I read this book – without any precondition or notion about who the characters were, anything about the movie that was made based on it “21″ or any other ideas or notions. I was compelled by the idea of the story and I think the story was structured really well.

However I’m almost pissed that now I find out that most of the characters are composites of many people, some of the stories are outright fiction and that kind of gets me mad. It’s a compelling story so I guess you should call it somewhere around non-fiction because it’s true but many of the stories out there have been said to be fabricated.

I’ve been waiting for this book for a long time, and it did not disappoint at all.

Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, his newest book about the collapse and the people who searched out to profit from the destruction of the housing market. Lewis does a great job describing all the characters and this is just another great story. I almost wish it went on another hundred pages just go get more of the writing. At the end of the book, Lewis describes how both sides appear to win on a trade and where were the real losers? In his epilogue he meets with his former boss at Salomon Brothers which is a very interesting sequence.

One of my favorite sequences comes at a hibachi restaurant, where a lender describes how he distributes and packages his loans. This follows, with the character saying ‘I want to short his loans, sight unseen.’

I don’t want to give much away, plus it is deeply complicated, but I think I might understand these types of loans, CDOs, the foolishness of the rating system and how companies used it and much more.

(Excerpt available in Vanity Fair)

This is a great book detailing probably one of the greatest baseball players to ever live in Satchel Paige.

A young Mobile boy who was sentenced to the Alabama Reform School for Boys, more like a juvinile hall that we know today, could have been the best thing to happen to him. He got out of Alabama with an electric fastball and then became an electric personality throughout the Negro Leagues, barnstorming, practically anywhere.

It’s tough to separate legend from story in Satchel’s life but the author does his best to distinguish between the two and dig to find out which is fact and which is not.

One great point I liked in this book is that Satchel was, in practical terms, baseball’s first “free agent.” When Satchel didn’t get what he wanted, he found another eager employer to collect on his star power. Mostly through gate receipts that owners wanted, they would pursue Satchel to no end for their teams until he reached the Kansas City Monarchs. Once he entered the majors too, they found out how loose and uncontrollable Satchel really was.

It really gives you a great perspective on how the leagues were during segregation and how the Negro Leagues really worked to rise and then fall as Jackie Robinson, disliked by many Negro Leaguers by the way for many reasons, who broke the barrier. However, Satchel still made records as the first African American pitcher in the majors and holds many of the firsts there.

A very good, and extremely fast, read on the Ivy League. It took me about, 5 train trips to finish this book? That’s a fast read for me.

The chapters are very short and go through one of the most prestigious leagues in a very good way. Student-athletes have to pay their own way, they get aid from admissions but not in terms of scholarships. These guys battle it out, playing on Friday-Saturday in conference and go through a real fight.

The book describes the 2005-06 season which is the culmination of Penn’s dominance under Fran Dunphy. Dunphy moved on to Temple after the year was over which was an interesting move to go from one Big 5 school to another. Also Joe Scott’s Princeton team had a roller-coaster year, scoring an extremely low amount in the non-conference against Monmouth to contending for the Ivy championship. The one great thing about the Ivy League is that the regular season champion is it, there is no conference tournament, the regular season champion has to earn it and does. Steve Donahue’s Cornell Big Red have the appearance of getting ready to be on the dominant level that they have attempted to maintain this past year, wrestling away the dominance from Princeton and Penn.

There are a bunch of amazing stories, I recommend this book not only for the stories but for the way its written. It’s a great book for college basketball fans to enjoy.

I enjoyed this book about the Battle of Britain and the roles the leaders took to ensure, or cost them, victory.

The story is very intriguing about the use of fighters and bombers in World War II. It starts with some of the developments and the rivalries that shaped the development of the fighters and bombers needed on both sides for the war.

The best chapters; however, lie in the Battle of Britain. There was fear that after an air raid the Germans were set to invade England after taking France. This turned out to be true, Hitler’s famous Operation Sea Lion as it was called was set to be green lit. However, the German navy wanted to make sure that German bombers did enough damage so that an invasion would be possible. Also it appeared that the German strategy thought that the bombing would undo the British will and create a push for a change in government that would please Germany, neither happened.

The bombers turned out to be sitting ducks for the Hurricanes and Spitfires, British fighters, that would attack them. The leader of Fighter Command, Air Chief Marshall Hugh Dowding, correctly thought out that the war would be of attrition and of fighting in smaller numbers. When Fighter Command scrambled their fighters into different, smaller groups, it gave the appearance to the Germans (who did not do enough intelligence work) that the British Fighter Command was small and could be overrun at any time. However this was not the case. Dowding also correctly thought to keep the fight going long enough to stave off a potential invasion season. The invaison season would be between the time of June to September. If the British were losing less planes than the Germans, that would prolong the battle into the fall and stave off Hitler calling on Operation Sea Lion.

