Children of the Revolution, Robinson - B

                                               DCI Alan Banks is at it again.  A man in his early sixties is found dead in the woods. There's 5000 pounds in his pocket. We learn that he was broke and the early conclusion is that he had to be blackmailing someone.  The likely candidate is Lady Chalmers, wife of a noted West End producer and a successful writer in her own right. But,why?  The story takes us back to the early 70's, a time of tremendous social change in England and along the way, we get a tutorial on Marxism and the coal miners.  As I said in this space a year ago this month, Banks is my favorite and the retirement question raised last year has been addressed. It's been put off.

The Patriarch, Nasaw - B

                                                One of the NY Times Ten Best of 2012, this book is subtitled 'The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph  P. Kennedy.'  To anyone of my age, proclivities, and background, the general story of Joe Kennedy is well-known.  What this author accomplishes though is the providing of substantial  detail in a smooth, almost effortless, narrative.  As the text runs to 787 pages, that is a noteworthy feat.  This book was written at the request of Ted Kennedy and his sister Jean Smith, the two youngest of the nine Kennedy children.  The author is an award-winning biographer and professor, who was afforded unlimited access to Kennedy's papers. There was a substantial degree of separation, bias and prejudice that  existed in Boston a century ago.  The Irish Catholics were outsiders for whom access to Boston Latin, Harvard, the right clubs and jobs was difficult to obtain.  The proper Bostonians were Protestant, old money and not willing to share with the newcomers. Kennedy was an extremely talented and supremely ambitious man, and there was no obstacle he could not overcome. He succeeded at Harvard, graduated in 1912, married Rose Fitzgerald in 1914, went into banking, then industrial management and worked for the Hayden, Stone brokerage in the early 20's.  He was a financier in the truest sense of the word, buying, selling, and trading stocks, making deals, wheeling and dealing, all while acquiring and disposing of businesses.  He was involved in Hollywood as an owner, producer and lender as the industry switched to 'talkies'. He was relentlessly focused, as the author continuously points out, on his only true ambition - making himself and his family richer - and in a few short years, he did just that. He made millions when he sold his Hollywood interests to David Sarnoff and RKO. Before he was forty, he had established trusts for his children which were the foundation of multiple generations of wealth. He was a master short seller, who kept increasing his net worth throughout the Depression.  It is Joe Kennedy's personal life though that amazes the reader and is undoubtedly the reason that his times are referred to as 'turbulent'. Apparently, he was a serious Catholic, yet one who had affairs with hundreds of women. His most famous paramour was Gloria Swanson, who was amazed that he felt that by confessing his continuous sinning, he was forgiven and could continue as a member in good standing of his church.  He was virtually never home, often away three hundred days per year, but was quite attentive to his children. They all adored him and thought that he was a great dad. But as a father, he suffered incalculable pain as he buried four of his nine children and ruined the life of a fifth, when he had Rosemary lobotomized.  At the time of his death, 8 years after a debilitating stroke, he had  learned of Teddy's misdeeds at Chappaquiddick. Joe Kennedy's personal career highpoint came during his fifteen months as the first SEC Commissioner.  Appointed because he 'knew' the ways of  Wall Street, he is universally credited with getting the important Commission off on the right foot. One of his most important friendships from his Washington tour was Arthur Krock, columnist and Washington Bureau Chief of the Times, who became Kennedy's personal public relations advisor for years.  Kennedy had a reputation as bootlegger, but the author completely disagrees and points out that it would be difficult for Kennedy to pass Congressional muster if there was any truth to those rumors.  He was, though, an astute businessman, who in anticipation of the repeal of Prohibition, garnered the import rights for a decade and a half of Haig and Haig Scotch and Dewars White Label. Those rights were worth $900,000 per year and were the primary funding for a second series of trusts.  His second job for FDR was as Maritime Commissioner, but he made it quite clear that there was only one job he wanted as reward for being the most prominent business backer of the New Deal. It was a job that just about everyone, including Roosevelt, knew he was totally unqualified for - Ambassador to the Court of St. James.  Cocky and totally undiplomatic, immediately upon his arrival in London, "he was trying to usurp the authority of the Secretary of State and interfere in British politics. And two weeks into his tenure, he had already been slapped down by Cordell Hull for doing so."  FDR knew he had made a significant mistake, but with his eye on the politics of the 1940 nomination, knew he didn't want an angry Joe Kennedy back in the states shooting off about this, that and everything.  So, he left him there until Oct. 1940.  Reading about Kennedy's two and a half years in London, one is appalled at his disloyalty, hypocrisy,  headline hunting, arrogance, bigotry, total lack of any true sense of values and daily egomaniacal posturing.  He was opposed to war, any war, at that time, and the author leaves a strong impression that his opposition was personal, not philosophical.  He was justifiably and understandably concerned about his two oldest sons and was also fearful of the impact of war on his wealth. He comes off less an appeaser than a defeatist, although history has characterized and condemned him for being both. Upon his return to the states while technically still Ambassador, he equivocated about Lend-Lease and became persona non grata in the Roosevelt administration. Banished to Palm Springs and Hyannis Port, he would never hold public office again. The war extracted a terrible price from his large family.  Jack, fortunately, survived his 1943 encounter with danger. For Joe, Jr. death came in August of 1944.  It was an awful blow for Joe, Sr: "Joseph P. Kennedy would never recover from the death of his oldest son and namesake, the handsome, charming, charismatic young man who believed - with his father - that he could do anything he set his mind to". Kick's English husband, Billy, oldest son of the Duke of Devonshire, was killed in action in France in September.   After the war, Kennedy turned to further building his assets and advancing Jack's career, and was rewarded with Jack's election to a very safe Congressional seat in Boston.  Tragedy struck again in 1948, his sixtieth year, when Kick was killed in a plane crash in France.  Of his four oldest, two were dead, one a victim of a botched lobotomy, and the fourth perennially ill.  Throughout the 1950's, Kennedy remained very much behind the scene and continued to financially support Jack's political ambitions.  And he was rewarded when Jack became the first (and still only) non-Protestant American president.  Indeed, Jack remains only the second president (Van Buren) without a British heritage.  Joe insisted, in the face of almost universal opposition, that Bobby be Attorney General. A year later on December 19, 1961, Joe Kennedy suffered a severe cerebral stroke that would put an end to the life he had so vigorously led. He was wheelchair bound and unable to speak.  He viewed the sixties through a prism of pain, helplessness and indignity. He died on Nov. 18, 1969.

