Hanky-panky

It is hard to keep up with the financial news and political news of late. And even harder, I’ve found, to keep an even temper. I know it sometimes seems that “political” books are the only ones that anyone has been publishing over the last year or so. Still, let me mention a few of ours that are especially timely, and that, I think, stand out amidst the fog and noise. And forgive, please, if I get a little agitated – there is so much going on to exercise one these days.


To wit: the Bailout. (“Bailie Mae,” some have called it; others “Cash for Trash,” and others “Hanky Panky.”) This especially has really gotten into my wiring. I’ve become unhealthily obsessed. And far from impressed, let alone convinced. Sad to say, Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank doesn’t help at all by saying, as he did on the NewsHour Tuesday night, that the Federal Government should have the ability to renegotiate the terms of the mortgages it buys with Secretary Paulson’s $700 billion. It’s a nice idea, but slips past the fact that the government wouldn’t actually be buying mortgages, but would be buying mortgage-backed securities. That’s a huge difference. (Also on the NewsHour, Paul Krugman pointed out that the government has already bailed out the conventional mortgage market, by nationalizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Of course, as of this writing it’s looking uncertain that there will even be a bailout.) Presumably Treasury Secretary Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke explained the distinction, since the agreement – or at least the phantom agreement that was said to exist a couple hours ago – no longer included such a provision. But if you or anyone you know is looking to make sense of the problem this $700 billion is expected to solve, the best place to turn is still The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash, by Charles R. Morris (PublicAffairs, 9781586485634). It’s true that the crisis has exceeded even Mr. Morris’s dire expectations (the paperback, coming in February, will be retitled The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown), but his book still gets more directly at the heart of the problem, explaining how poor regulatory oversight, anything-goes mortgage lending, and widescale financial chicanery over the past 25 years created the credit crisis that has hollowed out the economy as a whole. Several reviews pegged this as the book to read. The Economist, for example, called it “a well-aimed opening shot in a debate that will only grow louder in coming months” – as it surely has done. In fact, Mr. Morris is currently writing a new essay, which will appear in the paperback and which you’re invited to post on your websites or in other promotional material. We expect to have a .PDF available a week from Monday; let me know if you’re interested. In the meantime, you can still get Mr. Morris’s podcast about the book and the crisis at www.perseuspodcasts.com; and you can find his assessment of the Paulson plan – “it will make an unholy mess even worse” – at http://washingtonindependent.com/6707/hopes-for-clean-bailout-bill-gone.


Mr. Morris was ahead of the curve on this one. George Soros was way ahead of the curve 10 years ago, when he wrote The Crisis of Global Capitalism. His most recent book, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What it Means (PublicAffairs, 9781586486839), sharpens his analysis, and suggests what is needed going forward is not just a new set of regulations, but a new way of thinking. You might call it a new honesty. “The new paradigm I am proposing is not confined to the financial markets. It deals with the relationship between thinking and reality,” Mr. Soros writes in his introduction, “and it claims that misconceptions and misinterpretations play a major role in shaping the course of history.” Demand has spiked in this political season, and we’ve just reprinted.


(I beg your indulgence for an aside: typing that bit about “thinking and reality” and how their relationship affects the course of history reminded me of what I’m thinking now might be the most important book of political philosophy written in the current era: On Bullshit, by Harry G. Frankfurt (Princeton University Press). I’d love it if the cable news shows started inviting Mr. Frankfurt back to discuss the tendency among politicians of both parties, particularly presidential candidates, to make public pronouncements that are not just untrue, but that disregard entirely the very notion of truth. Oh, I might as well mention, too, that Jonathan Chait has just written an essay about this distressing tendency for The New Republic online….)


