read at least one book per month

... is called “Sheeple: Caucus Confidential in Stephen Harper’s Ottawa” by Garth Turner, a former Conservative-turned-Independent-turned-Liberal Member of Parliament who claims to have been the first politician in Canada (or possibly the world) to have been “dooced”. To be “dooced” is to be fired for something one has written on a blog. This book is Mr. Turner’s first hand account of how the blog he kept regarding his daily activities and observations as a Member of Parliament from 2006 to 2008 made him more accessible to his constituents, angered his colleagues, at times rescued him from binds but ultimately contributed to his political demise. Being the first “digital MP” was an experiment in a new type of representative democracy that sought to make the way government works more transparent to the general population and to make the MP more accessible. Garth Turner, with a penchant for theatrics and a love for being on camera (he was once a journalist), was a flawed hero for this “movement”. However, no one else had the guts to do this, to challenge his own party to debate when he thought their course was wrong.

The book’s title,”Sheeple”, was intended to reflect what Turner describes as the sheep-like behavior of the members of Stephen Harper’s Conservative caucus who dared not challenge their leader on anything. Garth Turner was someone who had fundamental disagreements with Prime Minister Stephen Harper and rather than keep quiet about them, as he was instructed to do, he spoke and wrote about them openly and dealt with the consequences. I was a long-time reader of Garth Turner’s blog, having first encountered it after reading a story about him in the Canadian press about having been kicked out of the Conservative caucus for supposedly blogging about confidential party business. During the years I read his blog, I not only enjoyed reading about the political intrigue but also learned a lot about how Canadian government works.

“Sheeple” reads very much like Turner’s blog, and in fact passages from his blog are quoted liberally. His journalistic experience is apparent in the descriptive language he uses and in his at times almost distant recounting of events he was intimately involved in. I was surprised that he doesn’t talk much about being an Independent or about his time in Opposition leader Stephane Dion’s inner circle. He doesn’t even mention the Conservative who defeated him in the October 2008 election by name. (Her name is Lisa Raitt, by the way. She, in her role as a cabinet minister for Stephen Harper, was in the news this week for having been caught on tape saying that Canada’s medical isotope shortage, which is harming cancer patients, was a “sexy” issue that could further her political career.)

The book raised a few interesting questions in my mind:

• Do people vote for a party and demand that their representatives adhere strictly to whatever the party doctrine is, or do people elect individuals who use their common sense and independent judgment to stand up for the interests of their constituents even when those interests are at odds with the best interests of the party?

Based on the way I worded the question, my opinion is probably obvious. There’s a trend in American politics that I find disturbing, and that’s where the ideological purists on either the Democratic or Republican side want to weed out any and all dissent. Conservative radio talk show hosts rant about wanting the “mushy moderates” out of the Republican Party, and progressive bloggers write of moderate, “blue dog” Democrats with scorn. This contributes to the increased polarization and failure of reaching consensus in government. I believe that the majority of voters are middle-of-the-roaders who would take a pragmatic, rather than ideological approach to government.

• Do people want their leaders to govern based on an open deliberation of the various sides of an issue, or do they elect leaders who are “daddy figures” whom they expect to dictate what’s best for them without any serious, public deliberation?

I understand the need for discipline and unity in message in order to govern successfully, but I have absolutely zero respect for politicians that rubber stamp legislation, keeping quiet about serious drawbacks, just to curry favor from party leaders and advance their own careers. I don’t understand carrying the “us versus them” team mentality to the extent that healthy political debate, even within a party, is stifled. I would like to think that there could be a better, more inclusive way of governing than what Turner described of Harper.

• Finally, are people even ready for politicians that maintain real, substantive, interactive blogs?

Every word is under the microscope, and nothing can be taken back. Politicians often misspeak, say things with one intention that can easily be taken out of context to be spun in a way benefiting their opponents. Consumers of news are bombarded with so much information that they don’t have time to evaluate the accuracy of everything reported or understand the subtleties, so the spin, no matter how wrong, sticks. It’s no wonder politicians are reluctant to post their words unfiltered for public consumption when the public is so unforgiving.

