The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means by George Soros
Reviewed by John Cassidy
New York Review of Books
George Soros has been an active investor for more than half a century. In the mid-1980s, when I started writing about Wall Street, he was already a leading hedge fund manager. Not many people understood hedge funds back then, but for those in the know Soros's Quantum Fund, which he founded in 1973, was the model: year after year, it had achieved returns in excess of the broader market. After weathering the 1987 stock market crash, Quantum, since 1989 under the day-to-day management of Stanley Druckenmiller, racked up more big gains, culminating in a huge bet against the pound sterling in 1992, which reportedly netted more than a billion dollars. (Soros has never publicly confirmed the exact figure. The British newspapers put it at $1.1 billion.)
Thereafter, Soros spent an increasing amount of his time on philanthropic activities throughout the world, including many laudable efforts to promote the
Reviewed by Sydney Blair
The Virginia Quarterly Review
Books about the art and technique of fiction writing seem to fall into separate and distinct categories. Some are helpful, borderline inspiring, while others -- the ones that equate the art of writing with the art of anything: real estate development, professional football, cooking -- tend to confuse the issue. Achieving success in any of these occupations requires a boatload of brains, guts, and talent, but writing has its own peculiar demands and skill sets, as the many books available on the subject attest.
There's the How To variety, useful in a fundamental, roll-up-your-sleeves, nuts-and-bolts way but thin when it comes to the deeper complications of how fiction works. Such books serve as Headquarters Central when we're in a technical jam, aiding and abetting the becalmed writer with specific jump starts; they offer a way out when we're stuck for a character or are in need of an engaging turn of phrase or surprising plot twist, when we need to ramp up a situation or setting. They wrest us from our (we
The Lizard King: The True Crimes and Passions of the World's Greatest Reptile Smugglers by Bryan Christy
Reviewed by Doug Brown
Powells.com
In the herp world, there are two broad groups: academics (people who study crawlies at universities) and herpetoculturists (people who keep crawlies as pets). These groups are largely what Stephen Jay Gould called "Non-overlapping Magesteria," as many of the academics think the pet folks don't know much about herps, and many of the pet folks think the academics are a bunch of stuffy snobs. The major cause of friction between the two groups is over-collecting. Academics commonly don't reveal the exact location of their study sites to keep the pet-trade people from descending and taking all the animals. This happened when Carl Kauffeld made the Okeetee Hunt Club in South Carolina famous in his classic Snakes: The Keeper and the Kept. The world flooded in, and now corn snakes and scarlet kingsnakes are sparse on the ground in that patch of Jasper County. Even worse is when endangered animals are taken from the wild ...
Jonah Hex — the disfigured "thinking man's killer" who made his first appearance in a DC Western comic in 1972 and was recently revived in a new series by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Grey — will jump from the comic pages to the big screen.
"W" himself, Josh Brolin, is in talks to star in the lead role.
"The art clearly nods to Clint Eastwood's classic westerns," declares Booklist of the paperback collection Face Full of Violence. "[W]estern comics fans should be impressed by his frontier-noir adventures."
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And speaking of Josh Brolin, he's been getting rave reviews for his portrayal of our current Commander in Chief in Oliver Stone's latest Presidential biopic, W.
Brolin is pitch-perfect, and though he doesn't look that much like W., he creates a memorable character that might not be W. but has vitality in his certitude and confusion.
This Bites: I confess — I don't know who you are. I wish I had some sort of Web 2.0 Spy-thingee widget that would tell me precisely who is reading this blog, and when, and how often they yell at their monitor in outrage.
But I don't. Aside from Denise and Miss Gretchen, I have to guess at my audience.
My hunch tells me there aren't a lot of Stephenie Meyer fans reading — but maybe I'm wrong (it's happened). Could be there's a cult of swoony wanna-be teen vampires who read this blog and plot my downfall — and they would have it, too, except that, just when they're about to go out and kill me, they catch their reflections in the mirror and are so entranced with their own tragic beauty that they momentarily fall in love with themselves and forget everything else. Again, that's just a guess.
So, Dear Readers, maybe this final Twilight trailer will delight you.
Maybe some of the worst dialogue ever written (start with "Your skin is pale white and ice cold" and go from there) and sub-high-school-theater acting will repulse you.
I have no way of knowing unless you speak up. (But please don't send any tragically beautiful teen vampires to kill me. That's just annoying.)
Dance Fever: Portlanders, you have less than one week to get in shape for Tango Fest XII, which starts on Wednesday the 15th!
If you don't have the time or money for dance lessons, freshen up your skills ASAP with Tango: An Argentine Love Story — and author Camille Cusumano's reading at Powell's City of Books on Tuesday night!