The Downfall of Money, Taylor - B +

                                                The subtitle of this excellent book about Weimar Germany is 'Germany's Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class'.  One of the author's opening observations is that as the Great War approached,  unified Germany..."was for the last time until well into the latter half of the twentieth century simultaneously fully solvent, fully employed and fully at peace." That all ended with the war. Because Britain was able to blockade Germany, the home front saw four years of declining food production and near starvation.  As the armies walked home in the third quarter of 1918, the German population also faced severe economic challenges. Fully sixty percent of the war had been paid for by war bonds - a superb 5% yielding investment that now would not be paid back.  The food blockade continued until June, 1919 when Germany signed the peace treaty. Armistice and peace did not bring quiet to the German political scene.  Revolt and  fighting in the streets between the left and right were legacies of the war. The Weimar Republic, effective in August 1919, was never quite able to get its arms around the political turmoil that preceded the economic conflagration.  By signing the peace treaty,  Weimar sealed its own fate. The right vehemently opposed the signing, despised the war guilt clause, never accepted the treaty's terms and was bent on overthrowing the government.  The country was irretrievably divided.  The economic situation throughout Europe was equally troubled.  The two victorious allies, Britain and France, were suffering from inflation after years of wartime expenditures. They were effectively broke and owed the US billions of dollars.  They needed reparations from Germany to pay the US. Essentially the three largest European economies needed to run surpluses in order to generate dollars to pay the US. But, who would they trade with who would be running a deficit?  Not the US. The situation was hopeless.  And for the Germans, most hopeless of all. They were obligated to pay crippling reparations and there was no political will to comply.  Governments came and went; ministers were assassinated. The strongest economy on the continent became a 'banana republic'.  Government printing presses tamped down the social unrest.  The author summarizes it as:  "the government continued to use wartime legislation to subsidize employment, and to regulate food prices and rents broadly in favor of the workers. ....it continued to print money in order to do so. Inflation crept up." Further straining the system were the needs of 550,000 war widows, 1.3 million war orphans and 1.5 million disabled vets.  When the in-kind coal reparation for 1921 fell behind schedule, the French occupied the Ruhr Valley.  The arrest of Germans, from the head of Krupp's down to street fighters, further inflamed emotions.  The Germans struck and resisted at every turn as the French tried to seal off the Ruhr from the rest of the country.  The country came close to collapse.  Insurgents on the right and left sought to revolt, as Berlin lost control of the country.  Hitler's Beer Hall  Putsch failed in Munich in the fall of 1923. Soon thereafter, a currency reform led by Chancellor Gustav Stresemann and future Finance Minister Schacht ended the papiermark and introduced the rentenmark.  Virtually every debt in the nation, including the obligations of the state to its people, were reduced to pennies. Hyperinflation was over.  Within a year, a new Reichsmark was introduced and stability came to Germany.  In the mid-twenties, normalcy returned thanks to a significant amount of foreign, particularly American, investment.  But of course, the Depression was a worldwide event and one that saw the return of extremism and eventually the end of the Weimar Republic.
                                              The author makes a compelling case that the German educated and middle classes, the supporters of the monarchy, were the ones who suffered the most during the war and its aftermath.  They fought and lost and were saddled with the 'war guilt' clause.  Their savings were destroyed by inflation and currency reform.  "They went from a position of unchallenged privilege within continental Europe's most powerful country to become, in practical terms, just one group competing in a modern political and economic marketplace for which it felt little else but contempt and loathing."  Without  a centrist middle class, Germany was easily susceptible to the radicals who followed.  Although not an easy read, this book helped to connect the dots for me going from war to reparations to inflation to the failure of  Weimar Germany.

