Holiday Book Guide: Photography - WSJ.com
Despite a murderous year for the publishing industry, artful books of photographs continued to roll off the presses in impressive numbers. Electronic devices simply can't match (so far) the substantial pleasure of looking at—and owning—pictures on a paper page. Here are some highlights.
"We English" by Simon Roberts (Chris Boot, 56 pages, $60). Most of us experience nature along pathways and shorelines trodden for decades, if not centuries. This rueful truth is known in the bones of the English, who have pieced and parceled their half of an island since the Bronze Age. Simon Roberts gently mocks his compatriots as they search for weekend inspiration in these well-groomed landscapes, even as he reminds us why such lovely places were, and still could be, wellsprings for poetry.
"Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans" (Steidl, 506 pages, $75). This mammoth catalog is a tribute to Robert Frank's lacerating classic, "The Americans." Published a half-century ago, the Swiss emigre's deeply emphatic and critical examination of his adopted country has only improved with age. "Looking In" offers dozens of Frank's outtakes, as jagged and tough as the 83 pictures that he included in the original book. If you can afford it, buy the hardcover edition of "Looking In," since the paperback inexplicably deletes many of the smaller images that accompany the superb essays.
"Small Trades" by Irving Penn (Getty Museum, 269 pages, $49.95). The final book overseen by the late andinimitable Mr. Penn collects more than200 portraits of tradesmen and -women taken in 1950-51 in Paris, London and New York. A tip of the cap from one exceptional craftsman to his fellow workers, this salute also eulogizes professions—tinsmith, charwoman, iceman, pickle salesman, organ grinder—that would soon be obsolete.
"Playing With Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage"by Elizabeth Siegel (Yale University Press, 200 pages, $45). Photocollage was invented not long after photography. Aristocratic women in Victorian England were notably keen on cutting up photographs of humdrum realism and mixing and matching them to create whimsical fantasies—e.g., photos of children nestled in the blooms of painted flowers or a drawing of a juggler tossing balls decorated with portrait photographs of sober, bearded Englishmen. Ms. Siegel's expert commentary on her selection from family albums of the 1860s and 1870s leads us on a twisty ride down the rabbit hole.
"Faces of the Frontier: Photographic Portraits From the American West 1845-1924" by Frank Goodyear III (University of Oklahoma Press, 181 pages, $45). Myths about the American frontier persist despite the best efforts of historians to disprove them. From the archives of the National Portrait Gallery, Mr. Goodyear has culled a wild bunch of characters— Gen. Winfield Scott ("Old Fuss and Feathers"), Levi Strauss, Calamity Jane, Sam Houston, Geronimo and even Hollywood cowboy Tom Mix—who left their imprint on our image of the West. As photographs often show, most of these men and women looked quite ordinary, which makes their star billing in our imagination all the more interesting to ponder.
"Legacy: The Preservation of Wilderness in New York City Parks" by Joel Meyerowitz (Aperture, 209 pages, $65). Who knew that the five boroughs had so many parks, encompassing 29,000 acres of greenery? In his systematic tour of what is left of the city's natural landscape—and where it is even being enhanced, thanks to Mayor Michael Bloomberg's campaign to plant a million trees—Mr. Meyerowitz uncovers odd and charming hideaways that most native New Yorkers will not have visited or even heard of. Particularly striking are the images of North Brother Island, acquired by the city's parks department in 2007. The 13-acre island in the East River has clearly been reverting to the wild—vines seem to be pulling a power station down into the ground—since the 1963 closing of Riverside Hospital.
"Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before" by Michael Fried (Yale University Press, 409 pages, $55). The latest art historian to discover that photography offers challenges not found in the other arts, Mr. Fried trains his lucid mind and prose on the work of Jeff Wall, Thomas Struth and other contemporary figures. The knotty arguments here call for a reader's undivided attention, but they reward it.
"Sawdust Mountain" by Eirik Johnson (Aperture, 143 pages, $50). A permanent mist hangs over the inhabitants of a region Mr. Johnson calls Sawdust Mountain, and it isn't just the rainy climate. In his moving group portrait of a community of loggers and fishermen in the Pacific Northwest, Mr. Johnson, a native son, documents the precariousness of life in this corner of America. At the same time, his photographs capture the defiance of those who have made certain choices—rural solitude instead of an urban economy—and are content (or not) with that bargain.
"The Photographs of Homer Page" by Keith F. Davis (Yale University Press, 144 pages, $50). One of the best-printed books of the year restores to public view one of mid-century America's unjustly forgotten photographers. Page was a humanist in the style of Helen Levitt, with a similar eye for the ballet of the street. This tasty selection of his New York work from 1949-50 whets the appetite for a full retrospective.
"The Contact Sheet" by Steve Crist (Ammo Books, 192 pages, $39.95). Before the digital era, contact sheets preserved a photographer's thought process and were a graveyard for burying mistakes. The strips here reveal how an illustrious group— William Claxton, Nan Goldin, Dorothea Lange, Julius Schulman, William Wegman and others—went about their business. We see a full-page reproduction of a well-known photograph, accompanied by the contact sheets—sometimes with more than a dozen images—from the same session. There is, for example, Claxton's famous 1960s image of a model (his wife) wearing what became known as the first topless bikini, as well as 12 other rejected shots—including some showing her wearing a diving mask pushed up over her forehead. It's not always clear why the photographers chose one picture over another, which only adds to the value of this archival material.
"The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith" by Sam Stephenson (Knopf, 268 pages, $40). From 1957 until 1965, Gene Smith ran one of the hippest jazz scenes in New York out of his Sixth Avenue loft. He obsessively photographed and tape-recorded everything that went on there, from rehearsals for Thelonious Monk's big-band concert at Town Hall in 1959 to all-night jam sessions with Zoot Sims and Roland Kirk. Thought for years to have been unplayable, the tapes—and the photographs—from this lost jazz world have been restored, thanks to Mr. Stephenson's tireless efforts.
