Like Grace in Warren Adler’s Mourning Glory, Fleur seduces very wealthy widowers at funerals. Fashionable, flamboyant and sexually gifted, she moves in to Richard Favour’s estate, charms his family, and plays out her usual scam. First, she borrows an American Express Platinum Card which draws on the widower’s bank account, but has her name on it. Then she buys lots of lovely elegant presents for everyone. Then she withdraws larger and larger amounts of cash, which she re-deposits; withdraws and re-deposits, establishing a credibility so that she can eventually withdraw a very large sum of money, without a re-deposit. But this time, things are different.
The Gatecrasher by Madeleine Wickham read by Katherine Kellgren
July 10th, 2010
Phillip Margolin, Fugitive, read by Jonathan Davis
July 10th, 2010
Charlie has been a guest and a prisoner of the dictator of Batanga for 12 years when he has an affair with the dictator’s favorite wife. After the wife is tortured, Charlie extradites himself to America, and stands trial for an old murder. The crime is investigated, reconstructed and solved, with a twist.
The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Arielly
June 30th, 2010
How is it possible to account for irrationality in a scientific way? What kind of a science, what kind of a scientist studies the the irrational side of human behavior? How, moreover, can irrational decisions be measured, explained and controlled? Arielly describes experiments which do just this.
A parrot is put in a cage with two sources of food, one takes time and effort, the other is instantaneous. The parrot prefers the food on which it has spent a bit of time. “Contra-freeloading” describes this very phenomenon: many animals prefer to work (or play) for food, rather than eating freely accessible food. Read this against standard economic theory, which holds that rational economic agents always prefer to minimize their effort to produce maximal rewards. Yet we humans, (like parrots) are not always and already rational; we play, we interact with our environment, although our interactions ‘cost’ us more in effort and may not produce higher returns..Arielly describes experiments which demonstrate how and how much human beings are motivated by meaning, over and above immediate rewards. Some of these experiments point to “the Ikea effect” and explain why we feel better when we own things that we assemble ourselves. Some point to “the egg theory” which explains why Mrs. Baker will buy a cake mix to which she must add some ingredients, rather than a mix which requires no effort at all. Some experiments point to the “Not Invented Here” bias, which is the bias against solutions or goods which we ourselves did not invent. (Also called The Toothbrush Theory because we only want to use our own.) The notion that a personal investment of labour results in an increase in value is not new; what is new is a science that can quantify this revaluation, or ‘over-valuation’. Behavioural economics concerns itself with how systems and institutions and designs make room for the irrational, and what happens when they don’t.
Information has an emotional weight, it is not free of its distribution method or its owner, or the order in which it is presented. Some information can be “primed”—preceded by a particular emotional charge—so as to control its impact. Arielly’s life story, for example. Arielly introduces his work by telling us about his traumatic, disfiguring, painful accident and his prolonged convalescence and rehabilitation. Is this information intended to influence our apprehension of his work? Does it?
Doomed.
June 17th, 2010
I am reading three books, disrespectfully, carelessly, unthinkingly.
After finishing The Girl Who Kicked A Hornet’s Nest I decided that there was nothing more to read. Nothing else to read. Nothing to satisfy the specific hunger for more Girl. Nothing to rejoin the amorous journalist and the girl. What a pity. Out of all those beautiful, lithe, mythically wise women the journalist ends up with a weight lifter. Disappointing. Like all men, really.
Maybe it wasn’t really Larsson who wrote the whole thing. Maybe it was his girlfriend. Which would explain why the rest of the world is reading “Men Who Hate Women” and Americans, fat, hypocritical and prudish are reading about hornet’s nests. But now we have run out of hornets nests. What remains?Something named “The Assassins of Athens” which rhymes, ridiculously. We stopped after three rich schoolboys bragged to a homicide inspector about the routine they routinely used to pick upgirls at bars which they were not old enough to drink in…..
The second begins with a Jewish wedding and progresses intellectually to a classic old fashioned domination of a good Jewish girl from Scarsdale by a cold English cad. She loves it. Then the plot turns limp and the Englishmen confesses his impotence, and the book dooms itself to the whining chic lit bin.
