Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World

This thin little book (only 212 pages) packs a depressing punch. Michael Lewis sets out to explore the causes and ramifications of the financial collapse in 2008 and reaches any number of disturbing conclusions. The new third world Lewis visits? Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany, and the United States, with an emphasis on California.

Germany, Lewis notes, isn't quite so broke as the rest, but their bankers were gobbling up risky (read: stupid) loans with as much voracity as anyone in the world and, given the state of so many other euro-based economies, Germany is hardly unaffected. As a side note, he does a nice job explaining that the EU was created largely to prevent Germany ever again attempting to dominate the rest of Europe, but as just about the only large, solvent economy in the Eurozone, Germans now have the ability to impose their will on others - the Greeks, for example - and require them to become more German (hello, harsh austerity measures) if they hope to retain any semblance of an economy. The problem, of course, is that it's not clear that they do. As Lewis has on good record, every single member of the Greek parliament is lying to evade taxes.

The entire premise of the book is, essentially, that the world is broke, our political and financial systems are broken, and good luck and Godspeed to anyone hoping to fix it. Lew maintains this message steadfastly right up to his concluding sentence, which is oddly, "as idiotic as optimism can sometimes seem, it has a weird habit of paying off." Such optimism seems misplaced to me, but maybe that's just my pessimism shining through.

Four stars.

The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914

Several years ago, I was lucky enough to visit the Panama Canal (pictures below), and was struck then by the remarkable feat that it was. And I didn't even know the half of it. The Path Between the Seas has filled every gap in my knowledge and more. At some 600 pages, it is a veritable tome, and David McCullough has clearly done an almost-unfathomable amount of research - on the Suez Canal, the history of Panama, early engineering and railroading technologies and techniques and American imperialism (add Panama to the list of places Teddy Roosevelt took by storm), to name a few of the areas he visits in great, but highly readable detail. (I enjoyed this book more, and found it more readable than The Greater Journey, which I read last year.)

McCullough does a fine job tracing the canal from its beginnings as a French canal in the 1870s through its completion by the United States in 1914. In the process, some 25,000 men lost their lives and some $639 million - in 1914 dollars - were expended. Yet even the statistics - the cost, the amount of earth moved, the number of men employed (and killed), the gallons of water that pour through the locks - fail to convey the magnitude of the project that Ferdinand de Lesseps and John Stevens and George Goethals undertook and that Goethals saw through to completion.

Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern

Flapper is the story of the Roaring Twenties, from Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald to the Charleston and the speakeasy, it is that most of famous of decades in all its decadent glory. Joshua Zeitz brings alive the people and the times in a way that also allows the reader to fit the pieces together, understand the magnitude of the social change, and appreciate the nuances of the era. Zeitz examines the suffrage movement, changing fashions, the entrance of women into the world of work, and the growing presence of women in higher education. He tells of those things virtually all of his readers know - Prohibition and Clara Bow, among them - but also of the people and incidents that have been lost to time - Lois Long (aka Lipstick), the groundbreaking columnist for The New Yorker, for example, and Louise Brooks, the daring, dishy, and highly intellectual flapper actress.

Zeitz manages to tell the entire story of Coco Chanel in a single chapter, while allowing the changes she ushered in to permeate the entire book. Ditto for Scott Fitzgerald. The 1920s, Zeitz notes, could be said to have started and ended with Scott Fitzgerald; like the promise of the man, the reader soon realizes that the promise of the decade will also be lost in the midst of this dizzying new life. The fall is ignoble, but Zeitz handles it deftly and his reader, like those who lived through the decade, can't help but be disappointed that the ride must end.

After Appomattox: How the South Won the War

I don't remember when or where I first heard of After Appomattox, by Stetson Kennedy, but I most definitely thought that it examined the North-South cultural divide and, pardon me, but what feels to be the growing presence and influence of southern, and especially southern redneck, culture/values. In other words, Honey Boo Boo, anyone?

I was wrong. After Appomattox is the story of the Reconstruction years, 1865-1876, and how ultimately the North lost the enthusiasm for and interest in the promises made to southern blacks during and immediately after the Civil War. Or, as Kennedy puts it so succinctly, "The nation had evidently made up its mind that, so long as the South remained inside the Union and did not go back into the business of buying and selling blacks, it could do what it damned well pleased with them" (p. 237). Certainly there would be no 40 acres and a mule.

Indeed, After Appomattox is the sobering (and sordid) story of complicity and outright racism at the highest levels of government and the inheritance such individuals bequeathed this country for generations to come. Andrew Johnson, in one of his finer moments (of which there were to be enough for Congress to impeach him), sent a messenger south to inform the generals stationed there that the president was "for a white man's government, and in favor of free white citizens controlling the country" (p. 45). Although General Grant - and later President Grant - fought such men doggedly, the tide of racism throughout the country and into the highest reaches of government was simply too strong. In 1876, in a deal that secured Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency by a single electoral vote, the highest and mightiest in the land reached a deal by where the federal government would, essentially, no longer intercede in state matters. The result, Kennedy notes, was as though it was Grant who had surrendered to Lee at Appomattox and not the other way around. To say nothing of the fact that the deal of '76 also set the stage for nearly a century of the repression of and brutality against blacks.