"Who Shot Rock and Roll: A Photographic History" by Gail Buckland (Knopf, 319 pages, $40). Ms. Buckland tells a familiar rock-music story but from the perspective of the photographers who attended the concerts or hung out in the hotel rooms. Blessedly, she makes no attempt to inflate celebrity portraiture into High Art. Though the musicians pictured, from Elvis Presley in 1955 to Amy Winehouse in the present day, are what you'd expect, the line-up of photographers is anything but the usual suspects. Yes, we find Jim Marshall, Lynn Goldsmith and David Gahr but also Dennis Hopper, Andreas Gursky, Ari Marcopolous and others not solidly embedded in rock culture.
"Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard" by Jeff L. Rosenheim (Steidl, 407 pages, $65). The huge collection of postcards—9,000 of them—owned by photographer Walker Evans was in keeping with this lifelong pack-rat's affection for many things looked down on by the high-minded. Mr. Rosenheim's delightful catalog for a show of the postcards at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York explores the many relationships, direct and indirect, between these commercial images—of hotels, parks, lighthouses and much more—and Evans's supposedly austere photographs. Only a sourpuss could flip open this book and not break into a smile.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Friday, January 29, 2010
J.D. Salinger, Reclusive Novelist Dies at 91
(courtsey The Wall Street Journal)
Perhaps the most reluctant celebrity in the history of American letters, J. D. Salinger leaves behind some of its most-read stories.
Mr. Salinger, who died Wednesday at age 91, leaves behind one fully realized novel (The Catcher in the Rye) and five collections of shorter writings, all surrounded by a penumbra of unknowns about the author, who went into seclusion in 1953.
Yet Mr. Salinger's books have remained highly visible, iconic presences in American classrooms and have sold more than 65 million copies, including translations around the world. "The Catcher in the Rye" is often cited in lists of the best 20th- century novels.
The son of a cheese importer, Mr. Salinger grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side. He attended a military academy for high school and never graduated from college. Critics and enthusiasts had little problem drawing parallels between Mr. Salinger's youth and that of the "Catcher in the Rye's" narrator, Holden Caulfield.
Mr. Salinger's early stories appeared in magazines while he was serving in the Army in Europe during World War II, in magazines including The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire. His more mature work appeared in the New Yorker starting in the mid-1940s, including "A Perfect Day for Bananafish."
"The Catcher in the Rye" caused a sensation when it was published in 1951, unusual for its salty language and sentiment, attributed to Caulfield, who styled himself an enemy of "phonies." Taken as portraying a thirst for authenticity by some, the work is seen by many young people these days as merely whiney.
Mr. Salinger's celebrity was hardly dimmed by his decision to live out of the limelight. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1961 yet remained a sphinx. His last original published work, "Hapsworth 16, 1924," appeared in the New Yorker in 1965. Visitors who caught sight of him in New Hampshire where he lived described an unkempt recluse.
WSJ's Mark Lasswell talks to Simon Constable on the News Hub about famed author J.D. Salinger's death as well as the lasting legacy he left to the literary world.
More and more, his public face consisted of lawsuits brought against unauthorized publishers of his early works or unpublished letters. After Mr. Salinger filed suit, a federal judge last year barred a Swedish writer and publisher from publishing a sequel to "Catcher in the Rye."
In one of the few public statements he made after 1953, Mr. Salinger told the New York Times in 1974, "There is a marvelous peace in not publishing."
Mr. Salinger's death is almost certain to generate renewed interest in his work and increasing pressure to bring his work to the big screen, something the author for the most part resisted.
More
Mr. Salinger allowed his short story "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" to be optioned, resulting in the 1949 film "My Foolish Heart." But it was apparently so bad in the eyes of both Mr. Salinger and the critics that it soured him from ever again selling film rights.
"I toy very seriously with the idea of leaving the unsold rights to my wife and daughter as a kind of insurance policy," Mr. Salinger wrote in a 1957 letter attributed to him and made public by a Washingtonville, N.Y. memorabilia dealer in 2009. "It pleasures me to no end…to know that I won't have to see the results of the transaction."
--------
Here's the link to online book.
http://freebooksread.blogspot.com/2010/01/read-catcher-in-rye-online.html
Here's the link to TIME Magazine, Jul. 16, 1951 review
Books: With Love & 20-20 Vision - TIME
Perhaps the most reluctant celebrity in the history of American letters, J. D. Salinger leaves behind some of its most-read stories.
Mr. Salinger, who died Wednesday at age 91, leaves behind one fully realized novel (The Catcher in the Rye) and five collections of shorter writings, all surrounded by a penumbra of unknowns about the author, who went into seclusion in 1953.
Yet Mr. Salinger's books have remained highly visible, iconic presences in American classrooms and have sold more than 65 million copies, including translations around the world. "The Catcher in the Rye" is often cited in lists of the best 20th- century novels.
The son of a cheese importer, Mr. Salinger grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side. He attended a military academy for high school and never graduated from college. Critics and enthusiasts had little problem drawing parallels between Mr. Salinger's youth and that of the "Catcher in the Rye's" narrator, Holden Caulfield.
Mr. Salinger's early stories appeared in magazines while he was serving in the Army in Europe during World War II, in magazines including The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire. His more mature work appeared in the New Yorker starting in the mid-1940s, including "A Perfect Day for Bananafish."
"The Catcher in the Rye" caused a sensation when it was published in 1951, unusual for its salty language and sentiment, attributed to Caulfield, who styled himself an enemy of "phonies." Taken as portraying a thirst for authenticity by some, the work is seen by many young people these days as merely whiney.
Mr. Salinger's celebrity was hardly dimmed by his decision to live out of the limelight. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1961 yet remained a sphinx. His last original published work, "Hapsworth 16, 1924," appeared in the New Yorker in 1965. Visitors who caught sight of him in New Hampshire where he lived described an unkempt recluse.
WSJ's Mark Lasswell talks to Simon Constable on the News Hub about famed author J.D. Salinger's death as well as the lasting legacy he left to the literary world.
