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.

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.

This is one of the most interesting books I’ve had a chance to read. And there was more to fear than fear itself: FDR had a fear of fire, part of which is explored in his earlier days in this book.

It’s easy to realize, FDR is no saint, very quickly. This is a man who was a manipulative politician with a complex personality. FDR was a man who would be great at listening and did not give away too much, if anything, in conversations with advisers. However he did have character flaws. He’s a man who had multiple affairs and severely damaged his relationship with his wife. After these affairs, they rarely slept in the same room. However, this also empowered Elanor to become more active in politics and still knew that FDR’s career in politics would carry her too and have a relationship with a close friend that brought out the best in her to be a first lady.

One of the parts of FDR’s complex personality was his mother and their relationship. It would not be bold to say that there was an Oedipus complex  as FDR was growing up and made his relationship between Elanor and mother-Sara even more interesting.

This was also a time where dictatorships were trendy. The book focuses on FDR’s beginnings and 1932-33 when Americans were actually fond of Benito Mussolini and the Italian Fascists. Throughout the book, they talk about the fact that FDR could become the dictator that America needed to navigate out of a financial crisis.

FDR and Herbert Hoover had a very strenuous relationship. Hoover tried to consult FDR on banking issues as they were in the transition and FDR balked at every advance Hoover tried to make. They were mostly Hoover’s miscalculations of FDR’s abilities but also the tension kept building between the two. Hoover wanted to have FDR sign off on decisions he made but FDR consistently refused. Hoover believed that FDR intentionally let him act alone so that he could swoop in and save the day.

FDR was the first President to set ground rules for the press and it was a time when they were most willing to cooperate. The administration had a tough policy on when to take photos and established the true vernacular of what off the record meant. FDR and his new administration struggled quickly to reorganize the banks, created a late hour solution and passed it even though there might have been only 4 copies and used his supermajorities to pass the bill. FDR clearly had the intention of letting Congress pass his agenda while not being afraid to run them over into semi-dictatorial powers if they stepped in his way.

FDR began by making cuts to government spending and then passed his large, new social contract. Even though many of his accomplishments were after the Hundred Days, the Securities Exchange Commission; Social Security and the Wagner Act, it could be said these advances would have never come about if it weren’t for FDR pushing his agenda.

Many times FDR liked to have experts take on the same issues, bang heads together, see what they have and figure out the rest. This is exactly how he got the resulting Agricultural Adjustment Act. The idea for his Tennessee Valley Authority came as president-elect when he saw the Tennessee valley as a project to see if the government could remake a region. But perhaps one of the most notable accomplishments, even in todays terms, was Federal Deposit Insurance. However, FDR opposed this program when it was slipped into the Glass-Stengall Act by his Vice President John Garner. FDR was adamant and threatening a veto but knew that his fellow Democrats had the votes to override his veto. FDR thought that the high premiums would cripple the healthy banks, instead it created public confidence and the premiums stayed low. FDR reluctantly passed it and later laid claim to it being a great accomplishment of his administration.

There’s also a good chapter about an assassination attempt on FDR in Miami. This book is well worth a read.

A quick read. I read it in a day and it explores a bunch of presidencies and the personalities of the presidents who inhabited them. It is a compilation book of messages from various presidential biographers about their stories of writing a biography.

I was taken aback on the chapter that Lyndon Johnson and how everything in his life appeared to be a lie. His obsession for secrecy, writing “Burn This” on notes he sent to former students and colleagues.

The author explores a darker side to LBJ: Johnson betrayed past friends and connections in his path to power. Yes he was great at making Congressional deals but the most telling things in the chapter on him were about his personal story. The author talked to LBJ’s brother and went as far to situate him as if he were at home with his family in the past to describe the events. The brother was able to eventually recall events and then the biographer asked him about the stories LBJ told everyone about his childhood and he said (page 91):

And Sam Houston said, “I can’t.” And I said, “Why not?” There was a long pause, and then he said, “Because they never happened.”