In essence his plan worked. The fighters concentrated on destroying the bombers, which were more expensive to make and required more manpower, and as long as the British were losing less fighters than the Germans were bombers then the war of attrition would favor the British. However the Germans failed to realize that and when they finally crippled Fighter Command with bombing raids on strategic air ministry targets, they quickly switch to a bombing of London which quickly raised Fighter Command’s resolve and ability to stave off the enemy.

One of the most important weapons for the British was their new invention, radar. Radar enabled the British to see where the German attacks were coming from and where to protect from Fighter Command. Dowding wanted, and received, cover for most of England’s coast by radar which enabled them to stave off attacks from the east and north.

The book shows that Hitler got the operation ready a few times but would postpone it indefinitely in mid-September. The Germans were did in by poor intelligence and arrogance of their (they felt) inevitable victory. Dowding would fight through political battles in the Royal Air Force and eventually be taken out of his duties by November. There is no mention of him in the first official historic files of the Battle of Britain, to which Churchill thought was a great offense of infighting at the Air Ministry.

There are a lot of great stories in here about people who fought the war, not only British but German and all of the people who came (from New Zeland, America, Canada, and many others) to fight the war on the British side. The first American death in World War II came in the Battle of Britain. If you like war books, specifically World War II, this is a very good and fast read.

I’m not sure if I’m going to keep the comments section because all it appears to do is spam me. I’ll have to figure out a way to just put “tweet me” but I’m sure twitter could be spammed eventually. (Am I wrong on this one)

Meanwhile I’m working on a book list for the future and I have these titles on there.

• With wings like eagles : a history of the Battle of Britain  by Michael Korda
• Satchel : the life and times of an American legend by Larry Tye
• This republic of suffering : death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust
• True compass : a memoir by (the late) Edward M. Kennedy
• How to value players for rotisserie baseball by Art McGee
• THE BIG SHORT : INSIDE THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE by Michael Lewis
• The Eastern stars : how baseball changed the Dominican town of San Pedro de Macorís by Mark Kurlansky
• Outside the limelight : basketball in the Ivy League by Kathy Orton

Any recommendations? Let me know via twitter @ryanarestivo

Michael Lewis’ first book, Liar’s Poker, I finally got to reading right before his most recent work, The Big Short, comes out in March.

This book captures the atmosphere of Wall Street in the 1980s and Lewis’ brief autobiography of his life at Salomon Brothers. As a young, out of college, he reached into some unusual connections and got a chance to join the training program. The training program really sounded like a placement class, or even, a college class where Lewis jokes about the front row and back row type of people when speakers enter to talk about the loyalty and the greatness of joining Salomon Brothers. Not only was there a class but each member of the class was not guaranteed a job and would have to impress the managers for a chance to work for them, and be treated lowly to start.

However I think this book is very much making the argument against the theme of loyalty. In Wall Street, at this point, Lewis talks about the structure of the Salomon bonus system and that it is based on loyalty and the prestige of working at Salomon Brothers. The newer classes of workers at Salomon Brothers began to learn that company loyalty didn’t have much value and once they drew big success, they began leaving for more lucrative offers from other companies.

Salomon Brothers created a way to sell mortgage bonds back in the 1980s and built up a huge profit, only to be outdone by junk bonds. I enjoyed this read and it gets into the heads of the top names and how people can be backstabbing in nature, even to save their own jobs or get rid of people.

This is a great story and probably one not many know about around here.

The Great Fire of 1910 is the story. However, the relationship between Gifford Pinchot and Teddy Roosevelt is another dominant story and how they founded the Forest Service and how it survived through everything.

These were times of appointed senators, big timber industry threatening the forests and a conservation movement which was led by Teddy Roosevelt at the 11th hour of his Presidency. He and Pinochot shared a love for the outdoors and nature, and at the end Pinchot toured much of the Northern Rockies looking for land that Teddy would sign into as national parks.

Not long after did they realize Roosevelt’s succesor, President Taft, was not as much inclined to the cause as they were. Pinchot was fired for making poor remarks and the Congress continued to cut off the Forest Service: forcing them to pay mostly from their own pocket for basic needs. However, the forests caught fire in 1910 and it was up to the rangers and whoever they could summon to save it.

There are many good anecdotes in here. The 25th Infantry, an African American group, were summoned from the Army to help and took it upon themselves to change their shattered reputations. There’s a funny passage about two Italian immigrants (page 148-9):

The Italians had a saying: “I came to America because I heard the streets were paved with gold. When I got here, I found out three things. First, the streets weren’t paved with gold. Second, they weren’t paved at all. And third, I was expected to pave them.

