What are you reading at the moment?



I own a "first" of the book; it is one of Hemingway's more obscure and least read works. The photographs are extensive, explicit and stomach turning. It is not a book likely to be found on the reading list or bookshelves of PETA members.

I'm surprised to see it make an appearance.


ETA: I suspect that there aren't too many books in English on the subject of tauromachy !


Wow! Cool that you have a first edition. My copy was purchased quite a few years ago, but I finally got around to reading it recently. I found it very good indeed, and though the photos were a bit tough, the art of bullfighting in all its beauty and sorrow is amazingly depicted by Hemingway. Now, I want to go to Madrid to see a bullfight.

Next up on the reading list: Milan Kundera's The Farewell Party
 
I'm reading "Fearless Fourteen" by Janet Evanovich
Latest in the Stephanie Plum series about the inept bounty hunter
 
I'm re-reading Diana Gabaldon, as well. :)

I have the entire series, and reread them about once a year. Right now, I'm on The Fiery Cross. (For fans: the seventh book is out in September, and a movie is in the making right now of Outlander).
 
"Sin in the Second City--Madams, Ministers, Playboys and the Battle for America's Soul" by Karen Abbott

(clearly I'm still jonesing for Chicago sin even after last weekend) ;)
 
The Value of Valor by Lynn Ames. This is book three in a series where two lesbian lovers (Kate & Jay) save the world while screwing each other silly. :D
 
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Again, not a book, but the latest edition of Cycling Plus magazine arrived in the post.
 
Again, nothing for pleasure, just the same ol' boring humanities textbook. Up to the Baroque period now. The history is great, the text dull, dull, dull.

Have a burning desire to visit Versailles now.
 
Just finishing Fraser's biography of Cromwell, in the middle of a Women's Science fiction anthology, Vale's The Technique of Screenplay Writing, and browsing Danielou's unabridged translation of the Kama Sutra, with Notes From Underground, The adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl, and several Hitchcock anthologies on the backburner.

Amazing how much you can get done when your computer crashes, I really need to get my books organized.
 
I suppose I have a limited interest in what I read these days, but right now, I'm reading WILLING, the second book in the READY, WILLING, and ABLE series by Lucy Monroe. She's quickly becoming one of my favorite authors.

Each book is about ex-mercenaries and the women who love them. :) Hey! I'm a sucker for a good romance, especially ones with hot, hunky tough guys and fiesty women.

I just finished reading STAR QUALITY which was a three story anthology by Lori Foster, Lucy Monroe and Diane Castell. It centers around a small town in Ohio and the effects of a full moon on three of its residents.
 
I finished Toland's biography of Hitler and am now reading a biography of Lou Gehrig.
 
Not counting textbooks, only reading one thing at the moment; 35 Dumb Things Well-intended People Say by Dr Maura Cullen
 
Again magazines rather than books, but my membership of the Western Front Association has just come through, and with it a copy of Stand To! and of their Bulletin.
 


It was long said ( not publicly, of course, but solely amongst themselves ) by folk who worked for Bear Stearns that, in order to be hired by the firm and succeed, one needed to be "P.S.D."

When outsiders asked, they'd explain that P.S.D. stood for, "Poor, Smart and Desperate [ to get rich quick ]."

That made me roll my eyes because from my perspective as a fiduciary and as one who spent a career casually observing Bear ( and its Wall Street brethren ), P.S.D. could only mean: "Poor, Smart and Dishonest."

Further, the media's labeling of some Wall Street firms as "white shoe" disgusted me. The long-standing practice and lazy habit betrayed the media's complete and utter cluelessness. In over twenty-five years, I never met anyone who worked on Wall Street that I consider "honest and competent."

The media, of course, has always had a horrific conflict of interest respecting Wall Street because a not-insubstantial portion of media revenues come from advertisements bought by Wall Street.

________________________________________________

( Fair Use Excerpts )

Bear Stearns’s ‘Dirty Secret’ Bursts in Cohan’s Book
Book Review by James Pressley

March 6 (Bloomberg) -- The end for Bear Stearns Cos. proved swift and brutal.

As the scrappy U.S. securities house slipped into a sudden death spiral a year ago this month, Chief Executive Officer Alan Schwartz was hosting a media conference in Palm Beach.

Chairman Jimmy Cayne was playing tournament bridge in Detroit and didn’t fly back to New York right away.

The man who would pick up the pieces, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase & Co., was preparing to celebrate his 52nd birthday at Avra, a Greek restaurant in Manhattan.

These are just three snapshots from the opening chapters of William D. Cohan’s “House of Cards,” a masterly reconstruction of Bear Stearns’s implosion -- a tumultuous episode in Wall Street history that still reverberates through our economy today.