More and more, his public face consisted of lawsuits brought against unauthorized publishers of his early works or unpublished letters. After Mr. Salinger filed suit, a federal judge last year barred a Swedish writer and publisher from publishing a sequel to "Catcher in the Rye."
In one of the few public statements he made after 1953, Mr. Salinger told the New York Times in 1974, "There is a marvelous peace in not publishing."
Mr. Salinger's death is almost certain to generate renewed interest in his work and increasing pressure to bring his work to the big screen, something the author for the most part resisted.
More
Mr. Salinger allowed his short story "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" to be optioned, resulting in the 1949 film "My Foolish Heart." But it was apparently so bad in the eyes of both Mr. Salinger and the critics that it soured him from ever again selling film rights.
"I toy very seriously with the idea of leaving the unsold rights to my wife and daughter as a kind of insurance policy," Mr. Salinger wrote in a 1957 letter attributed to him and made public by a Washingtonville, N.Y. memorabilia dealer in 2009. "It pleasures me to no end…to know that I won't have to see the results of the transaction."
--------
Here's the link to online book.
http://freebooksread.blogspot.com/2010/01/read-catcher-in-rye-online.html
Here's the link to TIME Magazine, Jul. 16, 1951 review
Books: With Love & 20-20 Vision - TIME
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Five Best travel accounts that offer first-class enjoyment
Ms. Landro writes the Journal's Finicky Traveler column (courtsey The Wall Street Journal)
1. A Moveable Feast By Ernest Hemingway Scribner, 1964
The young Ernest Hemingway hadn't yet published his first novel, "The Sun Also Rises," when he moved to Paris in 1921 as a correspondent for the Toronto Star. Soon he was mingling with the likes of Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and although he was barely earning enough to keep himself and his family fed and housed, "in Paris, then, you could live very well on almost nothing, and by skipping meals occasionally and never buying any new clothes, you could save and have luxuries." This heady memoir of the expatriate life doubtless lured many a young romantic to travel to the City of Light in pursuit of the moveable feast at its cafés, bookshops and salons. Hemingway and wife Hadley also journeyed by train through Switzerland to the Austrian frontier, where we glimpse an era before the modern ski resort: They climbed through the Alps aided by seal skins attached to their skis. Though the trip is the beginning of the end of their idyll, as he writes, "there is never any ending to Paris." A newer edition of "A Moveable Feast" published earlier this year has sparked controversy for changes made by Hemingway's grandson; for the full picture, read it side by side with the original, published after the author's suicide in 1964.
2. Innocents Abroad By Mark Twain 1869
In 1867, Mark Twain embarked on an ambitious cruise to Europe, the Middle East and the Holy Land. His aim was to see Europe and the East with his own eyes rather than those of the guidebook writers who had gone before. The letters from the road that Twain wrote for publication back home—they are compiled in "Innocents Abroad"— presented one of the first unvarnished looks at the realities of travel. With scathing wit he mocks his fellow passengers ("We have a poet and a good-natured enterprising idiot onboard, and they do distress the company") and the drudgery of guided tours. Churlish after too many churches, Twain never feels so blessed as when he learns that Michelangelo is dead. After an arduous but fascinating journey on horseback through Lebanon and Syria, he is felled by cholera but recovers to swim in the Sea of Galilee, where a night sky "has no boundaries but the broad compass of the heavens." The curmudgeonly traveler becomes downright reverent by the time he reaches the Holy Land, "the genuine center of the earth."
3. Married Adventure By Osa Johnson Lippincott, 1940
Still in her teens when she married pioneering photographer and documentary filmmaker Martin Johnson in 1910, Osa Leighty gave up the safety of Kansas and domestic comfort for an often-perilous existence filming life in the South Seas, Africa and Borneo. Her maiden voyage, on a tramp steamer across the Pacific, starts with cockroaches nibbling at her fingernails in the night, but that was nothing compared with fleeing hostile natives in the jungle, stumbling across a hut full of shrunken heads and seeing evidence of cannibalism roasting in the embers of a campfire. Acting as her husband's helpmate, crew member and occasional protector, she trains her rifle at the rhinos charging at him in Africa while he captures them on film, but she also becomes a lover of animals, cuddling baby cheetahs and weeping after shooting an antelope. The Johnsons' documentaries inspired many to explore distant lands, and Osa's "I Married Adventure" still makes for breathtaking reading.
4. Riding the Iron Rooster By Paul Theroux Putnam's, 1988
The author of "The Great Railway Bazaar" and "The Old Patagonian Express" spent a year traveling through China by train in 1986, ending up in Tibet and witnessing along the way China's "turbulent passage" as the reforms of Deng Xiaoping brought an end to the deprivations of the Cultural Revolution. Like Twain before him, Paul Theroux is something of a misanthrope; he spends much of his time scorning and evading fellow Western travelers and gives the slip to the government minders accompanying him into the more remote parts of Inner Mongolia. He finds the Chinese he meets along the way unfailingly friendly and unsuspicious as he tries to learn "how people felt about hookers and high fashion in a country where a few years ago foreign decadence was condemned and everyone wore baggy blue suits." And as he comes to understand, the Chinese "are never happier than when on a railway journey," even in the crowded compartments of cars with a designation that translates as "hard class," chattering away, smoking, slurping tea, playing cards, spitting sunflower seeds onto the floor and "watching the world go by."
5. Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need By Dave Barry Fawcett, 1991
OK, so Hemingway he's not, but Dave Barry's slim volume of irreverent riffs on modern travel is laugh-out-loud funny. Intended to help readers travel with "a minimum of unpleasantness and death," this guide by the Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist notes that "most domestic locations are conveniently located right here in the United States," and he spares none of them. Atlantic City is the one seaside resort, Barry says, that could actually be improved "by the arrival of an oil slick." When traveling abroad, he advises, dispense with the notion that the French are rude—"they just happen to hate you"—but be prepared to assert yourself with helpful French phrases like "Attemptez vouz a yanquer ma chaine, boudet?" Germany, he notes, is "actually a very nice nation that used to have an unfortunate tendency to fall in with the wrong crowd and every few decades try to take over the world." As for culinary adventure, Barry has praise for "the great variety of Mexican food, which is perfectly safe as long as you never let any of it get into your digestive system."