Jennifer Chiaverini’s Elm Creek Quilting Series narrated by Christina Moore
June 2nd, 2010
It is not unusual for women’s books to lay out women in groups, like a plate of madeleines, a silver tray of cream cakes. But this circle of quilters is not a dainty or delicate array.
Chiaverini quilts stories about a dozen or so women who quilt, whose separate lives come together accidentally and on purpose at Elm Creek quilting camp, where women welcome women into an American tradition. Chiaverini’s women are full-bodied, irregular, problematic. Each one has stories full of children or mothers; Diane, for example, who shows up at the police station to bail out her son:
Well. it certainly does my heart good to know that the citizens of Waterford are being protected so heroically from skateboarders. Now if only you could do something about all those thieves and murderers and terrorists running loose, now I would be really impressed.
Diane is smart and sarcastic and argumentative, Sylvia is a grand old dame and a master quilter, Summer is a sleek hippy daughter of a single feminist academic, Judy is a practical, organized, rational type, Bonnie industrious and busy shopowner-housewife, Sarah, the bitchy domestic manager and co founder of the quilting camp. After eight quilting books, these characters are solid evidentiary structures and Elm Creek is a well elaborated structure of the imagination: safe, supportive, creative, cozy. It is problematic and fun. As fun as a summer camp for big girls who love little pieces of cloth.
It is of course the problems of everyday life that are shared among the quilters, not just the piecing and sewing and binding and basting.Perhaps there is a kinship between these ladies and the medieval craftswomen or ‘spinsters’ who (like the wife of Bath) were good at ‘deceit, weeping and spinning’. Somehow, this medieval picture of women and textiles and discourse is comforting to female readers in 2010.
For whom?
May 27th, 2010
5. Be careful with puns, innuendo and double meanings. Search engines, spiders and robots have no sense of humor. Keep this in mind when trying to attract their attention.
So states SEO “tip” number 5 of Berkshire Hathaway’s BusinessWire.com, a neat new on-line press release engine, as clean as Google’s home page, with no ads. It is all business, and that means it is wired, well connected, and engineered to distribute and deliver text to multiple news wire services, stock markets, media.
And when it tells us how to write, it tells us to write for the search engines, the spiders and the robots.
How sad.
Money To Burn by James Grippando, narrated by Jonathan Davis
May 26th, 2010
Michael Cantela is the youngest winner of the Investment Advisor of the Year at the elite investment firm of Saxton Silvers. He has a knack for making rich people richer, an apartment on Sutton Place, an unemployed wife, and an eight or nine figure personal portfolio. That is, until he checks his balance. Which is zero.
Imagine it: a hotel room at the Pierre, your wife is newly undressed and waiting for you who are on line looking at a zero balance. Your portfolio has been liquidated. All your stocks sold, and the total transferred to somebody else’s account on the Cayman Islands.
A short look at the short success of a straight man among the crooked and the greedy, with a little torture thrown in, for spice.
Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie read by Rosemary Leach
May 19th, 2010
Gwenda gets off the boat at Plymouth, hires a car, looks for village to live in. And finds one: a perfectly charming cottage with aga, a kitchen garden and flowered wallpaper. Gwenda moves in with her rosewood, her mahogany, her papermache, her chintz and all the fabrics of domesticity. She feels from the start that the house and the garden are familiar; she knows in advance where the doors are and where they ought to be, she imagines the wallpaper of a room and then discovers the very same wallpaper in a boarded up cupboard. There is something uncannily familiar about the house from the start.
By the end of the first week she has had one or two hallucinations, and thinks perhaps that she is going mad. She meets Miss Marple who suggests that there may be another way to explain her familiarity with the house. Perhaps she has lived in the house before. Which is of course a perfectly sensible English alternative to Freud: “You are not mad; your house is old, your ancestors are ugly, your hallucinations are memories and best avoided.” But this is impossible. Gwenda is from New Zealand, and she is curious.
What she finds unsurprisingly is murder.
Warren Buffet’s Management Secrets by Mary Buffett & David Clark. Performed by Mary Buffett.
May 17th, 2010
A catholic tailor used his life savings to go to the Vatican. When he returned his parish gathered to find out what he had seen. “What kind of a fellow is the Pope?” they asked him. “44 Medium,” he said.