Overwhelmed with the pain of a failed 15-year relationship, Camille Cusumano took off for Buenos Aires intending to stay a few short weeks — but when her search for inner peace met with her true passion for tango, she realized she'd need to stay in Argentina indefinitely. Tango is a memoir of falling in love with a country through the dance that embodies intensity, freedom, and passion — all pivotal to Camille's own process of self-discovery.
Who needs to dance with washed-up actors, musicians, and ex-athletes when you've got the real thing right in the Rose City?
Within 10 minutes of waking up this morning, you'll likely have tapped a coal plant for energy, drained water from a municipal water supply, and dispensed gallons of waste into the sewer system. Within 15 minutes you'll likely have used products that come from all around the world, but mostly from China. And within half an hour you're likely emitting carbon dioxide — pollution — into the air. Multiply you by 6.7 billion. That is what the earth wakes up to each morning.
In my book, You Are Here, I note the effect of everyday things on the planet. I begin the last chapter of the book with a simple exposition: the far reaches of my morning routine. But I also make another important note about daylight saving time.
"We spend a million dollars per minute on energy in the U.S. The sun provides a discount to that cost, but we don't fully use it. Without even taking into account solar power, much of the Earth's natural light is wasted. Daylight saving time, for example, saves electricity. By moving in ...
Reviewed by Ron Charles
Washington Post Book World
What could be better than working as a daredevil photojournalist, jetting around the world's hotspots and sleeping with alluring strangers?
Motherhood, of course. Forget fame, danger and sex: Nothing compares with the thrill of tucking little ones into bed after supper.
Or so Deborah Copaken Kogan told us in Shutterbabe, her wild 2001 memoir of capturing war photos and male booty. Fresh out of Harvard, this Potomac, Md., native ventured into Afghanistan, Bucharest and the Soviet Union during some of the most alarming crises of recent history. But then she found the man of her dreams and settled down in Manhattan to raise a family.
Well, the seven-year itch is an equal opportunity employer.
Kogan's first novel, Between Here and April, is an amalgamation of autobiography, true crime and melodrama. Her heroine is a wife and mother named Elizabeth, a former globetrotting journalist from Potomac, Md., who found the man of her dreams and settled down in Manhattan to raise a
Nobel Rot: After recents comments slamming American authors, the world was shocked — shocked, I tell you! — to learn that the Nobel Committee has awarded its coveted prize for literature to a French author.
French-born author Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature today in Sweden. The Nobel Prize committee described the 68-year-old as an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization."
Set largely in locations near the French Riviera, these eleven short stories depict the harsh realities of life for the less-privileged inhabitants of this very privileged region. Distinguished French writer J. M. G. Le Clézio lends his voice to the dispossessed and explores his familiar themes of alienation, immigration, poverty, violence, indifference, the loss of beauty, and the betrayal of innocence.
Tim Burton will direct a new version of Alice in Wonderland for Disney. Anne Hathaway and Helena Bonham Carter have signed on to join the cast.
The movie, which stars Mia Wasikowska as Alice and Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, will use a combination of live action and performance-capture technology to tell the Lewis Carroll story.
Hathaway is playing the White Queen, a benevolent monarch who is deposed and banished by her sister, the Red Queen (Carter), who has an affinity for crying out, "Off with their heads!" The White Queen needs Alice to slay a creature known as the Bandersnatch.
What do you think? Is there anyone more perfect to play the Mad Hatter than Depp?
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Julie Taymor is set to adapt The Tempest to the big screen with Helen Mirren in the lead role.
Although the play centers on Prospero, an exiled duke-turned-sorcerer, Taymor -- who likes to take an experimental approach to her stage and film projects -- has rechristened the lead character
The average lifespan of a cell phone is 18 months, not because that is actually how long the phone will last, it is because that is how long carrier plans are; sign up for a new plan and get a new phone.
The average lifespan of a computer in the United States is about two years. In developing countries like India, it is five, and quickly approaching three. Consider the amount of people in the world. Consider how many computers there are on the planet as well as the number of cell phones: There are more than a billion cell phones and billions of computers. Where do they all go when they die?
They end up largely in the developing world where environmental standards are low and the opportunity to get paid a fee for refuse is very much wanted. About 80% of the computers and cell phones in the U.S. are shipped overseas to poor countries. Here's why: It would cost a computer company in the U.S. $20 to recycle a computer to domestic environmental standards. But this same company can offload an old computer to a Third ...
Thomas M. Kostigen is coauthor of the New York Times bestseller The Green Book. He writes the "Ethics Monitor" column for Dow Jones MarketWatch and the "Better Planet" column and blog for Discover magazine. He lives in Santa Monica, California. Visit his website at www.readyouarehere.com.
Elaine Szewczyk was born in Krakow, Poland. Her work has appeared in The Financial Times, Playboy, and the Chicago Tribune, among other publications. Currently she is the Editor at Kirkus Reviews. She lives in New York City.
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Elaine Szewczyk
