Tales of a Female Nomad by Rita Gelman

Oh boy has it been forever since I have posted!  I have 5 books to do, so maybe if I do one a day I will catch up! 
This book was a gift from A & K for Christmas and I loved it!  I read it before leaving for Abu Dhabi so it is still home and my review will be from memory (and Amazon).  If you want to borrow it, I believe it is on the breakfast bar!

The author and main character whose name is Rita finds herself on the verge of divorce.  She was livin' large in a fancy pants life style in LA but at the age of 48 she decides to take an opportunity to head to Mexico for some adventure and time away from her marriage.  Her children had gone off to college and she needed to "find herself".  In doing so, she began a lifetime of travel and exploration.  She is also a children's book author so could support herself and even get funding for her travels from some her clients. Rita never traveled with anything more than she could carry and usually went in search of remote destinations where she was the only guest or outsider in the village.  Her travels took her from Mexico to Guatemala, Nicaragua, Borneo, Bali (where she lived for years) and several other destinations.  From time to time she came home to reconnect with family and friends, but her marriage did not survive.  Her children became travelers as well and frequently spent months with her exploring new territory.  As far as I can tell, she is still traveling!  The book is more than just her travel journals however - she really wants to connect with the people and their cultures.  She learns to cook with the women over open fires all over the world, visits trance healers, studies black magic, and really just awakens your spirit of adventure and makes you say, "Let's go!"  (But I won't be divorcing Dad anytime soon to do it!)  It is well written and a pleasure to read.  Thank you A & K!

January Recap

In January, I finished three books:

"A Man Called Intrepid" - this was a fascinating look at the secret war behind World War II, particularly focused on British work in the United States in the period of American neutrality. It centers on the work of Bill Stevenson, code name Intrepid, who ran the British Security Coordination activity in New York. Officially, it was unacknowledged, but in fact it was a British effort to put their secret warfare activities somewhere outside England in case Hitler invaded. They also tried to influence America to enter the war on the side of the Allies. I didn't realize the extent to which the Nazi sympathisers were involved in US politics, even at very high levels. The Brits ran an incredible spy operation right out of New York City, and also helped birth the OSS, which was a precursor to the CIA. Fascinating book, and looooooong, but worth the read.

"The Quantum Thief" - good hard science fiction. The author is a theoretical physicist, specializing in string theory, and you can tell. The narrative is convoluted, the technology is crazy, the story is fantastic. It's kinda nuts, but it's also very good. There are spies, quantum artificial intelligences, interstellar wars, and bizarre references to video game culture. Worth a read if you like the genre.

"The Hobbit" - I can't believe how long it has been since I've read this. It's not as good as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but it's good in its own right. We saw the movie in December, so I had to reread it to remind myself of the real story. The movie is faithful enough to the book, but actually makes the dwarves out to be more heroic than they are in the book. If you haven't read this, it should be high on your list.

The Smartest Guys In The Room

I haven't posted in some time but I think "The Smartest Guys in the Room" is worth mentioning here. First of all, thank Meredith for the Christmas gift, I had been wanting to read this for quite some time.

The book is about the rise and fall of Enron. It is well written and focuses more on the people and their motives than it does on the industry. Working in energy certainly made this more interesting to me but the story of the people is really what makes this a great read.

It has a pretty straightforward structure; Ken Lay grows up and forms Enron, hires Jeff Skilling who comes up with the idea for a "Gas Bank," which revolutionized gas trading. They, and Enron as a whole, embodied the idea that free markets are perfect and capitalism is the most pure form of business where intellect and innovation will reign supreme. There were a few close calls in the trading ops in the early day but Enron started to grow at an incredible rate.

The middle of the book starts to explore decisions that would come back to haunt the company. From their relatively early days Enron did their best to work the rules to their advantage. They greatly expanded the use of mark to market accounting, something still widely used. This section also starts to explain complicated financing structures used to hide debt from the balance sheet. This seems to be where the executives became addicted to hitting Wall St. targets (which also lined their pockets). Quarter after quarter there would be a rush to hit their goal, often by closing deals that were destined to lose money over the long haul (mark to market accounting allows you to book the gain when the deal closes, long before you see any cash. Some of the rules have been changed and, at the very least, disclosures are now more closely watched). The middle of the book could be a bit technical but if you don't understand you aren't alone. It appears that the board of directors, the analysts and many of the accountants didn't really know what was going on.

Eventually reality caught up with their fairy tale and it all started to unwind, quickly. In the month before Enron filed for bankruptcy they blew through nearly $2 billion in cash (this fact help 86 a deal that, perhaps, could have saved some of Enron). The amazing part of the story is the attitude of the Enron executives. Many seemed to believe if something wasn't explicitly illegal there was no moral/ethical reason not to take advantage of a certain situation (the part about California was a good example of this. Also, I enjoyed this part because I cover our CA market and enjoyed confirming my suspicions, CA can't get out of their own way).

