Self-Indulgent Pleasures
One of the great advantages of escaping on vacation is the delightfully self-indulgent pleasure of just lying on a beach and reading. (Perhaps it is sadly telling that this is my guilty pleasure)
While I was away, I plowed through 3 books:
• The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine: I loved the book — no one can make a financial tale more compelling than Michael Lewis. He is a master story teller, allowing the narrative to unfold via the characters he brings to life. I plan on doing a full review in the future.
• A Genius for Deception: Fascinating military history of how the Brits deloyed camoflouge, counter-intelligence and subterfuge to help win WWI and II. (I am on the final chapters)
• Traders, Guns and Money: An insider’s view of the derivatives trading business, written with a wicked comic sensibility. I am a little more than halfway through, but this reads like the Liars Poker of the oughts.
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February 28th, 2011 at 9:00 pm
How the Brits won WW2, concise version: “Hitler, megalomaniac that he was, decided to out-megalomaniac his favourite megalomaniacal role model, Napoleon, by not only opening a second front where none was needed in invading Russia, but – unlike Napoleon – actually pulling it off. Alas, Hitler’s Russian adventure ended much like Napoleon’s did, destroyed half the German military, and made it possible for the allies to invade a much-weakened western flank, while 20 million pissed-off Russian army troops rolling in from the East sealed Germany’s fate. The end.”
All those wonderful stories about the British invention of ‘radar’ and breaking of the enigma cipher are fascinating but secondary to the thing which really cost Germany the war, which was Hitler’s insane decision to invade then-ally Russia, just as he had all of western Europe in his grasp and the English thoroughly sidelined on their island nation.
February 28th, 2011 at 9:28 pm
Barry-If you haven’t discovered Carl Hiaasen…you will be a big fan.
~~~
BR: I’ve read everything of his (except the golf book) — VERY funny stuff
February 28th, 2011 at 10:43 pm
BR, if you enjoyed “Genius of Deception”, another WWII book you might enjoy is “Bodyguard of Lies”. I hesitate to recommend it, because the sucker is around 1,000 pages if I remember right… but I read it in a couple marathon sessions and thoroughly enjoyed it. There’s something about war that brings out the best and the worst in the human animal.
March 1st, 2011 at 3:39 am
I have not read the book but I know for sure that Brits did not win WWII. If it was not for our help and support, Brits would have been surrendered to Germans – very early in the war.
The primary winner of WWII is General Zhukov. Hay, Brits and U.S. provided logistic help to him. Food, cloths, so amo and that’s all.
Now, if you are thinking about D-day, the Battle of Normandy, I believe Germany’s outcome were pretty much determined before that. We went to Europe to get our own share of brownies. Hadn’t we gone there, Stalin would have driven to the coast of Normandy from the other side and had claimed all those lands for his own and, today, Mr. Sarkozy would not have said “Cheers” when he was making a drinking toast, most likely he would said “Nostrovia”
March 1st, 2011 at 6:46 am
BR,
re: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0273731963/thebigpictu09-20
“Traders, Guns and Money”
I’ve long thought that Das has a good fix on the ‘Derivatives’-Scene, would you concur?
March 1st, 2011 at 6:51 am
mservat,
You have some good points but I think you may carry your thoughts too far. True, Germans I’ve talked to, say the war was fought in the East. But don’t forget I’m fairly certain the Russians would have been over run without allied materials. Germans couldn’t defeat the British air power and most of all Hitler was the ultimate ideologue in that his perception of reality was screwed. Starting a two front protracted war is never smart (read the first book on war ever written by Sun Tzu) or look at Iraq. It might be true (or it might not) that the BRits would have surrendered very early in the war without our help is a bit over stating what is known (this falls into the cat. of unknown knowns).
March 1st, 2011 at 6:53 am
Silly BR, reading on the beach is one of life’s great pleasures! Only topped on occasion by painting on the beach. Or slowly consuming so much rum on the beach that you lose track of the fact that you are getting sunburnt. Or throwing caution to the wind and letting the kids bury you. But I digress. . . .no need for guilt.
