Fidelity's World, Henriques - C

                                         When I read the Madoff book earlier this year, I noted that the author had written a book about Fidelity, so I ordered it from Amazon. I did not pay much attention to the description of the author as an "investigative reporter", the fact that the book was published in 1995, or the subtitle, 'The Secret Life and Public Power of the Mutual Fund Giant'.  "The lady doth protest too much" kept running through my mind and eventually led to me skimming the last half of the book.  Clearly, from a century ago when "robber barons" "front ran", to today's insider trading scandals, Wall Street  has often been a sink of criminality.  Yet, at the same time it has been the capital allocator throughout this country's extraordinary success and growth.  This book attempts to tie  the Boston mutual fund business, and specifically Fidelity, to every financial misdeed that has ever happened.  Yes,  Ed Johnson ran the company when mutual fund salesmen were certainly sleazy. Yes, his son Ned has run the company since the sixties and his first bond/money fund guru was sentenced to two months in jail (after she left Fidelity) for accepting some extra-legal compensation both at and after she left Fidelity. But so what?
                                       The mutual fund industry was started in Boston as a result of "the prudent man rule" promulgated by the Massachusetts Supreme Court.  That rule led to the private trusteeship of wealth, and in turn, to three investment trusts in the '20's.  Ed Johnson, a young lawyer from Ropes and Gray moved over to the investment side and worked at Incorporated Investors before he purchased a small mutual fund management company.  His son Ned grew Fidelity into one of the largest money managers in the world. Ned went along with Vanguard's Bogle and changed Fidelity's offerings to no-load in 1979. Both Vanguard and Fidelity have completely democratized investing around the world. Ned dreamed up check-writing for money market funds and along the way has become very, very rich and wants to maintain his family's control of the company. I'm quite comfortable with complimenting someone who has built wealth for millions, as well as for his employees and family.                    

Antarctica, Day - B-

                                         We have biographies of cities, and more recently, rivers, so why not a continent?  This very well-written book is the story of mankind's varying attempts to discover, investigate and eventually occupy the vast southern continent.  Something was always believed to there, but the first to venture into its dangerous waters was Cook in the late eighteenth century.  He believed it was a frozen wasteland and not worth the effort to look into.  He was correct, but that did not stop the endless attempts to explore the continent. In the nineteenth century, Britain, France, Russia, America and Norway were the primary searchers.  In the waters north of Antarctica and on the many islands between Antarctica and South America, they found whales and seals and vigorously pursued commercial fishing opportunities.  The golden age of exploration took place at the beginning of the twentieth century. Sir Earnest Shackleton made the "furthest south" on behalf of Great Britain. Over the summer of 1911-12, Amundsen and Scott paired off in their fateful race to the Pole.  This tale is vividly depicted in a Masterpiece Theatre mini-series called 'The Last Place on Earth', which was based on 'Amundsen and Scott', a brilliant and enthralling book by Roland Huntford published in the UK in 1979, and reissued here under the same name as the tv show. I've also read Amundsen's memoirs of the adventure, as well as a number of other books. Unfortunately for me, there are 400+ pages in this book that cover the period after Scott dies.  Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the above countries, as well as the southern hemisphere entrants of Chile, Argentina, Australia and New Zealand all tried to claim sovereignty over the icy wastes.  The issue reached the height of absurdity when the USA and USSR took their cold war competition to the South Pole.  Matters have been more or less resolved since the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which froze territorial claims, provided for the sharing of scientific information, and demilitarized the continent.

A Delicate Truth, LeCarre - B-

                                         There are moments in this book when you feel as if the 80+year-old author has defied time and remains a master of creativity. In the opening scenes describing the joint US/British covert operation on Gibraltar, the words majestically fly off the page; he describes someone as a jihadist Pimpernel - a truly brilliant characterization.  I thought the book steadily went downhill along the way to what one of the two Times reviewers called its "unsurprising conclusion."  One of the principals of the above mission later finds out that the operation went terribly wrong.  He is a retired veteran of the Foreign Office and teams up with an up-and-coming thirty-one year old to try and find out what did happen and to expose it. The cloak and dagger set, the Foreign Office, and the Official Secrets Act all combine to make sure that doesn't happen.  LeCarre takes to task the British establishment for going along with the Iraq War, leading to the inevitable comments that he has become anti-American.  Author Olen Steinhauer in the other Times' review points out that that characterization of anti- Americanism would also encompass at least half of America.
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A Conspiracy of Faith, Adler-Olson - B

                                         In the third Dept. Q novel, the author appears to hit his stride. It's not as over-the-top funny nor as compelling as the first one, but is a much better story than the second.  It is a solid police procedural with interesting plot points along the way; a book that knows its place and goes about its business. Dept. Q is handed a case from Scotland, where a bottle with a note inside it has washed up.  Examination reveals a Danish connection that helps lead Carl and his team to a thirteen-year-old kidnapping.  The kidnapper targets large families with an evangelical religious connection, and takes advantage of each sect's tendency to keep everything, even kidnappings and murder, within their own group and away from the police.  The case is successfully cracked and is resolved with a good ending.

Invisible Armies, Boot - Incomplete

                        One does not really expect a professional historian in the Times to be too harsh when reviewing the work of  another professional.  Yet, the reviewer does suggest that the first few sections of this book "could have been pruned back a bit. The early history feels sketchy...."  This endeavor is  subtitled "An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare From Ancient Times to the Present."  Undoubtedly, a history of irregular warfare is going to feel chaotic, and kudos to the author for pointing out that throughout most of history war has been 'irregular'.  Nomadic forces, the Mongols in the east and the Huns in the west are superb examples of early  non-state actors with substantial impact on the outcome of world history. Prior to the 17th century, the only state to recruit, train, barrack, and supply standing armies were the Romans. Thus, it is only in modern history that the assessment of irregular and regular forces can truly be made. There is some very interesting discourse about hybrid wars, part guerrilla and part regular, one example of which is our American Revolution. The southern raiders, like the Swamp Fox, Francis Marion, wore down Cornwallis, while Washington waited for him to stumble. The author also points out that it was the first time that the concept of public opinion impacted an outcome. There was substantial opposition to the war within Britain that led to a discontinuation of an effort well within their capabilities to carry on. The Times reviewer also points out that, "The effort to link guerrillas and terrorists does not come off."  The author cites the Social Revolutionaries in Russia as successful terrorists, as they killed a Czar and, in the twenty years run up to the November Revolution wreaked havoc in Russia.  But, it took  three years of a failed war effort to topple the  Russian Empire.  The first practitioners of irregular warfare  to successfully overthrow the shackles of occupation and domination were the Irish.  Here too public opinion made it impossible to do to the Irish what the British had done to the Boers twenty years earlier or were doing to the Iraqis at the same time. It's hard to slaughter non-combatants or put in concentration camps people who are represented in Parliament.  Ultimately, the reviewer observes that the book "really has two authors, sometimes working together, sometimes not". And ultimately, I put the book down. The jumping around from era to era; the chapters that were sometimes less than ten pages and my inability to find the binding thread made the whole process - well, chaotic for me.

A Most Wanted Man, LeCarre B+

                                         Yet another masterpiece from the the great spy novelist and former member of Britain's MI 6.  This one is set in Hamburg, the city that was home to some of the 9/11 terrorists, and involves a young man just arrived there from Chechnya, via Russian and Turkish jails, a tramp steamer, Sweden, and Copenhagen.  He is there to claim his late father's illicit funds on account with a less than blue chip Scottish bank.  You never know if he is a victim or an evil doer as the Germans hover over him or even after the GWOT hoovers him up.