The author then was re-told LBJ’s story and checked every witness of the stories he could find and found that this new retelling was true. The conclusion on page 92 is a fascinating implication that if LBJ were to be alive a few decades earlier, he would have been able to write his own legend as he tried to. It is important to understand who he really is to see how to view his presidency. I will probably pick up a book about LBJ so fire your recommendations into the contact me page.

Ben Bradlee writes the essay on Richard Nixon saying that a reason not to contest the 1960 election in Illinois was that the Republicans might have moved as many illegal votes as Chicago mayor Richard Daley did to help John Kennedy win the election.

The last two chapters are dedicated to Ronald Reagan, his personality of being steadfast in his beliefs, and Bill Clinton. The writer for Clinton viewed his nature as self-destructive. The enemies against Clinton would be crushed in opposition to him but did not understand that Clinton’s worst enemy was himself. This came partly from his personal upbringing that his mother and Bill were able to create an alternate reality of their family life than living with an alcoholic stepfather. The writer of this chapter also discusses the dynamic to which Bill and Hillary were comprable to a tandem in the White House.

I enjoyed this one. Very quick read. I’ll recommend it.

A relatively new release. This is a very interesting book to see how the Obama team built their Presidential campaign from day one.

I think it’s very interesting to get into the campaign’s mind-set at the start of it all. They knew they were going up against a tough candidate in Hillary Clinton and they knew they had to put forth a great effort to win Iowa. They built a plan and used that blueprint to build a grassroots campaign and it worked really well.

Plouffe makes a point early in the book to say that he knew it would be tough to beat Clinton straight up and that’s when he says they had to bring out the non-traditional caucus goers and sign other people up to be behind their candidate. Early on they made that move by recruiting a lot of republicans and independents who could vote in either primary. This backfired in New Hampshire though when many of those went out for John McCain because they thought he ‘needed it more.’

I was surprised in the middle of the book, it has been revealed, that John Edwards knew he was going to bow out and one of his staff asked both sides to see what Edwards could get from their endorsement. Obviously at the time and even now they made the right decision to not make any promises if he threw his endorsement behind them. This has been covered in a few places and its very bold that Edwards would ask for a spot on the ticket while in the primary season. Meanwhile, after winning the nomination, the campaign went on a hunt for a Vice President and chose the interesting pick.

There are many themes to this book that people can take into their lives, even if they’re not on the campaign trail. I share a few of those towards the bottom, some of my favorite passages, but here I’d like to accentuate a point about the campaign.

They set out to cultivate and market a completely new group of people, sporadic and young voters and won them by a landslide. They also took lots of risks and they paid off. Their idea to stick to their message and hold firm on commitments worked perfectly even as the campaign expanded. With all that, there were mistakes and they are catalogued from the top down with President Obama giving his opinion on what type of campaign should be run. And oh by the way, they made technology work for them in assembling a massive grassroots campaign. I don’t want to ruin a lot of that part but it is so fundamentally sound that it’s difficult to believe how well the organization was built.

I think a few telling remarks are on page 237 when President Obama was direct about their message:

Obama said at one point in the fall of 2007, when conventional wisdom dismissed us, “People will either accept me and my message or they won’t. But we are not going to cast about for a political identity…”

The next paragraph I found compelling was a quote he had from Mark McKinnon, an adviser for George W. Bush’s campaign and said to a documentary (pg 237): “I’d rather have one flawed strategy than seven different strategy.” The author talks about how if you make a plan and commit to it, you’re going to succeed since you’ll have no chance if you don’t have any sense of where you’re going.

Also another note of a theme Plouffe mentions was: whenever they took risk he said they were rewarded. This happened over many, many times. Also their powerful internet grassroots network help spread the messages and by dealing with the voters, in their messages, as they’re adults was important to establishing a good change campaign.

Their presidential campaign strategy to spread the electoral college map made them look at McCain’s map as having no plan to win.

This will probably make a good book to read for students in the future to try to capture the essence of what 2008 was in the campaign form. So I’d say it’s a recommended read.

It also makes me wonder if Plouffe will be called once more to help re-elect Obama the last job he’ll ever have.