This is the kind of obsession Buffet is looking for in his managers. “In Warren’s world it is not so much about how smart we are, but how obsessed we are,” says Mary Buffet, in her sweet voice. Find an obsessive with ‘recurrent and persistent thoughts, impulses or images which cannot be ignored or suppressed’ (DSM 300.3). And make sure that he is obsessed with your business.
This is a sweet book read by a sweet voice, easy to hear and easy to understand. Indeed, sometimes it reads like a recipe book, with generous margins for adding ingredients. Sometimes it reads like the ROMPER ROOM list of Do-bees and Don’t-bees. DON’T be greedy when choosing a job. DON’T borrow money. DO delegate. DON’T criticize your employees. Do what you love to do and hire people who love what they do. DO be obsessed. DO choose the right company.
When a company owns a piece of the consumer’s mind, it never has to change its products. That means more profits, and more managerial bonuses. It is good to work for such a company.
When a company sells a unique service, like H & R Block, it doesn’t have to worry about falling demand: “There is never a recession in the tax filing business.” It also doesn’t have to worry about spending lots of money on capital. It is good to work for such a company.
Below-cost buyers and sellers like Walmart’s and Costco also have a competitive advantage; but beware—the stress on keeping prices low puts a great deal of pressure on managers. Still, these chains offer good managerial opportunities.
Sometimes it reads like a macroeconomics textbook, and sometimes like a handbook in human psychology (We all have a deep and honest need to be appreciated.). Or etiquette (When meeting someone for the first time, behave in a friendly way. ).
But mostly this is a manual of common sense with instructions on how to be a good human being, not only a good manager.
Meet the Giants: An Interview with Ziad Abdelnour
May 15th, 2010
Schumpeter once wrote that the Stock market is a poor substitute for the holy grail. In other words, capitalism is more or less incapable of producing belief in itself. And yet, there are people who do believe in it. Ziad Abdelnour is one of them.
For Ziad, business is war. And what is at stake in this war is the creation and destruction of worlds.
“The lifeblood of capitalism are the entrepreneurs, the financiers who make things happen.”The drive to make things happen is not inherited, is not taught, is not capable of being transmitted by a propaganda machine. “It has to be in your DNA” says Ziad. Because of this, the profile of Blackhawk Partners has not changed for years:
I don’t back industries. I don’t back ideas. I back people.
These people—these capitalists, the billionaires who change the world—are rebels. Only by backing rebels, can you re-create the world.
This is what Ziad’s capital does: it empowers the rebels (re-bellare) to start the war all over again .
Elvi Rhodes A House By the Sea read by Anne Dover
May 9th, 2010
How fun to be a stubborn, sensible English widow who takes up decorating or hotelkeeping or moves to Brighton. The kind of fun that takes time: not like those television garden shows that demonstrate
“how to transform an entire garden in a matter of five hours while the lady of the house [goes to] visit her mother in the next town. ...A team would move in. They would spend an inordinate amount of money on mature plants, containers, garden furniture, trellising and ceramic slabs… Towards the end there would be moments of panic because the wife was due to walk in the door in precisely seven minutes time…”
No, Caroline has fun slowly. She sells her old house at Bath slowly, she moves to Brighton slowly, she fixes her old house slowly, and then converts a new house into flats, slowly. Meanwhile she discovers that she’s “...got a wonderful eye for fabrics, window treatments, lighting, decorating, color schemes and so on … even furniture.” Then, very slowly, she turns her builder into her friend and her friend into her partner, slowly, sensibly, with a happy division of labour:
I’m asking you to design while I carry out the practical part.
How fun.
Drive by Daniel Pink
May 5th, 2010
This looks like a book, but its an ad for the guy who’s going to talk at your next off-site. Welcome to the Motivational Operating System and it’s “sets of assumptions and protocols about how the world works that run beneath our laws, economic arrangements and business practices.” It is called an operating system rather than a ‘common sense’ because the language of IT lends credibility to a non-science of social behavior. Also and because it is an “operating system” it can be tweaked, and Pink is here to tweak it.
With “autonomy boosts”— because the language of nutritional energy drinks turns a boring moral notion something measurable, blendible and drinkable. Boosts have an immediate effect. They make it to possible to increase “flow” which describes something in between enlightenment and a serotonin fry-up. “Flow” resonates both eco- and ego-culture, it sounds liquid and monetary and vaguely green. And very credible, from the Latin credo, lending itself to belief, and credit.