1. A Moveable Feast By Ernest Hemingway Scribner, 1964
The young Ernest Hemingway hadn't yet published his first novel, "The Sun Also Rises," when he moved to Paris in 1921 as a correspondent for the Toronto Star. Soon he was mingling with the likes of Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and although he was barely earning enough to keep himself and his family fed and housed, "in Paris, then, you could live very well on almost nothing, and by skipping meals occasionally and never buying any new clothes, you could save and have luxuries." This heady memoir of the expatriate life doubtless lured many a young romantic to travel to the City of Light in pursuit of the moveable feast at its cafés, bookshops and salons. Hemingway and wife Hadley also journeyed by train through Switzerland to the Austrian frontier, where we glimpse an era before the modern ski resort: They climbed through the Alps aided by seal skins attached to their skis. Though the trip is the beginning of the end of their idyll, as he writes, "there is never any ending to Paris." A newer edition of "A Moveable Feast" published earlier this year has sparked controversy for changes made by Hemingway's grandson; for the full picture, read it side by side with the original, published after the author's suicide in 1964.
2. Innocents Abroad By Mark Twain 1869
In 1867, Mark Twain embarked on an ambitious cruise to Europe, the Middle East and the Holy Land. His aim was to see Europe and the East with his own eyes rather than those of the guidebook writers who had gone before. The letters from the road that Twain wrote for publication back home—they are compiled in "Innocents Abroad"— presented one of the first unvarnished looks at the realities of travel. With scathing wit he mocks his fellow passengers ("We have a poet and a good-natured enterprising idiot onboard, and they do distress the company") and the drudgery of guided tours. Churlish after too many churches, Twain never feels so blessed as when he learns that Michelangelo is dead. After an arduous but fascinating journey on horseback through Lebanon and Syria, he is felled by cholera but recovers to swim in the Sea of Galilee, where a night sky "has no boundaries but the broad compass of the heavens." The curmudgeonly traveler becomes downright reverent by the time he reaches the Holy Land, "the genuine center of the earth."
3. Married Adventure By Osa Johnson Lippincott, 1940
Still in her teens when she married pioneering photographer and documentary filmmaker Martin Johnson in 1910, Osa Leighty gave up the safety of Kansas and domestic comfort for an often-perilous existence filming life in the South Seas, Africa and Borneo. Her maiden voyage, on a tramp steamer across the Pacific, starts with cockroaches nibbling at her fingernails in the night, but that was nothing compared with fleeing hostile natives in the jungle, stumbling across a hut full of shrunken heads and seeing evidence of cannibalism roasting in the embers of a campfire. Acting as her husband's helpmate, crew member and occasional protector, she trains her rifle at the rhinos charging at him in Africa while he captures them on film, but she also becomes a lover of animals, cuddling baby cheetahs and weeping after shooting an antelope. The Johnsons' documentaries inspired many to explore distant lands, and Osa's "I Married Adventure" still makes for breathtaking reading.
4. Riding the Iron Rooster By Paul Theroux Putnam's, 1988
The author of "The Great Railway Bazaar" and "The Old Patagonian Express" spent a year traveling through China by train in 1986, ending up in Tibet and witnessing along the way China's "turbulent passage" as the reforms of Deng Xiaoping brought an end to the deprivations of the Cultural Revolution. Like Twain before him, Paul Theroux is something of a misanthrope; he spends much of his time scorning and evading fellow Western travelers and gives the slip to the government minders accompanying him into the more remote parts of Inner Mongolia. He finds the Chinese he meets along the way unfailingly friendly and unsuspicious as he tries to learn "how people felt about hookers and high fashion in a country where a few years ago foreign decadence was condemned and everyone wore baggy blue suits." And as he comes to understand, the Chinese "are never happier than when on a railway journey," even in the crowded compartments of cars with a designation that translates as "hard class," chattering away, smoking, slurping tea, playing cards, spitting sunflower seeds onto the floor and "watching the world go by."
5. Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need By Dave Barry Fawcett, 1991
OK, so Hemingway he's not, but Dave Barry's slim volume of irreverent riffs on modern travel is laugh-out-loud funny. Intended to help readers travel with "a minimum of unpleasantness and death," this guide by the Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist notes that "most domestic locations are conveniently located right here in the United States," and he spares none of them. Atlantic City is the one seaside resort, Barry says, that could actually be improved "by the arrival of an oil slick." When traveling abroad, he advises, dispense with the notion that the French are rude—"they just happen to hate you"—but be prepared to assert yourself with helpful French phrases like "Attemptez vouz a yanquer ma chaine, boudet?" Germany, he notes, is "actually a very nice nation that used to have an unfortunate tendency to fall in with the wrong crowd and every few decades try to take over the world." As for culinary adventure, Barry has praise for "the great variety of Mexican food, which is perfectly safe as long as you never let any of it get into your digestive system."
Monday, January 25, 2010
Books on Finance During Trouble
These books on finance in a time of trouble pay big dividends, says Duff McDonald (courtsey The Wall Street Journal)
Mr. McDonald is the author of "Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase" (Simon & Schuster, 2009). He is a contributing editor at New York magazine.
1. The House of Morgan By Ron Chernow, Atlantic Monthly, 1990
Can a bank actually be heroic? Ron Chernow suggests as much in his exhaustive history of J.P. Morgan and its instrumental role in the development of the industrial Western economy from the late 19th century to the end of the 20th. But the clear-eyed Chernow does not ignore the less-than-heroic in this National Book Award-winning title, which is as much a social and political history as it is the story of the Morgan dynasty. Of the fallout from the Crash of 1873, Chernow writes: "Not for the last time, America turned against Wall Street with puritanical outrage and a sense of offended innocence." When World War I erupted: "Wall Street, which prided itself on its prescience, was once again caught napping by a historic event." Both tendencies remain in place today. What we do not have is a Wall Street king like John Pierpont Morgan, the man who built the banking dynasty and who had the power to intervene personally in the Panic of 1893 and save the U.S. Treasury by launching a syndicate to replenish the nation's gold supply.