The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible

The first thing to say is that A.J. Jacobs' wife deserves a medal. Seriously. If my husband told me he was going to stop shaving for a year (we're not talking about a tidy little Abe Lincoln beard here; we're talking terrorist facial hair), wear only white garments (sometimes in the form of a shepherd's robe), carry around his own seat (one of those old and infirm cane-with-built-in-seat contraptions) so as not to sit anywhere "impure," carry unleavened bread upon his back (even if only for a day), and eat no fruit grown on tree less than five years old, there is a distinct possibility that I would file for divorce. I would certainly insist he have his mental health examined. And that's before you consider the constant nattering about the Bible, amending "God willing" to virtually every future-tense statement, or replacing certain choice words with "sugar" or "fudge." That his wife merely takes to whistling the theme song from The Andy Griffith Show is a testament to at least one virtue, patience. I'm sure it helps that this quest was undertaken for the purposes of writing a book, which undoubtedly pays a good many bills.

That said: The Year of Living Biblically was referred to several times in Good Book, I like The Know-It-All (A.J. Jacobs' previous book about reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from a-z) well enough, and Clio recently listened to it on tape and heartily recommended it. All good enough reasons for me to pluck it from the library shelves. Parts of it were definitely laugh-out-loud funny. Even greater parts were head scratchingly bizarre. But, I'm sure because I read them so close together, I couldn't help but compare these two Bible books, both written by secular East Coast Jews, and sprinkled liberally with humor and irony, as well as Biblical scholarship. In a head-to-head contest, Good Book comes out ahead, although I can recommend them both, but maybe not in immediate succession.

Both Jacobs and Plotz note that their religious studies/immersion/projects changed them intrinsically in ways they couldn't necessarily articulate, but which definitely were spiritual in nature. This phenomenon, if you will, makes me curious about earlier decades, when society was, on a whole, more religious. Essentially, my question is this: Were people simply more religious because they spent more time with the Bible? And did they spend more time with the Bible simply for lack of Nintendo Wii and the Internet, or was there something inherently different about them? My guess is the former, but I think I'll pass on undertaking the research myself. I wouldn't want to turn into a Bible thumper.

The Age of Empire: 1875-1914

I heard about this book from my friend Clio, who gave it a pretty positive review last October, despite not finishing the book. It's a time period that I find interesting - a world in transition from an older, nearly unrecognizable world, to a modern one with airplanes, telephones, women who work and vote and all of the other accoutrements of modern life - as well as a period about which I've read quite a bit already. All of which is to say that I was really looking forward to reading this book, and that I'm terribly disappointed in it. And I've chalked up my first "did not finish" of 2013.

So what's the problem? There were a few actually. For starters, The Age of Empire is incredibly, incredibly dry. It reads like a textbook, and not an engaging one. It's incredibly dense, so that I often found myself rereading a given paragraph or page 2-3 times to get my head around the information being presented. (I gave up after 200 pages, though I'd probably read more than the 340 in the entire book!) The Age of Empire also has tables of numbers, sometimes within the text, and regularly refers readers around the book (i.e., see pages 114-115, earlier) and to other books written by Eric Hobsbawm (i.e., see The Age of Capital, chapter 14, 11). I found these things distracting.

I also did not care for the organization of the book. Neither chronological, nor organized by empire (British, Ottoman, Habsburg, etc.), The Age of Empire is organized by theme and, therefore, seems to jump around quite a bit. The development of socialism as a political philosophy, for example, or the increasing liberation of women and growing suffrage movement are covered, then referenced, then re-referenced, to an extent that I felt I was reading in circles.

Lastly, I was disappointed with the extent to which The Age of Empire truly seemed to examine and confront imperialism. Honestly, that was probably my greatest disappointment, because I expected to read a book about empires, within the context of the wider socio-political-economic issues. Instead, this was a book about the social/political/economic issues at a time that just happened to coincide with the apex of imperialism/colonialism. Two books, one British (The Perfect Summer, England 1911: Just Before the Storm) and one American (The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War) handle the subject matter and time period much more deftly - and are eminently more readable.

The Sushi Economy

Tuna is big business in Japan. How big? In the first auction of 2013, one sold for $1.7 million. Yes, for a single fish.

A friend recommended The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy by Sasha Issenberg before I went to Japan last August. I ordered it...and promptly allowed it to begin collecting dust in my office. This past week I decided that I really, really needed to read it, and I have to admit I'm glad that I did. It's an incredibly readable look at the world's changing food cultures, supply chain, and interconnectedness. Issenberg is hot on the tail of sushi from the massive Tsukiji market in Tokyo to sushi restaurants from LA to the Bahamas, to the source of the tuna itself, in the waters off Prince Edward Island, Gibraltar, and Australia. Along the way, he meets and interviews everyone from fishermen to environmentalists to sushi chefs, giving a human face to every step of the process.

In many ways, The Sushi Economy reminded me of The Beekeeper's Lament, in that it takes its reader on a circuitous route to understand the ins and outs of a single product, as well as the perils of feeding a world that increasingly wants more of the "best things." In China alone, Issenberg predicts 50 million new sushi fiends by 2020, assuming only one-tenth of China's middle-class population develops a taste for the food.

(As a side note, I never include pictures in my blog, but I'm adding a couple that I took at Tsukiji last August, so you can get a sense of the place that sells a million dollar fish.)