Of all the reporting of the bailout plan and the Congressional hearings, I think the best has been in the LA Times. It’s been clear and far more thorough than anything I’ve found elsewhere. For example, I haven’t seen any other newspapers discuss Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Paulson’s explanation of why they propose simply to buy (at above-market prices) troubled assets, rather than acquire an equity stake in failing companies: “The two officials said the point of the plan was not to relieve troubled companies of their financial burden. Instead, the goal is to attack a more fundamental problem: helping the markets regain the ability to set prices for these assets. To do that, they said, Washington must reboot the buying-and-selling process…. That goal also helps explain Bernanke’s call for the government to pay a reasonable price for the assets it buys, rather than the lowest price it can get. If the Treasury pays a higher price, the central banker said, ‘credit markets should start to unfreeze. New credit will become available to support our economy.’” (Until late this afternoon the only other place I saw this explanation was in Paul Krugman’s blog. He called it the “slap-in-the-face” theory, by the way, and pointed out that that strategy has already failed twice in the last year. On top of which is the fact that no one has yet explained convincingly how they intend to “discover” a price, or even if it’s possible…but I’ve said too much. Hard to say if the math changes if taxpayers actually get an equity stake…if that’s even a possibility anymore.) It heartens me that one of the writers of that LA Times piece, Peter Gosselin, has done as careful a job reporting on “Main Street” woes as he and his colleagues have done here with Wall Street arcana: in June, we published his book High Wire: the Precarious Financial Lives of American Families (Basic, 9780465002252). No one in Congress seems to have been paying attention, but the book did get startling reviews. Truthdig.com’s Jeff Madrick makes the case for shining a light on it now: “It would be a pity if Peter Gosselin’s new book, High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families, gets lost in the current turmoil over subprime mortgages and deepening recession. He has done the most convincing job I’ve seen in capturing the failures of America to deal with a changing, complex and far less generous economy than it has known in the past.” His book makes for great reading – the Washington Post Book World called it a page-turner – and also articulates clearly how the big economic decisions government has made in recent decades have steadily eroded Americans’ financial security.


Matt Taibbi writes in the current issue of Rolling Stone: “Here’s the thing about Americans. You can … saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore… and none of it matters….” Cue Rick Shenkman, author of Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth about the American Voter (Basic, 9780465077717). It seems the question has been much on people’s minds recently, because after a successful summer of promoting the book (we went through at least 3 printings), it looks like he is back in demand to talk about the election season. Recent and scheduled appearances include CNN Headline News, CNN International, CBS Sunday Morning, and a special Brian Lamb interview on C-Span. His book was also the focus of a terrific article on Newsweek.com – which points out, by the way, that while pieces like Mr. Taibbi’s provide a laugh and maybe help blow off some steam, Shenkman is after something a bit more constructive: “What Shenkman does not do is chortle, Mencken-like, about stupidity. He offers plausible suggestions for how the knowledge level of the American electorate might be raised to a respectable threshold.” You can access the full article here: http://www.newsweek.com/id/158224/output/print


In the midst of our current financial cataclysm it may cause a bit of whiplash when Friday’s Presidential Candidates’ Debate addresses foreign policy. (If, that is, there is a debate – as of this writing it is still unclear what Senator McCain is going to do. I wonder if there’s a futures market out on that question.) Well, whether you’ve got a day or a week to prepare for it, we can help. Topic A is likely to be Iraq, and what we do after the “surge.” I expect both candidates to be disingenuous about its results – Senator Obama will have a hard time insisting that the surge has not manifestly reduced violence in Iraq, but the recently reported internal friction among the “Awakening Councils,” for example, makes assessments of progress a bit trickier. But for a full accounting of the surge, and what led up to it, there is nowhere better to turn than Linda Robinson’s Tell Me How This Ends: General Petraeus and the Search for a Way out of Iraq (PublicAffairs, 9781586485823). Last week Ms. Robinson appeared on the NewsHour to discuss the situation in Iraq, and we expect she will be frequently consulted.


And Topic B is sure to be…everything else. Conveniently, we have a book for that, too: America and the World: Conversations on the Future of American Foreign Policy (Basic, 9780465015016). This interesting encounter between Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft (with David Ignatius moderating) has just landed, and is already getting some extraordinary reviews. For example, the New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani: “What makes these discussions between Mr. Brzezinski and Mr. Scowcroft so bracing is their combination of common sense and an ability to place America’s relationship with a particular country in both a historical perspective and a regional context of competing interests and threats. Their book should be required reading not only for the next president elect but also for any voters concerned with the foreign policy issues that will be on the next administration’s plate.” Both authors are taping with Charlie Rose tomorrow – the show should air shortly.