2. The Go-Go Years By John Brooks, Weybright & Talley, 1973
Just as the stock market moves in cycles, even though each new generation seems to think each new high and low is happening for the first time, so, too, do market players often imagine that they're breaking new ground when most are not. Today's high-flyers are pretty much the same as those depicted by John Brooks in "The Go-Go Years," his account of how the stock market changed during the 1960s. At the very moment when stocks were truly going mainstream in America, Brooks produced one of the most enjoyable and insightful books ever written about the tribes and tactics of the stock market. Chronicling the escapades of almost-forgotten swashbucklers such as Gerald Tsai and Saul Steinberg, he produced incomparable observations about Wall Street's merry-go-round of triumph and tragedy. He describes 1968 as the year "Wall Street had become a mindless glutton methodically eating itself to paralysis and death," something that happened again in the period 2004-07. And what of our capacity to learn from our mistakes? "Reform is a frail flower that languishes in the hot glare of prosperity," he observes. Given that prosperity still looks a while off at this point in 2010, maybe reform will actually bloom.
3. The Bubble Economy By Christopher Wood, Atlantic Monthly, 1992
"What everybody knows is seldom worth knowing," begins "The Bubble Economy," an incisive, readable assessment of the Japanese real-estate boom and bust of the 1980s. Christopher Wood, the former Tokyo bureau chief for the Economist, writes with such flair that it's a shame he gave up journalism, becoming a financial analyst and the publisher of the newsletter Greed & Fear. His book has aged well; swap out names and institutions and it might have been written last year. "Isaac Newton actually arrived in Japan in 1990," Wood writes. "His presence did not prove a pretty sight in a country where too many people had concluded that the laws of gravity, when applied to their own financial markets, had somehow been suspended." Like a faded rock star, the 367-year-old Newton is back for another world tour.
4. When Genius Failed By Roger Lowenstein, Random House, 2000
A raft of books have been written—and are still being written—trying to explain the complex financial products, such as collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps, behind the near collapse of Wall Street about 16 months ago. The last time something this complicated took the system to the brink, it was the crash in 1998 of the gigantic hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, when its "relative value" trades went bad. Luckily Roger Lowenstein was on the case—there is no better writer for explaining the intricacies of finance in eminently understandable terms. His description of how Wall Street reached its precarious state in 1998, necessitating a rush to bail out LTCM, capturesthe birth of the "too big to fail" doctrine: "Almost imperceptibly, the Street had bought into a massive faith game, in which each bank had become knitted to its neighbor through a web of contractual obligations requiring little or no down payment." A decade later, we'd done it again. If more people had read "When Genius Failed," today's miseries might have been avoided.
5. Point of No Return By John P. Marquand, Little, Brown, 1949
While Wall Street hardly has trouble generating stories that seem straight out of a novel, there are a handful of sublime works of fiction that capture the spirit of its strivers in ways that nonfiction cannot. These novels, like Tom Wolfe's excellent "Bonfire of the Vanities," show us what the traders were thinking as well as what they were doing. Nearly four decades before "Bonfire," John P. Marquand wrote "Point of No Return," a lost masterpiece that shines a bright light on the mind-set of that species of Banker Americanus that helped to build the modern financial-services edifice and that colonized suburbia. Marquand's protagonist, Charles Gray, managed not just to survive but to thrive in the 1929 stock market crash, the Depression and its aftermath, and he has collected an enviable set of trophies: the new house in Westchester County, the wife, the two kids and the country-club membership. But "Point of No Return" is hardly a cheerful success story. Instead, it's a gripping portrayal of a man obsessed with roads not taken and of the insecurities that lie just beneath a veneer of seeming achievement. "The more you get, the more afraid you get," says Gray. "Maybe fear is what makes the world go round."
Mr. McDonald is the author of "Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase" (Simon & Schuster, 2009). He is a contributing editor at New York magazine.
1. The House of Morgan By Ron Chernow, Atlantic Monthly, 1990
Can a bank actually be heroic? Ron Chernow suggests as much in his exhaustive history of J.P. Morgan and its instrumental role in the development of the industrial Western economy from the late 19th century to the end of the 20th. But the clear-eyed Chernow does not ignore the less-than-heroic in this National Book Award-winning title, which is as much a social and political history as it is the story of the Morgan dynasty. Of the fallout from the Crash of 1873, Chernow writes: "Not for the last time, America turned against Wall Street with puritanical outrage and a sense of offended innocence." When World War I erupted: "Wall Street, which prided itself on its prescience, was once again caught napping by a historic event." Both tendencies remain in place today. What we do not have is a Wall Street king like John Pierpont Morgan, the man who built the banking dynasty and who had the power to intervene personally in the Panic of 1893 and save the U.S. Treasury by launching a syndicate to replenish the nation's gold supply.
2. The Go-Go Years By John Brooks, Weybright & Talley, 1973
Just as the stock market moves in cycles, even though each new generation seems to think each new high and low is happening for the first time, so, too, do market players often imagine that they're breaking new ground when most are not. Today's high-flyers are pretty much the same as those depicted by John Brooks in "The Go-Go Years," his account of how the stock market changed during the 1960s. At the very moment when stocks were truly going mainstream in America, Brooks produced one of the most enjoyable and insightful books ever written about the tribes and tactics of the stock market. Chronicling the escapades of almost-forgotten swashbucklers such as Gerald Tsai and Saul Steinberg, he produced incomparable observations about Wall Street's merry-go-round of triumph and tragedy. He describes 1968 as the year "Wall Street had become a mindless glutton methodically eating itself to paralysis and death," something that happened again in the period 2004-07. And what of our capacity to learn from our mistakes? "Reform is a frail flower that languishes in the hot glare of prosperity," he observes. Given that prosperity still looks a while off at this point in 2010, maybe reform will actually bloom.