Especially considering that you are not exactly reading my level of beach fare. Granted, I have been known to pull out the Economist for beach reading, but I draw the line at substantive and hard-covered. Beach reading calls for trash! It’s a guilty pleasure only when you are reading something so devoid of value you can watch the kids, drink rum, converse as needed with the spouse, and still not miss a darn thing. I get snippy if they interrupt the painting.
March 1st, 2011 at 6:55 am
ewmayer:
“…Hitler’s insane decision to invade then-ally Russia, just as he had all of western Europe in his grasp and the English thoroughly sidelined on their island nation….”
Yeah…! I’m still scratching my head over that one… At some point in time Hitler must have thought to himself….
“WHAT WAS I THINKING….?”
March 1st, 2011 at 9:01 am
I have to second JD and Bodyguard of Lies
its the best strategic and special means military history book ever.
its out of print and only abt WWII
but hard to imagine Genius for Deception even close
March 1st, 2011 at 9:30 am
I recently finished Lewis’s most recent book too and came away amazed. I don’t know how he manages to get the folks involved to reveal the level of detail included in the book. The fact that so much information was available even in real time to discern what was happening yet nothing was done by our governing elites should disturb any reader even more.
The Brits certainly excelled in the intelligence war in WW2. A relatively short book which deals with codes, code-breaking, ciphers, and the murky world of espionage via the Special Operations Executive is Leo Marks’ book, “Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker’s War, 1941-1945,” a first person description of life inside the group running the British spy network in Occupied Europe by the person responsible for the ciphers the agents used. The author himself never had to set foot inside Nazi-controlled Europe but his ability to to depict the courage of the people who volunteered to go there is exceptional.
We should never forget that Hitler decided to plunge into the Soviet Union on the same date that Napoleon crossed into Russia. It was too late in the season the first time and so it proved the second. Of course, the Soviets proved more troublesome than expected but the German’s strategic plans possessed flaws big enough to drive a Tiger tank through. One also sometimes has to wonder what might have happened if the Communists hadn’t come to power and industrialized the old Russian empire the way they did to try to create the new Soviet Union. Hitler’s anti-Slav racism would have had him invading Russia/Soviet Union under any circumstance. Would a slower, more fractured Russian post-Tsarist Russia have been able to resist a German onslaught the way the Soviets managed to do?
March 1st, 2011 at 10:01 am
“• A Genius for Deception: Fascinating military history of how the Brits deloyed camoflouge, counter-intelligence and subterfuge to help win WWI and II. (I am on the final chapters)”
One of my favorite WWII stories involves the Germans certain attempt at subterfuge, by building a large fake airfield out of plywood, right down to full scale, painted Bf-109 fighters lined up in a phony flight line. The hope was that the Brits would waste precious resources devoted to an airfield that wasn’t
The Brits recon units were not fooled by the ruse, and were able to figure out what was going on. In a response that shows the Brits penchant for humor, even in war, they sent a single twin engined Mosquito fighter bomber to overfly the field at tree top level and drop a single large wooden bomb on it, and then speed off back to England, mission accomplished. :)
March 1st, 2011 at 11:09 am
I agree with Julia. You should not consider reading non-fiction (especially Finance/Economic related) an indulgence!
I would think you could even justify reading such tomes in your office every day, consider it research, and write the damn books off.
Or was your association of guilt related to a feeling of not leaving your work world behind?
March 2nd, 2011 at 2:57 am
For once, me and Barry are on the same page. I have been chugging through Guns, Traders and Money the last couple of weeks. I’m not in the biz but I’ve studied derivatives so the hardest thing to learn from this book is that it is not a two party deal. Put-Call parity is cool and all, but there are investors, issuers, dealers and traders. It’s a four party deal minimum and on any given day any party can win, except me. After reading Das’ characterization, I think I may do nothing else but be a Bogle fan and index and go to Shiller’s trailing PE to try and time my investments. The costs of doing business make it a lose lose.