This book is graphic, whatever that means. There are distrciptions of people being burned to death and other horrible ways in which the Great Fire of 1910 proved to be almost unescapable.

One of its heroes, Ed Pulaski, at a point when the fire was crowding them and it looked bleak forced his men into a mineshaft cave by gunpoint and collapsed minutes later only to survive with one blind eye and physical problems. There is much more to be said about his story in this book that captures the different type of Forest Service rangers as he was one of the few rangers without a Yale University background in forestry.

The solution to the fires was to create a man made fire to try to combine with the Great Fire and force it out of fuel. It’s aftermath led to the creation of many more initiatives to help the Forest Service out of its infancy and into fighting fires and then protecting the nations’ land. It also led Teddy Roosvelt back into poltics to try and beat Taft; but everyone would fall before Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Much of Pinochots influence worked on Teddy’s cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in creating the Civilian Conservation Corps.

I liked this book very much. A very good story of America to capture that most probably don’t know about. If you can take a little violence and graphic scenes of fire to ingest the beauty that was captured by most of the rangers by the forest to start, you’ll like this book.

Somehow I found this book to read and it is a good one. It is about Kennedy and Johnson’s National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy and the events to which he advised the President: most notably the escalation to war in Vietnam.

The late John F. Kennedy made a commitment to no ground troops in all of his strategies, even when the CIA-planned Bay of Pigs called for direct military intervention as support. Kennedy did not allow troops for an invasion or air support. Bundy offered his resignation but Kennedy pulled him closer to a basement West Wing office. A fun fact, Kennedy is the one who created the White House Situation Room.

One theme of the book is discussing part of the nuclear option and Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower stated many times that he used the “nuclear option” to force a stalemate in Korea and advised future presidents, in private, to not be afraid to use the option. On page 163 Eisenhower’s advice to Johnson was to “use any weapons required” which includes nuclear weapons.

The author and Bundy are highly critical of Johnson as a commander-in-chief. Their belief is that Johnson, with his highly trained Senate Majority Leader experience, became a legislator-in-chief to use situations to push his agenda. Johnson didn’t want to escalate Vietnam in the midst of a 1964 election campaign so he forced a stalemate of intelligence and military strategy to gain a mandate of the American people to give him the Presidency.

The real problem they get down to in this book is that the war in Vietnam was based on many untrue assumptions or missing good intelligence. The failures of the South Vietnamese government, even when the United States installed new leadership. Even the Gulf of Tonkin incident did not end up having a second attack until a resolution is passed, part of the intelligence that could not be confirmed nor denied then. In all of the war games of SIGMA, the air strikes were found to not hurt the resiliency of North Vietnam. France fought in Vietnam to restore their former colonial power in the 1950s and finally could not divest in colonies anymore.

Many advisors who did not like idea of troop deployment eventually turned to the other side and when Johnson brought military troops into Vietnam, it broke Kennedy’s rule of holding back troops. However the war was used as, mostly, a way to politically force the North Vietnamese to cave in and get them to the negotiating table. This never turned out to work, even through the diplomatic back channels, they were rebuked at every time.

The last chapter discusses the historic game of guessing what President Kennedy would have done had he won re-election and been President in 1964. Most of the advisors came to agreement that Kennedy would hold steadfast on not allowing American ground troops to be deployed and that the war would come to a point where Kennedy would cut his losses and withdraw from Vietnam. Kennedy said in a press conference in May 1963 that he would withdraw American troops as soon as the South Vietnamese government would allow it. When asked how, on page 238, Kennedy said “Easy, put a government in there that will ask us to leave.” Because Kennedy would have won his second term, there would not be worries that it may enrage part of the country to be giving in to communism.

This is a compelling story about the old days of baseball when the trips were done by train and the teams were all located on the east coast. It centers on the race between  the Yankees and Red Sox and their players during the summer of 1949 and is an enjoyable book.

A lot of second-generation Americans made an impact on the sport and this book explores a lot of the complexities between players nationalities and how many players’ fathers thought poorly of their sons when they tried to explore baseball as a career. Most of them were working-class members who despised the idea.

Of course, there were players who were partiers and management had an iron fist over player contract negotiation. The Red Sox, who lost out on the playoffs just barely in 1948, had to come back from an early hole to make the 1949 season a race. The Yankees used their pitching to get by and were a great pitching team under the first year manager Casey Stengel.

This was also the day before agents, kind of. There is a nice story in here about a member of the front office who was fired and could be called the first ‘agent.’ At the end of the book the Yankee dynasty for the next four years is revealed but their (and mostly AL teams’) lack of signing African American players is what doomed the Yankee farm system and dynasty. The Yankees and Red Sox were two of the last teams to really embrace integration.

I recommend this book, it’s probably one of the best Yankee-Red Sox oriented books out there.