By Its Cover, Leon B +

                                               This, the 23rd in the Commissario Guido Brunetti series,  proves that this author is getting better and that her creative skills are undiminished.  Here, there is a continuing theft of pages from books and actual books from an antique Library.  We meet the Director, the guard, a daily reader of Latin who was once a priest, and an outright deceiver and thief posing as an academic.  One winds up dead and  the evildoers are unmasked by Guido.

The Accident, Pavone - B +

                                               Chris Pavone rocketed to fame a few years ago with his first book, 'The Expats'.  He had spent twenty years in the NYC book business, was the classic insider, and  was then suddenly a new novelist, because he had gone to Brussels with his successful  and well-known wife.  He wrote about a cabal of expatriates and had a big hit on his hands. Here, he thoroughly explores New York, its writers, editors, agents, and publishers, as he has built a fabulous tale around an anonymous submission.  The book at the center of the novel is the purported true story of Charlie Wolfe, sort of a cross between your favorite love to dislike Fox News personalities and the man behind the cable news network that made news politicized  entertainment.  Wolfe is not to be trifled with as his dad was a deputy director of the CIA and he's about as well-connected as you can imagine.  Part of the reason for Wolfe's success is a long-term relationship with a fella who may or may not still be in the CIA. The CIA man has been feeding Wolfe information about politicians and others for years. Wolfe has parlayed that information into big time cable success and the CIA man has a substantial Swiss bank account.  The author of the book marked as 'Anonymous' is Wolfe's right hand man, who after twenty-years of deceit and worse has decided to fake his own death and write an anonymous tell-all. The problem is that Wolfe is well prepared for the submission to hit the street in NY and all of a sudden everyone who touches the book is in perilous danger.  As the book gets copied and passed around, bodies are dropping from one coast to the other.  The author devises a surprising plot twist at the end of the book, that I suspect will be a very big seller.

Amsterdam, Shorto - B

                                               The subtitle is 'The History of the World's Most Liberal City'.   Shorto traces the city's openness and willingness to accept new ideas, and its commitment to equality and individual freedom to two sources. First, it always was and still is a trading city filled with people from the four corners of the known world.  Port cities chock full of  foreigners doing business with locals are historically open minded places. Second, it never had a medieval top-down structure.  The land was mostly reclaimed, and consequently, was broadly owned.  Living on a floodplain requires strong individuals capable of cooperation with their neighbors.  Of equal importance to those traditions is its escape from Spanish domination and Catholicism, an event celebrated as the Alteration and traced back to May, 1578.  The next step in the city's forward trend was the prosperity brought on by the success of the Dutch East India Company.  It was the world's first for-profit permanent entity, an extraordinarily successful business, and one that led to Amsterdam's per-capita income to be four times that of Paris.  The public ownership of its stock allowed for that stock to be sold, exchanged, even shorted in the world's first stock exchange. Amsterdam was always open to new people; it had a vibrant Jewish section, and welcomed the Hugenots when they were expelled from France and the Catholics forced out of Germany and England. We sometimes forget it was from Amsterdam that the Pilgrims sailed, after fleeing religious persecution in England. Shorto has also written a book about Manhattan and clearly believes that much of New York's inheritance is traced to the Dutch.  As Amsterdam marched through time, it became the home of worker's rights, women's rights,  homosexual's rights  - a place where those on the outside were afforded respect and choice. There were  two reviews of this book in the NYTimes. The staff reporter was complimentary, and an outside historian posited that the author had lost his way as he finished the book.  As I thought that his foundation in the 16th and 17th centuries was much stronger than his observations of Amsterdam more recently,  I think I prefer the first half of his book and consider the rest a bit forced.