What becomes clearer and clearer in Pink’s ad is the generation gap between operating systems. The generation hiring believes that labour is and should be unpleasant, while the generation they are hiring believes that labour should flow, feel good, and produce something monetary and vaguely green.
Sometimes Pink is here to play Nanny: the next generation of Americans needs to be given “Goldilocks Tasks”—tasks that are neither too challenging nor too boring, pre-packaged, and served with a straw. A kind of Jobucino. Sometimes he simply proclaims, with that relentless enthusiasm born of sun and Mexican labour, what companies need to do to keep their employees happy.
Crash Proof 2.0 by Peter Schiff read by Sean Pratt
April 24th, 2010
Don’t buy anything. Don’t borrow anything. Don’t open any kind of e-trade account, or invest in any kinds of funds, or buy any kinds of currencies, or pay any kind of broker. Read this book, cover to cover. Then write a letter of praise to Peter Schiff for his clarity of thought, his easy to understand explanations of economic realities, and his ability to map out alternatives for Americans with a little bit of good sense.
The Traffickers by W.E.B. Griffin read by Scott Brick
April 20th, 2010
Matt Payne is back, attracting bullets and bad guys and the failed sons and daughters of old Philadelphian society, and WEB Griffin is in fine form in the digital age, as romantic and jolly as always. But instead of showing us into the salons and bedrooms and backbenches of a secret world, he tells us about a city disfigured by Mexican cruelty, flooded by illegal Hispanic labourers and monetized by Meth and underaged vaguely Central American sex slaves. Instead of histories lived out among captains and sailors and adventurers he reads the plaques of unread public monuments, walking through a live city but seeing a museum. WEB Griffin’s huge heroes are missing, as are his lovely, laughing women, and his young apprentices and hearty institutional bosses. I miss them all.
A Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie
April 3rd, 2010
There are very few perfect beginnings to a story. Beginnings which move through images at the same rate as they move through text, rolling into a plot detectibly, sensibly, unhurriedly. A boy, for example, making the rounds on his bicycle, delivering the daily papers:
...At Colonel and Mrs Easterbrook’s, he delivered The Times and the Daily Graphic. At Mrs Sweatenham’s he left The Times and The Daily Worker. At Miss Hingecliff’s and Miss Murgatroyd’s he left The Daily Telegraph and The News Chronicle. At Miss Blacklocke’s, he left The Telegraph, The Times and The Daily Mail. At all these houses, and indeed in practically every house in Chipping Cleghorn, he delivered every Friday, a copy of the North Benom News and The Chipping Cleghorn Gazette, known simply as The Gazette. Thus on Friday mornings, after a hurried glance at the headlines in the daily paper…. most of the inhabitants of Chipping Cleghorn eagerly opened the Gazette and plunged into the local news. After a cursory glance at correspondence, in which the passionate hates and feuds of rural life found full play, most of the subscribers then turned to the local column.
We can easily sketch in our mind a series of houses, in front of which stand assorted sizes of mailbox, and in which kitchens sit the inhabitants of this happy English village, eating their singular English breakfasts, reading the headlines, the correspondence, the local news, and then, more likely than not, the Classifieds, in which are published up to the minute or almost up to the minute ads, as relevant and localizable as Tweets.
The Winter of Frankie Machine by Don Winslow
April 3rd, 2010
Frank has the waves, which is why he doesn’t need much of anything else. Nevertheless he has an ex-wife, a girlfriend, 4 jobs and a routine, about which he is frankly religious.
He has the “Gentleman’s Hour” which is when other guys who don’t need to be at work at 9 or 10 AM ride the waves, lovingly, respectfully, uncompetitively.
Frankie thinks that priests should know what Italian husbands have always known: Italian wives will always find a way to punish you, and its usually in the wallet. You piss her off, and she’ll still do a job in the bedroom, but then she’ll go out and buy a new dinette set.
Agatha Christie The Hollow read by Hugh Fraser
March 1st, 2010
Have a bit of Christie as social chronicler, as drawing room critic of a leisure class which presents itself as a platform of unemployment. It is 1946 and the Angkatells are gathered togethered, after the murder. Lucy, the mistress of cognitive deviations, Henrietta, clever, independent and detached, Midge, dark, square shaped, and poor, David, a spoiled, sour intellectual, and Edward, the reluctant, bony, undeserving heir.