3. The Bubble Economy By Christopher Wood, Atlantic Monthly, 1992
"What everybody knows is seldom worth knowing," begins "The Bubble Economy," an incisive, readable assessment of the Japanese real-estate boom and bust of the 1980s. Christopher Wood, the former Tokyo bureau chief for the Economist, writes with such flair that it's a shame he gave up journalism, becoming a financial analyst and the publisher of the newsletter Greed & Fear. His book has aged well; swap out names and institutions and it might have been written last year. "Isaac Newton actually arrived in Japan in 1990," Wood writes. "His presence did not prove a pretty sight in a country where too many people had concluded that the laws of gravity, when applied to their own financial markets, had somehow been suspended." Like a faded rock star, the 367-year-old Newton is back for another world tour.
4. When Genius Failed By Roger Lowenstein, Random House, 2000
A raft of books have been written—and are still being written—trying to explain the complex financial products, such as collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps, behind the near collapse of Wall Street about 16 months ago. The last time something this complicated took the system to the brink, it was the crash in 1998 of the gigantic hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, when its "relative value" trades went bad. Luckily Roger Lowenstein was on the case—there is no better writer for explaining the intricacies of finance in eminently understandable terms. His description of how Wall Street reached its precarious state in 1998, necessitating a rush to bail out LTCM, capturesthe birth of the "too big to fail" doctrine: "Almost imperceptibly, the Street had bought into a massive faith game, in which each bank had become knitted to its neighbor through a web of contractual obligations requiring little or no down payment." A decade later, we'd done it again. If more people had read "When Genius Failed," today's miseries might have been avoided.
5. Point of No Return By John P. Marquand, Little, Brown, 1949
While Wall Street hardly has trouble generating stories that seem straight out of a novel, there are a handful of sublime works of fiction that capture the spirit of its strivers in ways that nonfiction cannot. These novels, like Tom Wolfe's excellent "Bonfire of the Vanities," show us what the traders were thinking as well as what they were doing. Nearly four decades before "Bonfire," John P. Marquand wrote "Point of No Return," a lost masterpiece that shines a bright light on the mind-set of that species of Banker Americanus that helped to build the modern financial-services edifice and that colonized suburbia. Marquand's protagonist, Charles Gray, managed not just to survive but to thrive in the 1929 stock market crash, the Depression and its aftermath, and he has collected an enviable set of trophies: the new house in Westchester County, the wife, the two kids and the country-club membership. But "Point of No Return" is hardly a cheerful success story. Instead, it's a gripping portrayal of a man obsessed with roads not taken and of the insecurities that lie just beneath a veneer of seeming achievement. "The more you get, the more afraid you get," says Gray. "Maybe fear is what makes the world go round."
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Five Best works of fiction about families..
Pete Dexter chooses his favorite works of fiction about families (courtsey The Wall Street Journal)
1. The Complete Stories By Flannery O'Connor Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971
Flannery O'Connor died of lupus at age 39, leaving behind two novels, the material for two books of nonfiction and 32 short stories—perhaps half the stories close to perfect. A prime example is "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," about a family heading from Atlanta to Florida on vacation. The husband and wife ("a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage"), their three children, a grandmother and her cat are not far into the trip before an accident (startled cat, clawed driver) sends the car into a ditch. Another car comes along, but the would-be rescuers turn out to be three escaped convicts. Then comes one of fiction's great revelatory scenes, when the grandmother, even as the other members of the family are being led off into the woods and executed, bargains for her life with the convict called The Misfit. The grandmother, too, will soon be dispatched—but not before her pleading turns into a religious discussion. "She would of been a good woman," The Misfit says, once she is dead, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.'' As this mesmerizing short-story collection shows, O'Connor's tales—many of them about families and distant relations— seem to have come to her built-in with such scenes and lines and characters.
2. Edisto By Padgett Powell Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984
Here's why—I imagine—J.D. Salinger has never come out of hiding. From the moment "Catcher In the Rye" was published in 1951, every novel written about a precocious kid found some critic erroneously calling it the best book about precocious youth since "Catcher in the Rye." Then one day in 1984 Salinger—again, I'm imagining—had the bad luck to pick up "Edisto," by a young man called Padgett Powell, who had never written a novel before, and the next day the old recluse woke up feeling like Floyd Patterson the morning after his first fight with Sonny Liston. What Salinger would have seen when he opened "Edisto" was what Patterson saw when he looked across the ring into Liston's baleful eyes: the real thing. It's not just anybody, after all, who can write a believable novel about youthful brilliance. "Edisto" is the story of a 12-year-old named Simons Everson Manigault, whose sophisticated-beyond-his-years tone can't disguise how unfathomable he finds the adult world. The mysteries begin with his mother—or "the Doctor," as he thinks of this haughty college teacher—and his father, or "the Progenitor," who is no longer with the family. A mysterious stranger soon becomes the boy's surrogate father, teaching him about life using "one ounce of suggestion and pounds of patience." Padgett Powell is a writer of strange and original gifts. I just can't get over how little attention he receives from the thumb-suckers who sit around bemoaning the state of the arts in America.
3. Straight Man By Richard Russo Random House, 1997
The story of William Henry Devereaux, Richard Russo's middle-age university professor, begins with a remembrance of how, as a boy, he had begged his parents for a dog for years and then he finally got one. Devereaux's father, a well-known literary critic not interested in dogs or kids or, in the end, his wife, shows up one afternoon with an ancient Irish setter, who limps into the kitchen five minutes after arriving and dies. As his father buries the dog, Devereaux suggests naming it Red. His father looks at him in disbelief—name a dead dog? "It's not an easy time for any parent," muses Devereaux, "this moment when the realization dawns that you've given birth to something that will never see things the way you do, despite the fact that it is your living legacy, that it bears your name." Russo's access to the pulse of family attachments can make it all too easy to overlook the power of his great comic novels, like the hugely entertaining "Straight Man."