One area that doesn’t get a ton of high profile attention anymore, and is likely to be left out of the debates altogether, is Chechnya. But it’s still there, and still horrific. So after starred PW and Booklist reviews, we’re encouraged to see general reviewers agreeing that Asne Seierstad’s Angel of Grozny: Orphans of a Forgotten War (Basic, 9780465011223) is worth a detour. The New York Times reviewed it last Sunday. The photograph that appeared with the review got me even more than the cover photo (you can see it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/books/review/Baker-t.html). I mention it because it’s a great illustration of the book’s goal, as articulated by the reviewer Peter Baker: “After some 14 years of war, terror and lawlessness, the children of Chechnya have been damaged in ways outsiders can barely fathom. Even now, with the war part of the war essentially over, Chechnya remains a place of hidden horrors, where life is fragile and exceedingly cheap. The world long ago turned its gaze away, content that the big guns had been silenced and uninterested in peering beyond the illusion of stability that Vladimir Putin’s government in Moscow presents. But Asne Seierstad forces us to look again, to confront the reality of a savage place, to recognize that a broken, brutalized people have only begun to figure out how deep the wounds really go.… Seierstad has produced a masterly and much needed call to attention for the international community, …[displaying] the same literary style that distinguished The Bookseller of Kabul.” The New Yorker also singled the book out for praise: “…she is a humane witness to a dehumanizing conflict, and recent developments in the Caucasus make her testament all the more timely.”


Okay, that’s more than enough political crankiness and doom and gloom. We can change gears by looking over Frank Wilczek’s The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces (Basic, 9780465003211). A review in New Scientist calls Mr. Wilczek “wonderfully irreverent” and concludes: “The Lightness of Being is an apt description of Wilczek’s writing style, which manages to be at once profound and light, filled with humor, wordplay and original explanations of difficult concepts.” Mr. Wilczek is apparently a marvelous performer – I heard that he was smash at the MPBA trade show, and that his recent events up and down our coast have been great fun. Additionally, MSNBC.com’s science editor just posted a Q&A with the Nobel laureate, and the reader comments are fantastic. E.g. “Chad W”: “This guy rocks! One of the better science interviews I’ve read and Wilczek is great at offering impactful analogies and simple answers to complex questions that help bring this kind of science down to a layman’s level….” Or, even better, from “Duke”: “Great article. I will buy this book.” Hear, hear. (And the book will give us something to occupy our attentions while they fix that pesky transformer at the Large Hadron Collider….)


Don’t think of it as politico-religious allegory – think of it as just a cracking good read. Episcopal Life is now joined by Daily Kos in its enthusiasm for Salvation Boulevard, the new novel from Larry Beinhart (Nation, 1586584119). “This is a perfect novel for fans of the political thriller or mystery genre, with current issues interwoven smoothly into the mix…. While the plot is engaging and the dialogue crisp, sharp and believable, what keeps you glued to the book, turning page after page long into the night, is the evolution of the PI from stubborn Bible-verse quoter to thinking questioner. His wrestling with gradually dawning doubts, not merely triggered by events, but also by his loosening leash on his own mind and conscience, is really superbly and believably drawn.” Or, put more succinctly (and wholesomely) by The Seattle Times: “Carl's an interesting character — a smart man observing his rock-solid faith begin to crack — and the book is, often, pretty darned funny.”


I believe I’ve mentioned Margaret Leslie Davis’s Mona Lisa in Camelot (Da Capo, 9780738211029), a book that really surprised me. Well I’m pleased to see that some of you have read the galley: it’s been selected as a “notable” on the November Indie Next list. Thanks! As it happens, the list will be well timed: we just learned that Vanity Fair has decided to run their excerpt a month earlier than previously planned – look for it in the issue that hits stands October 7; the book should be in stores just a couple weeks later.


Finally, and wholly removed from contemporary politics, I need to point to the great UK reviews that have been coming in for Philipp Blom’s The Vertigo Years: Europe 1900-1914 (9780465011162). The Guardian calls it “narrative history at its best”: “The Vertigo Years is an ambitious book - a one-volume assessment of the gravity-eroding, giddying sweep of European cultural, social, political and spiritual change that permeated the first 15 years of the 20th century. But Philipp Blom has pulled it off triumphantly. The vertiginous atmosphere of a tumbling prewar society - at the same time exciting and frightening - is described with atmospheric clarity. The combination of easily worn scholarship, fascinating character studies and fluent story-telling that is often very funny makes this a hugely enjoyable and illuminating book.” And the first word on this side of the Atlantic is equally admiring – Booklist gives it a starred review: “Blom is a superb writer who wisely unfolds his story year by year, so readers can gauge the growing intensity of these factors. We, of course, know how the story ends, but Blom succeeds in infusing this outstanding chronicle with drama, compassion, and poignancy.” I’ll say again: it’s my favorite book of the year. And then some. If you’re looking for a history choice this holiday season, something to get for the people who loved Cultural Amnesia, this would be the one.

I’ve gotten it out of my system; I feel better. I thank you most sincerely.