It is quite obvious that the notion of work is odd, uncertain, and turning: the way milk turns. “Is the woman sympathetic and pleasant to work for?,” Edward asks Midge. “If you must have a job you must take one where the surroundings are harmonious and where you like the people you are working with.”
But how does one explain the notion of work to an heir?
How to explain to a person like Edward… What did Edward know of the labour market, of jobs, They were all divided from her by an impassible gulf: the gulf that separates the leisured from the working. They had no conception of the difficulties of getting a job. And once you had got it, of keeping it… She had found a job for herself at 4 pounds a week… Midge had no particular illusions about working. She disliked the shop. She disliked Madame Alfredge. She disliked the eternal subservience to ill tempered and impolite customers. She doubted very much whether she could obtain any other job….
A 17 year old shop girl, circa 1946 or 2010?
Discontent does not stop at the door of the dress shop. Oxford is overgrown with it; circulates it, exports it.
“I must have a talk with you David and learn all about the new ideas. As far as I can see one must hate everybody but at the same time give free medical attention and a lot of extra education… Poor things all those helpless little children herded into schoolhouses everyday….
Dick Francis 1921-2010
February 14th, 2010
Dick Francis died in his home on the Cayman Islands. He was 89.
A successful steeplechase jockey, Francis turned to writing after he retired from racing in 1957. He penned 42 novels, many of which featured racing as a theme. His books were translated into more than 20 languages, and in 2000 the Queen – whose mother was among his many readers – honoured Francis by making him a Commander of the British Empire.
For more info: The Globe and Mail
ORIGIN & CAUSE by Shelly Reuben
February 6th, 2010
Let’s just say that murders happened in the middle of other things: a cop, a lawyer, a fire investigator get up, they fight with their wives, they eat. Sometimes they think. The law is something they think about. How it came to be what it is, where it came from, when it changed. If you have a father who reads, who respects the history of things, who loves the Law, you think about what a lawyer should be, what the law should be, what an institution like the law allows human beings to be.
In Europe, rich people sometimes keep a modest apartment in a poor or marginal area of their city. They call it their “pied a terre”. Translated, this means “foot on the ground”. It is said that their purpose in maintaining these small apartments is to remind them of their roots and to keep them in touch with reality. And that’s exactly why I always keep my copy of Letters To A Young Lawyer in my briefcase. The words within, the philosophy, Harris’ love of simplicity and reverence for the law, this is my psychological pied a terre.
Capture by Robert Tanenbaum read by Charles Leggett
January 28th, 2010
Has anyone else noticed a spectacular and embarrassing silliness among the old guard of East Coast scribblers? As though they were trying to write comic books, and couldn’t figure out how to convert text into images? Gone are the wry, dry, street talk, the inside cracks of persons, cities, institutions. Gone are the political or intellectual references and resonances. Gone are the differences, the mannerisms, the languages that make themselves loved or remembered or both.
Advice? Use a pen not a keyboard, and write your age.
The Neighbor by Lisa Gardner
September 14th, 2009
Wonderful, well developed characters modeled on silly, overchewed, Oprah-certified victim-types. The victim of an alcoholic, depressive, schadenfreude-mother, the victim of a childhood kidnapping by a pedophile, the victim of an unforgiving corrections system, the victim of overwhelming emotions, overwhelming fears, overwhelming doubts, of poor parents, poor teachers, poor morals, poor taste. But magnetic and memorable, nonetheless. The woman who for no apparent reason leaves a pleasant husband and a pleasant child is a curiosity: for the police, for us. The mild mannered husband with quiet habits and no past is, likewise, unusual, and leaves us wondering.
Summer on Blossom Street by Debbie Macomber read by Miss Delilah
August 17th, 2009
Lots of interesting characters on Blossom Street: a widow with an adopted daughter, a tough ex-punk happily married and unhappily smoking, a good son and chocolate factory owner with a growing heart problem, a charmed and charming owner of a knitting store, a gorgeous single girl getting over an ex-fiancee who fancied prostitutes. Too bad all the characters sound like a relentlessly perky meet-and-greet girl selling God on morning talk radio.