact society.  They're wonderful reads because Lewis has a gift for explaining difficult topics clearly, mainly by profiling key individuals through arresting or amusing anecdotes.

The book is inspiring in its portrayal of several very knowledgeable and intelligent governmental officials (in the Departments of Energy, Commerce, Agriculture, and the NOAA), who chose government out of a desire to help their country.  This idealistic commitment is contrasted with several accounts of the appallingly ignorant and selfish perspective of many Trump appointees during formation of the new Trump government.  Immediately after being elected, the President Elect is required by law to form a transition team.

The first time Donald Trump paid any attention to any of this was when he read about it in the newspaper.  The story revealed that Trump's very own transition team, led by New Jersey governor Chris Christie, had raised several million dollars to pay the staff.  The moment he saw it, Trump called Steve Bannon, the chief executive of his campaign......and told him to come immediately to his residence, many floors above. Bannon stepped off the elevator to find the governor of New Jersey seated on a sofa, being hollered at. Trump was apoplectic, actually yelling You're stealing my money! You're stealing my fucking money! What the fuck is this?? Seeing Bannon, Trump turned on him and screamed, Why are you letting him steal my fucking money? Bannon and Christie together set out to explain to Trump federal law........  To which Trump replied, Fuck the law. I don't give a fuck about the law. I want my fucking money. Bannon and Christie tried to explain that Trump couldn't have both his money and a transition.  

Shut it down, said Trump.  Shut down the transition.  

Bannon asked Trump: "What do you think MorningJoe will say if you shut down your transition?" Bannon suggested MorningJoe would say it was because Trump didn't think he had any chance of being elected.  Trump stopped hollering.  For the first time, he seemed actually to have listened. "That makes sense," he said.

The cover and back of the book offer a hint as to its contents: careless removal of jenga pieces will cause the structure to collapse; in this book, the "structure" is the US government.   The title?  Well, a few months after the transition, when senior administrators in different departments were dismissed and/or ignored, Lewis interviewed many of them to find out what they would have told the incoming administrators about the issues currently facing the department. 

As an example, he spoke at some length with John MacWilliams, a super bright guy who had had an interesting and varied career: graduated from Stanford and Harvard Law School, worked for a law firm, then as an investment advisor for the energy sector at Goldman Sachs, wrote a novel, started and sold a private investment firm - and, at the request of MIT nuclear physicist Ernie Moniz, who had just been named Secretary of Energy, joined the DOE as their first-ever chief risk officer.  (McWilliams confessed that when he first joined DOE, he knew next to nothing about what it did - but dove in and eventually learned that about half its budget went to maintaining the nuclear arsenal and protecting America from nuclear threats.  Another quarter was devoted to cleaning up  contamination associated with production of nuclear weapons, and the remaining budget supported access and use of energy).

Lewis asked him how he would have briefed a new DOE appointee on the 5 greatest risks facing the DOE.  MacWilliams said Risk 1 was a nuclear weapons accident (A "Broken Arrow" incident).  He identified Risk 2 as North Korea ("The risk of mistakes being made and lots of people being killed is increasing dramatically.  It wouldn't necessarily be a nuclear weapon they might deliver. It could be sarin gas").  He suggested that Iran is "in the top 5" - at the time of writing, the deal with Iran had been concluded and "the serious risk in Iran wasn't that the Iranians would secretly acquire a weapon. It was that the president of the United States would not understand the nuclear scientists' reasoning about the unlikelihood of the Iranians' obtaining a weapon, and that he would have the United States back away foolishly from the deal." MacWilliams gave some past examples of Risk 4, which could be distilled down to the difficulty of imagining unexpected risks.  The Fifth Risk?  "Project Management," was all he said.

Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel

This month's bookclub book is Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel. I really enjoyed this highly original bit of sci-fi, which covers the period just before, during, and after a massive plague that wipes out 99.9% of humanity. Although many characters are followed over the course of the novel, it revolves most closely around the experiences of a loosely connected band of individuals - a famous Shakespearean actor (Arthur Leander), a child actress he once befriended (Kirsten Raymonde), his graphic artist ex-wife (Miranda Carroll), his current actress wife (Elizabeth) and son (Tyler), his close friend (Clark Thompson), and a paparazzo-turned-paramedic (Jeevan Chaudhary) who used to stalk him.

Station Eleven is a highly sensitive portrayal of human character, in all its beauty, ugliness, vanity, and complexities, and a compelling envisioning of what our post-apocalyptic society might look like.

I especially enjoyed the scenes with Miranda, whose magnum opus is the eponymous comic book series, Station Eleven. Her art is described in vivid terms, and its themes of isolation, longing, and exploration prefigure and contextualize the novel's broader themes.

Definitely recommend!

Madonna in a Fur Coat - Sabahattin Ali

For July's bookclub, we read Sabahattin Ali's Madonna in a Fur Coat, a very interesting and enjoyable read, although a sorrowful one. Madeline recommended this book, after reading a piece on it in the New York Times ("A Once-Forgotten Novel Unites Turkish Readers in Troubled Times").

The novel's frame is a young man who becomes deeply interested in one of his colleagues, an older German/Turkish translator named Raif Effendi. Raif seems a perfect nebbish, always being berated by his superior and never raising a word of complaint. He piques the young man's interest one day, however, when he suddenly dashes off a quick sketch that brilliantly reveals his superior's brutish yet pathetically miserable ego. After that, the narrator becomes determined to understand the mysterious Raif, despite all obstacles.

The story is ultimately a love story, although a highly unusual one, due to the unexpected gender nonconformity of the protagonists. Raif is hobbled in 1920s society by his "girlish" innocence, and he falls madly in love with the titular "Madonna," a "mannishly" outspoken and independent painter woman he befriends. The two bond powerfully, but struggle to find a relationship that fits their needs.