4. A River Runs Through It, and Other Stories By Norman Maclean University of Chicago, 1976
The writing just drops on you out of a tree. Norman Maclean (1902-90), a revered Shakespeare professor at the University of Chicago, published only two books, one an account of the 1949 smoke-jumping tragedy in Montana's Mann Gulch and the other this one, a 104-page novella about two brothers, their father and the mysteries of family love. For the entire length of "A River Runs Through It, and Other Stories," Maclean sustains a voice so precise and beautiful that it becomes part of the story itself—as fundamental and natural to what is here as the characters and the trout-fishing rivers where matters of love and attachment settle out into time. Here's the narrator, one of the brothers, on the devastating moment when a big fish gets away: "The fish has gone and you are extinct, except for four and half ounces of stick to which is tied some line and a semitransparent thread of catgut to which is tied a little curved piece of Swedish steel to which is tied a part of a feather from a chicken's neck." In the end, it's the voice that stays with you, long after the particulars of the story have mingled with other stories and faded away—a reminder of the consequential things that measured, dead-accurate sentences can be.
5. Rhine Maidens By Carolyn See Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1981
This explosive, driven little novel—which makes you feel, almost as soon as you begin, that it's slipping through your fingers too fast—could well be the most explicit, reasonable description of the craziness of women ever written. I'm not referring to the specific craziness of specific women— which is here, too, and beautifully done—but to a general condition: that wild, random windsock blowing somewhere out there. Carolyn See's novel is built around two women. The mother is in late middle age and bitter, so thoroughly disabused of all happiness and hope that even the idea of them makes her physically sick. The daughter, 20 years younger, has two unremarkable and unlikable children and a similarly unremarkable and unlikable television screenwriter for a husband. The daughter can see for herself who she married but is nevertheless scared to death of losing him. Many writers experience a period of bereavement after they finish a novel—not as bad as your dog dying but bad enough. Finishing "Rhine Maidens" did that to me, just as a reader.—Mr. Dexter, whose novel "Paris Trout" (1988) won the National Book Award, is the author, most recently, of "Spooner."
1. The Complete Stories By Flannery O'Connor Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971
Flannery O'Connor died of lupus at age 39, leaving behind two novels, the material for two books of nonfiction and 32 short stories—perhaps half the stories close to perfect. A prime example is "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," about a family heading from Atlanta to Florida on vacation. The husband and wife ("a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage"), their three children, a grandmother and her cat are not far into the trip before an accident (startled cat, clawed driver) sends the car into a ditch. Another car comes along, but the would-be rescuers turn out to be three escaped convicts. Then comes one of fiction's great revelatory scenes, when the grandmother, even as the other members of the family are being led off into the woods and executed, bargains for her life with the convict called The Misfit. The grandmother, too, will soon be dispatched—but not before her pleading turns into a religious discussion. "She would of been a good woman," The Misfit says, once she is dead, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.'' As this mesmerizing short-story collection shows, O'Connor's tales—many of them about families and distant relations— seem to have come to her built-in with such scenes and lines and characters.
2. Edisto By Padgett Powell Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984
Here's why—I imagine—J.D. Salinger has never come out of hiding. From the moment "Catcher In the Rye" was published in 1951, every novel written about a precocious kid found some critic erroneously calling it the best book about precocious youth since "Catcher in the Rye." Then one day in 1984 Salinger—again, I'm imagining—had the bad luck to pick up "Edisto," by a young man called Padgett Powell, who had never written a novel before, and the next day the old recluse woke up feeling like Floyd Patterson the morning after his first fight with Sonny Liston. What Salinger would have seen when he opened "Edisto" was what Patterson saw when he looked across the ring into Liston's baleful eyes: the real thing. It's not just anybody, after all, who can write a believable novel about youthful brilliance. "Edisto" is the story of a 12-year-old named Simons Everson Manigault, whose sophisticated-beyond-his-years tone can't disguise how unfathomable he finds the adult world. The mysteries begin with his mother—or "the Doctor," as he thinks of this haughty college teacher—and his father, or "the Progenitor," who is no longer with the family. A mysterious stranger soon becomes the boy's surrogate father, teaching him about life using "one ounce of suggestion and pounds of patience." Padgett Powell is a writer of strange and original gifts. I just can't get over how little attention he receives from the thumb-suckers who sit around bemoaning the state of the arts in America.
3. Straight Man By Richard Russo Random House, 1997
The story of William Henry Devereaux, Richard Russo's middle-age university professor, begins with a remembrance of how, as a boy, he had begged his parents for a dog for years and then he finally got one. Devereaux's father, a well-known literary critic not interested in dogs or kids or, in the end, his wife, shows up one afternoon with an ancient Irish setter, who limps into the kitchen five minutes after arriving and dies. As his father buries the dog, Devereaux suggests naming it Red. His father looks at him in disbelief—name a dead dog? "It's not an easy time for any parent," muses Devereaux, "this moment when the realization dawns that you've given birth to something that will never see things the way you do, despite the fact that it is your living legacy, that it bears your name." Russo's access to the pulse of family attachments can make it all too easy to overlook the power of his great comic novels, like the hugely entertaining "Straight Man."
4. A River Runs Through It, and Other Stories By Norman Maclean University of Chicago, 1976
The writing just drops on you out of a tree. Norman Maclean (1902-90), a revered Shakespeare professor at the University of Chicago, published only two books, one an account of the 1949 smoke-jumping tragedy in Montana's Mann Gulch and the other this one, a 104-page novella about two brothers, their father and the mysteries of family love. For the entire length of "A River Runs Through It, and Other Stories," Maclean sustains a voice so precise and beautiful that it becomes part of the story itself—as fundamental and natural to what is here as the characters and the trout-fishing rivers where matters of love and attachment settle out into time. Here's the narrator, one of the brothers, on the devastating moment when a big fish gets away: "The fish has gone and you are extinct, except for four and half ounces of stick to which is tied some line and a semitransparent thread of catgut to which is tied a little curved piece of Swedish steel to which is tied a part of a feather from a chicken's neck." In the end, it's the voice that stays with you, long after the particulars of the story have mingled with other stories and faded away—a reminder of the consequential things that measured, dead-accurate sentences can be.