Cohan is a former reporter and Lazard Freres & Co. banker best known for his bestseller about that storied firm, “The Last Tycoons.” He now has turned his hand to chronicling the cocky rise and meteoric fall of Bear Stearns, whose swoon into the arms of JPMorgan in March 2008 underlined the greed, hubris and madness that have plunged the world into its deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

The inherent precariousness of Wall Street is now clear. Investment banks like Bear were borrowing tens of billions of dollars a day on the strength of their reputations and assets, many of them illiquid, mortgage-related securities, Cohan says.

“The dirty little secret of what used to be known as Wall Street securities firms,” he says, “was that every one of them funded their business in this way to varying degrees, and every one of them was always just 24 hours away from a funding crisis.”

*****​

...Cohan, to his credit, persuaded a number of bankers to go on the record about topics ranging from tantrums -- picture a Bear Stearns executive flinging his jacket on the floor in a huff -- to the company’s refusal to join a bailout of Long-Term Capital Management LP. Cayne, with his cigars and mini-blowtorch lighter, unleashes a stream of profanities when asked about Geithner’s defense of the decision not to open the Fed’s discount window to Bear Stearns.

“The audacity,” Cayne said, calling Geithner a “clerk” (and worse) who had the nerve to go “in front of the American people announcing he was deciding whether or not a firm of this stature and this whatever was good enough to get a loan.

‘‘Like he was the determining factor, and it’s like a flea on his back, floating down underneath the Golden Gate Bridge’’ -- obscenity deleted -- ‘‘saying, ‘Raise the bridge.’’’

We also learn why Cayne didn’t fly back to New York as soon as he heard about the meltdown. The man who grew rich at Bear Stearns -- with a net worth of more than $1 billion in 2007 -- lingered in Detroit to play in minor events with Alfredo Versace.

Some outsiders, according to Cohan, viewed the board’s lack of involvement to this point as an abdication of its fiduciary duty. I’ll say. Insiders shrugged it off as a classic example of the insular culture at Bear Stearns, which ‘‘continued to operate as a small partnership despite having been a public company since November 1985,” Cohan writes...

*****​

...Throughout, Cohan is scrupulously fair. He gives Dimon, for example, ample space to explain the hard bargain that JPMorgan drove on Bear Stearns: “I tell people, buying a house and buying a house on fire are two different things,” Dimon says...

*****​

Along the way, we meet Bear Stearns legends such as Alan “Ace” Greenberg, described here as “a tough-minded Midwestern Jew with a gambler’s instinct and a serious itch to get rich.” As the company struggled to stay afloat in March 2008, Greenberg tried to keep people amused by performing magic tricks...

*****​

...Cohan’s skittishness about editorializing makes for a frustrating and inconclusive epilogue: Everyone, by this account, was to blame for Bear Stearns’s demise -- the company itself, the government, the Fed, hedge-fund managers, ratings companies, you name it.

Yet first drafts of history don’t get much better than this.
 
I'm reading a new history of the Holocaust, THE ARCHITECT OF GENOCIDE: Himmler and the final solution, by Richard Breitman.

Now Breitman is a nice Jewish academic who researched his subject thoroughly and came up with some stunning conclusions about the Holocaust. THER REALLY WAS A HOLOCAUST but it was more accident than intent.

Hitler was kinda busy building the Third Reich, and he delegated a lot of work and responsibilities to his lieutenants. Himmler jumped all over the Jewish Question because his associates had already cherry-picked the good stuff, and Jews were a gold mine of possibilities. Here's what was supposed to happen:

Hitler wanted more space for Germans in Germany, so he hatched the idea of conquering Poland to settle Jews there. Poland already had lotsa Jews. So it was a good place to send Jews. It was also a good place to build war factories, far from the battles with France and Britain. So it was safe for Jews and airplane factories. I mean, if you wanted to kill Jews make them walk in front of the army like Stalin did. Stalin used his people to soak up bullets and find buried mines. Tanks are expensive. Hitler cared.

But Stalin pissed in the punchbowl when he made plans to attack Germany. Hitler got wind of the treachery and attacked Russia while Stalin was moving his army into place and Stalin's pants were on the floor.

Then Hitler remembered that most Jews are Marxists, and a Poland full of Marxist Jews might be a problem. So Hitler said to Himmler, "Hey! Heiny! Handle the Jewish problem for me."

This book is an excellent example of how the Usual Suspects fit the pieces together in their heads.
 
I'm reading "Digging the Trenches: the Archaeology of the Western Front" by Andrew Robertshaw and David Kenyon, about what the work of a group excavating on the Western Front tells us about life in the First World War trenches.
 
Fascinating, I'll have to see if I can find that one.
 
Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan

also

Demon-Haunted World, by Carl Sagan
 
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