This post has grown quite long. I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in energy, Wall Street, scandals, history of business, management etc. It's not for everyone but I found the story engaging.

It's not available on Kindle though, that sucks.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Smartest-Guys-Room-Scandalous/dp/1591840538/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1360074460&sr=8-1&keywords=smartest+guys+in+the+room

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

I just finished Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand and all I can say is WOW.  Erin let me borrow this book (thank you!) and I was skeptical about it.  It is not the type of books I usually read.  By usually I mean never.  I have had this on the shelf for 6 months or more and always kept moving it to the back of the reading list.  Finally I decided to give it a try.  It was a page turner for me that has easily moved into my top 5 favorite books.  The story is of Louie Zamperini who was a hell raiser in his youth and ended up channeling his spirits to running.  He turned into one of the greatest runners the nation had seen.  He even competed in the 1936 Olympics.   With the war beginning he joined the Army Air Corps as a bombardier.  On a mission over the pacific his plane went down.  That is when the story gets even more interesting and exciting.  The tale continues as he is stranded at sea and then a POW in camps throughout Japan.  This true story of heroism and bravery is fantastic.  The detailed writing and personal accounts from many POWs makes it even more real and enthralling.  I can’t recommend this book enough; it is one that I will be reading again for sure.

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

I finished The Namesake a few days ago and I really enjoyed the read.  I really got into quickly and it was a nice flowing read.  It is about a Bengali family and their life.  The parents were born and raised in Calcutta and moved to the USA after their arranged marriage.  The two children were born in the U.S. and work to balance the clashing cultures and values of society and their family. It is interesting to read about the adjustment for the parents into the American way of life and the children as they try and live the American lifestyle outside of the home and the traditional Indian lifestyle in the home.  The characters are interesting and well developed.  I found myself very fond of all of the characters and was able to relate to each person differently.  Many times I find myself "rooting" for a specific character and their wants and desires but it in this book I found myself equally interested and curious about all the characters.  I would thoroughly enjoyed this book and would high recommend it! 

After looking at another review Google has a more enticing way of describing the book so here is the Amazon.com description:
The Namesake is a finely wrought, deeply moving family drama that illuminates this acclaimed author's signature themes: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the tangled ties between generations.
The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of an arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Ashoke does his best to adapt while his wife pines for home. When their son, Gogol, is born, the task of naming him betrays their hope of respecting old ways in a new world. And we watch as Gogol stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs.
With empathy and penetrating insight, Lahiri explores the expectations bestowed on us by our parents and the means by which we come to define who we are.

Makers - Cory Doctorow

On our cross country drive, I finished what will most likely be my last book of 2012: "Makers", by Cory Doctorow. This is a piece of near-future speculative fiction based around the idea of the democratization of manufacturing brought on by 3D printing. Cheap access to printers by hacker types (in the tinkerer sense of hacker) upsets the way companies do business and brings about a flourishing of inventiveness and innovation. The story follows two guys who spark it all, their rise to fame, their coming to terms with how big companies do business and all of the messiness of hackers trying to make it in the Real World.

I thought this was an interesting book, especially since I am fascinated by 3D printing. I think Doctorow spends a lot of time talking to people who think like he does - this is similar in a lot of ways to another of his books, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" in that it centers around Disney and the "Disneyfication" of our culture. This is an interesting thought to explore, but I don't see our culture collapsing in quite the same way - there's a danger in the shallowness of our consumer culture and our desire to be continually entertained, but the heroes of the novel facilitate this kind of shallowness even as they try to fight it. Their entire business model is based on cool hunting and making crap to fill the niche until someone else figures out how to make it cheaper. I don't know if this irony was intentional, or if I am just cynical (maybe both?), but it overshadowed the novel for me. The story is well written and even gripping at times, but I couldn't get the philosophy to jive.

Worth a read, maybe, but the story didn't make up for the convoluted and self-contradictory philosophy.

In the Heart of the Sea

This last week on my business trip I read "In the Heart of the Sea" by Nathaniel Philbrick. This is the story of the sinking of the whale ship Essex and the 90 day, 4500 mile trip the survivors made in open lifeboats in the Pacific. The sinking was the inspiration for "Moby Dick", and Melville may have even met the captain of the Essex.

The physical and mental anguish these men went through is staggering - they survived on about 500 calories a day of hardtack, eventually running down to 200 calories or so. They eventually resorted to cannibalism, which probably saved the lives of the men who made it.

What I found most interesting was the way that the various leaders on the crew dealt with things. When the ship sunk, they were only something like 800 miles from the Societies islands. The captain said they should sail for those islands, but the first and second mates were terrified of cannibals (somewhat ironic, right?) so they talked the captain into a scheme that would, in optimal circumstances, give them about one or two extra days of starvation rations. It was a terrible plan, but the captain was shell shocked and didn't assert his command. The real kicker? There weren't any cannibals on the islands.

I thought this was a fascinating book, and an amazing story of what people can survive. I could have done with a little less graphic description of cannibalism, but it certainly drove home the point.