5. Rhine Maidens By Carolyn See Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1981
This explosive, driven little novel—which makes you feel, almost as soon as you begin, that it's slipping through your fingers too fast—could well be the most explicit, reasonable description of the craziness of women ever written. I'm not referring to the specific craziness of specific women— which is here, too, and beautifully done—but to a general condition: that wild, random windsock blowing somewhere out there. Carolyn See's novel is built around two women. The mother is in late middle age and bitter, so thoroughly disabused of all happiness and hope that even the idea of them makes her physically sick. The daughter, 20 years younger, has two unremarkable and unlikable children and a similarly unremarkable and unlikable television screenwriter for a husband. The daughter can see for herself who she married but is nevertheless scared to death of losing him. Many writers experience a period of bereavement after they finish a novel—not as bad as your dog dying but bad enough. Finishing "Rhine Maidens" did that to me, just as a reader.—Mr. Dexter, whose novel "Paris Trout" (1988) won the National Book Award, is the author, most recently, of "Spooner."
દિલ પૂછે છે મારૂં....
દિલ પૂછે છે મારૂં....
દિલ પૂછે દિલ પૂછે છે મારૂં.... દિલ પૂછે છે મારૂં,
અરે દોસ્ત તું ક્યાં જાય છે? જરાક તો નજર નાંખ, સામે કબર દેખાય છે.
ના વ્યવહાર સચવાય છે, ના તહેવાર સચવાય છે,
દિવાળી હોય કે હોળી, બધું ઓફીસમાં જ ઉજવાય છે.
આ બધું તો ઠીક હતું, પણ હદ તો ત્યાં થાય છે,
લગ્નની મળે કંકોત્રી ત્યાં શ્રીમંતમાં માંડ જવાય છે.
દિલ પૂછે છે મારૂં, અરે દોસ્ત તું ક્યાં જાય છે?..... પાંચ આંકડાનો પગાર છે,
પણ પોતાના માટે પાંચ મીનીટ પણ ક્યાં વપરાય છે?
પત્નીનો ફોન બે મિનીટમાં કાપીએ પણ ક્લાયન્ટનો કોલ ક્યાં કપાય છે?
ફોનબુક ભરી છે મિત્રોથી પણ કોઇનાય ઘેર ક્યાં જવાય છે?
હવે તો ઘરના પ્રસંગો પણ હાફ-ડે માં ઉજવાય છે. દિલ પૂછે છે મારૂં,
અરે દોસ્ત તું ક્યાં જાય છે?....
કોઇને ખબર નથી આ રસ્તો ક્યાં જાય છે? થાકેલા છે બધા છતાં,
લોકો ચાલતા જ જાય છે.
કોઇક ને સામે રૂપિયા તો કોઇક ને ડોલર દેખાય છે.
તમે જ કહો મિત્રો શું આને જ જીંદગી કહેવાય છે? '
દિલ પૂછે છે મારૂં, અરે દોસ્ત તું ક્યાં જાય છે?....
બદલાતા આ પ્રવાહમાં આપણા સંસ્કાર ધોવાય છે.
આવનારી પેઢી પુછશે, સંસ્કૃતિ કોને કહેવાય છે?
એક વાર તો દિલને સાંભળો, બાકી મન તો કાયમ મુંઝાય છે.
ચાલો જલદી નિર્ણય લઇએ, હજુ ય સમય બાકી દેખાય છે.
દિલ પૂછે છે મારૂં, અરે દોસ્ત તું ક્યાં જાય છે? જરાક તો નજર નાંખ,
સામે કબર દેખાય છે.
દિલ પૂછે દિલ પૂછે છે મારૂં.... દિલ પૂછે છે મારૂં,
અરે દોસ્ત તું ક્યાં જાય છે? જરાક તો નજર નાંખ, સામે કબર દેખાય છે.
ના વ્યવહાર સચવાય છે, ના તહેવાર સચવાય છે,
દિવાળી હોય કે હોળી, બધું ઓફીસમાં જ ઉજવાય છે.
આ બધું તો ઠીક હતું, પણ હદ તો ત્યાં થાય છે,
લગ્નની મળે કંકોત્રી ત્યાં શ્રીમંતમાં માંડ જવાય છે.
દિલ પૂછે છે મારૂં, અરે દોસ્ત તું ક્યાં જાય છે?..... પાંચ આંકડાનો પગાર છે,
પણ પોતાના માટે પાંચ મીનીટ પણ ક્યાં વપરાય છે?
પત્નીનો ફોન બે મિનીટમાં કાપીએ પણ ક્લાયન્ટનો કોલ ક્યાં કપાય છે?
ફોનબુક ભરી છે મિત્રોથી પણ કોઇનાય ઘેર ક્યાં જવાય છે?
હવે તો ઘરના પ્રસંગો પણ હાફ-ડે માં ઉજવાય છે. દિલ પૂછે છે મારૂં,
અરે દોસ્ત તું ક્યાં જાય છે?....
કોઇને ખબર નથી આ રસ્તો ક્યાં જાય છે? થાકેલા છે બધા છતાં,
લોકો ચાલતા જ જાય છે.
કોઇક ને સામે રૂપિયા તો કોઇક ને ડોલર દેખાય છે.
તમે જ કહો મિત્રો શું આને જ જીંદગી કહેવાય છે? '
દિલ પૂછે છે મારૂં, અરે દોસ્ત તું ક્યાં જાય છે?....
બદલાતા આ પ્રવાહમાં આપણા સંસ્કાર ધોવાય છે.
આવનારી પેઢી પુછશે, સંસ્કૃતિ કોને કહેવાય છે?
એક વાર તો દિલને સાંભળો, બાકી મન તો કાયમ મુંઝાય છે.
ચાલો જલદી નિર્ણય લઇએ, હજુ ય સમય બાકી દેખાય છે.
દિલ પૂછે છે મારૂં, અરે દોસ્ત તું ક્યાં જાય છે? જરાક તો નજર નાંખ,
સામે કબર દેખાય છે.
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