Beautifully written and surprisingly poignant - would definitely recommend.

Astoria - Peter Stark

Our May bookclub book was Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival, by Peter Stark. Nate recommended this one, and I really enjoyed it!

Astoria is a remarkable true tale of ambition, wilderness exploration, and hardship, recounting John Jacob Astor's efforts to establish the first American outpost in the Pacific Northwest, as a means of building a hugely profitable global trading empire. Astor was a friend of Thomas Jefferson's, and undertook the mission with his support.

While Astor remained comfortably lodged at home in his mansion in New York, he sent two parties, an overland and an oversea party, to try to forge a path through the wilderness, and meet up in present-day Astoria, Oregon (about a 2 hour drive northeast of Portland, on the Columbia River and coast of the Pacific Ocean). The story covers the 3 years of their expedition, from 1810-1813.

Astor was an incredibly far-seeing and enterprising person, and he did his utmost to select the very best men and equipment for his missions. Even still, the journeys were incredibly brutal, owing in part to the roughness of the unknown terrain, physical hardship and starvation, and constant stress from fear of Native American attack, and in part due to interpersonal conflicts and ignorance among the party members themselves.

A fascinating story! Definitely recommend, especially for Pacific Northwest enthusiasts.

The Gathering Storm

We watched Darkest Hour, a pretty good film about Winston Churchill taking the reins of the British government after the failure of the appeasement policy (with an astonishing, virtuoso performance by Gary Oldman as Churchill) – which made me interested in reading The Gathering Storm – the first of Churchill’s six-volume history and personal memoir of the period from the end of the first World War to the end of the Second World War.  Churchill was a masterful writer (he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953, though for other writings, not the history).  

The book amply fulfills its stated theme:

HOW THE ENGLISH SPEAKING PEOPLES
THROUGH THEIR UNWISDOM
CARELESSNESS AND GOOD NATURE
ALLOWED THE WICKED
TO REARM

Of course, Churchill’s stirring speeches are famous for their emotional power and The Gathering Storm includes some striking examples. Churchill first described post World War One Germany, after the allies imposed The Weimar Republic, as a tepid democracy “which was regarded as the imposition of the enemy” and then paints a vivid picture of the consequences:

Thereafter mighty forces were adrift, the void was open, and into that void after a pause there strode a maniac of ferocious genius, the repository and expression of the most virulent hatreds that have ever corroded the human breast – Corporal Hitler.

Many of his conclusions and recommendations speak forcefully to the world situation today:

When three or four powerful Governments acting together have demanded the most fearful sacrifices from their peoples, when these have been given freely for the common cause, and when the longed-for result has been attained, it would seem reasonable that concerted action should be preserved so that at least the essentials would not be cast away.  But this modest requirement the might, civilization, learning, knowledge, science, of the victors were unable to supply.  They lived from hand to mouth and day to day, and from one election to another, until, when scarcely twenty years were out, the dread signal of the Second World War was given, and we must write of the sons of those who had fought and died so faithfully and well: 

Shoulder to aching shoulder, side by side,
They trudged away from life’s broad wealds of light
 -Siegfried Sassoon

In addition to his unparalleled gift for rousing and emotional language, Churchill’s narrative and persuasive writing throughout is marked by simplicity, clarity and power.  A sad story, masterfully recounted.

The Big Short

Michael Lewis has an astonishing gift for finding interesting topics, usually related to economics and human behavior, and fashioning them into fascinating and lucid stories that absolutely explode with side-splitting anecdotes.  His first book, Liar’s Poker, was a huge success, chronicling his own experience as a naïve, fresh-out-of-Princeton, bond salesman at Salomon Brothers.  The Big Short is a sequel, of sorts, which tells the story of the Great Recession (officially 2007-2009, with effects that lasted much longer), triggered by the collapse of the subprime mortgage market.  

The Big Short explains the origin and development of this market failure by describing, first, how the bubble grew: mortgage lenders signed up risky consumers who were almost certain to default when their low teaser mortgage rates converted suddenly to sharply higher rates, bond salesmen at several large investment banks found a way to repackage these subprime mortgages into bonds that somehow got rated as AAA (allowing them to be sold at premium prices) – with no one seemingly concerned that these instruments were doomed…except a handful of very smart, independent thinkers, who then bet against this market and, after a couple years, made truly vast sums of money when the mortgages went belly up.

One whip smart, colorful and abrasive character featured in the book was Steve Eisman. Eisman was in a constant state of fury over the practices of conventional Wall Street salesmen:

“Obsessing over Household, he attended a lunch organized by a big Wall Street firm.  The guest speaker was Herb Sandler, the CEO of a giant savings and loan called Golden West Financial Corporation.  “Someone asked him if he believed in the free checking model,” recalls Eisman. “And he said, “Turn off your tape recorders.” Everyone turned off their tape recorders.  And he explained that they avoided free checking because it was really a tax on poor people – in the form of fines for overdrawing their checking accounts. And that banks that used it were really just banking on being able to rip off poor people even more than they could if they charged them for their checks.”Eisman asked, “Are any regulators interested in this?”“No,” said Sandler.“That’s when I decided the system was really, ‘Fuck the poor’.”

Eisman relished taking on big shots in public when he thought they were talking nonsense:

"There was now hardly an important figure on Wall Street whom Eisman had not insulted, or tried to.” ”Eisman had invited the bullish-on-subprime Bear Stearns analyst Gyan Sinha to his office and grilled him so mercilessly that a Bear Stearns salesman had called afterward and complained.“Gyan is upset,” he said.“Tell him not to be,” said Eisman. “We enjoyed it!”

Very interesting, lively read!