Where Nobody Knows Your Name - Feinstein, B -

                                               This book is the master storyteller's tale of the 2012 season in the minor leagues.  He follows nine men: mostly players, some old, and some young, a manager and an umpire.   With his deft touch and insight, he paints a picture of the life of transients, some on the way up, some on the way down and all striving - either for the big payday or just a chance to extend the life they love.  It's baseball that they love; it's just that Triple A is the place no one wants to be.  Focusing on his core nine stories and interweaving dozens and dozens more, Feinstein tells the heartbreaking story of life in the minor leagues.  Most of the tales do not have happy endings.  What the minors do have though is great names - Lehigh Valley IronPigs, Savannah Sand Gnats, Toledo Mud Hens, Richmond Flying Squirrels, Charleston RiverDogs, and my favorite, the Louisville Bats.

Wheel of Fortune, Gustafson - B +

                                                This fascinating 2012 book is about the Russian oil industry since the collapse of the Soviet Union.  At the time of publication,  Russia accounted for 13% of world production and 22% of non-OPEC oil.  However, as  North American energy production skyrockets, those percentages are reducing monthly. Russia is unique among energy exporting countries because the industry has developed indigenously and the oil industry is part and parcel of a large industrialized economy.  Dependency on a commodity, though, has assured that Russia is a petro-state with the same ailments as any other country suffering from the "oil curse".   Corruption is rampant and the industry is not prepared for the modernization required to continue to maintain its position.
                                                When the USSR fell apart, it was the legal/administrative/management  system that disappeared.  The physical plant stayed in place.  The 1992 Mineral Resources Law affirmed the state's ownership of the underground assets and authorized production, refining and distribution of oil and gas by licensees.  As the industry scrambled to reorganize itself, production in 1996 fell to half of the Soviet peak year of 1987.  Having studied the west, they realized they needed integrated oil companies.  Lukoil, Yukos and Surgutneftegaz were the first Russian "majors".  Of the three, only Yukos was wrenched from the hands of the old "oil generals" and was taken over by one of the famous financial barons known as oligarchs, Mikhail Khodorkovsky.   After a near collapse of the state, when it defaulted on its bonds in the late 90's and the impact of the 'Asian flu' financial crisis,  oil prices rebounded and Russian production grew from 3.3 million barrels per day to to 6 million between 1998 and 2004.  Leading the increase in volume was Yukos, where Khodorkovsky turned over production responsibility to an American.  The Russian miracle was a typical oil industry boom/bust cycle, and this time one that revitalized the Russian state in conjunction with the introduction of a man who wished to reestablish central control in Moscow.   Strengthening the state was the mission of Vladimir Putin and those from St. Petersburg who came to Moscow with him.  In 2003 Putin struck, Khodorkovsky went to jail, and Yukos was dismantled and renationalized.  The reason was that for those around Putin -- many civil servants from St. Petersburg and veterans of the security service -- the oligarchs had trumped the state and we're using their wealth and power for personal goals and not to help revitalize the Russian nation.  Yukos was selected because, "it was more aggressive and more radical, than the other oil companies".  Khodorkovsky personally challenged Putin on a number of fronts and came close to merging Yukos with Chevron, an unthinkable outcome for those resentful of the oligarchs.  While Khodorkovsky went to jail for a decade and Lukos was dismantled,  Rosneft hurtled to the front of the Russian pack.  It had barely survived the end of the USSR as a state-owned catchall and wound up as the state oil company, sponsored by Putin and one of the largest in the world.  However, the size and national strategic importance of the oil industry have not been enough to accelerate progress away from the infrastructure and habits of the old Soviet Union.  The state has made it extremely difficult for foreign investors, oil companies and technical specialists to participate and move the industry into this century.  Thus, the frontiers of Arctic oil and extracting tight oil, as is being done in  Canada and the US, remain the challenge, but one at which the system isn't prepared to succeed.  The system requires increasing oil prices for the Russian petro-state to prosper and the author does not believe that is in the cards.   Between 2001 and 2011, oil prices quadrupled, allowing  a nine-fold increase in the Russian state budget and the accumulation of an $800 billion surplus. That cannot be repeated and the state is likely to progressively and systematically decline. Gustafson, who is a professor at Georgetown, prescribes a litany of positive thinking reforms of the nature often suggested in the 'Economist' and 'Foreign Affairs'.  My suspicion is that Putin's Ukrainian activities have already put those possibilities to rest.  This is a superb book, very well-written and packed (and I mean packed) with detail.  He is best when painting the big picture.