I don’t know that Garth Turner should attempt a return to politics, but someday I would really like to see more politicians be so open with their constituents about the job they’re doing and how they’re doing it and be so open to receiving feedback…

...is called “How Barack Obama Won: A State-By-State Guide to the Historic 2008 Presidential Election” by Chuck Todd and Sheldon Gawiser, who are political directors at NBC News. While there were some obvious underlying national trends that affected the outcome of the election (the unpopularity of Bush, the Iraq war, etc.), the states had their own peculiarities that affected their results individually. In their discussion, the authors cluster the states into broad categories such as battleground states, receding battlegrouds, emerging battlegrounds and the clear cut “red” and “blue” states, and they talk about the historical and emerging demographic trends in each state and their potential political implications for the future. For each state the book includes the vote totals as well as the exit poll results for a variety of different demographics including age, gender, race, income, education, religion and others for both the 2008 and 2004 elections. (As a statistics geek, this is the kind of stuff I like…)

In looking at the exit poll numbers, there’s just one thing that I don’t think gets talked about enough, and I was disappointed the authors didn’t do it here although they had the numbers staring them in the face. Despite the “historic” quality of this election, it seems race is still a big issue in the South. In Alabama, the exit poll results showed 88% of the whites voted for McCain and 98% of the blacks voted for Obama. It would just seem that “all other things being equal”, if we lived in a truly “color blind” society, race shouldn’t be so highly correlated with the vote outcome; I would expect to see each race voting for the winning candidate in whatever state by roughly the same margin. Of course, the “all other things being equal” condition is false, but even controlling for other demographics and socioeconomic characteristics, it just seems striking that in the Southern states (and nationally for the African American population) you can just look at someone’s race and know more than likely who they voted for. ..

...is called “Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China” by John Pomfret, a journalist with The Washington Post who in 1981 was one of the first American students admitted to a Chinese university after the communist revolution. He recounts his experience as a foreign student in China as a history major at Nanjing University and tells the stories of the lives of the Chinese classmates he had come to know. Each of his classmates had lived through the Cultural Revolution (a period during the late 1960’s to mid 1970’s when China’s government led a campaign of terror to force the people into absolute submission to the state), and they all had trying (some truly horrific) situations they had to cope with. They were all trying to take advantage of emerging opportunities in the “new”, more open China of the time. The author follows their lives through the decades and tracks the successes and setbacks in their careers and family lives, both often as a result of how they played the system under the Communist Party. Pomfret also tells of his own exile from China as a result of his journalistic coverage of the student demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in 1989 and of his eventual return to China where he meets his wife.

This book, which is both biographical and autobiographical, often reads as a novel and you develop a close connection with the characters he describes. One classmate that I particularly liked reading about was called “Book Idiot Zhou”, who as an eleven year old child joined the Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution and went around destroying things and terrorizing people who were deemed disloyal by the Party. As an adult, he taught Marxism and on the side he had his own capitalist venture collecting urine from public toilets to sell the enzymes he extracted from it to pharmaceutical companies. One irony is that when he was with the Red Guard he destroyed the houses of people who burned incense and ceremonial money to honor their ancestors that he would be doing the same ritual today for his own parents.

What I found striking is that people involved in either committing atrocities during the Cultural Revolution or who were victims during it went about their lives afterward with either no remorse or in the case of the latter with desire to please the Party. Another one of the classmates called “Old Xu”, a Party loyalist whose parents were both killed for being intellectuals, described the situation with the phrase “mei banfa” which means “no way out” – people just did what they needed to do to survive. The author paints a picture of a society where people felt obligated to snitch on each other (or even make up charges against someone) to either gain favor with the Party or to avoid seeming out of sync with it. During the Cultural Revolution children were forced to denounce their parents and publicly humiliate them if their parents ran afoul of the Party. The Communist Party controls everything, and any change that happens in China is only allowed to the extent the Party can maintain its grip on power or receive any cut of the benefits. For instance, communism as an economic philosophy is for sure dead (although everybody learns it and gives lip service to its superiority), but the authoritarian aspect of the communist system is seemingly unbreakable.

The issue the author leaves us with is the unknown implications of the explosive growth of China’s economy and the rapid change of its society. One of the author’s classmates who was sympathetic to the Tiananmen Square demonstrations said he changed his mind and believed years later that it would be a mistake to topple the Party because China otherwise has no moral backbone to hold itself together. With no religion, in this new economy he said it seems that materialism is the god of the people. My closest coworker/friend who was 18 and present at the Tiananmen Square demonstrations had previously told me that he also now thought it would be a mistake to end state control. He said that China is largely poor and uneducated and that the people wouldn’t know what to do with so much freedom and that today there’s no societal framework (like what took industrialized nations even hundreds of years to develop) that would permit a Western style democracy to operate. Change needs to happen somehow, but just “how” is the question…

After reading this book, I feel, in a contradictory way, that I understand both more and less about the things my Chinese coworkers/friends have lived through (or what their parents may have lived through) and how it affects who they are today.

...is called “Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President” by Lincoln Chafee. Lincoln Chafee is a former Republican senator from Rhode Island known for speaking out against many policies of the Bush Administration and was the only Republican to vote against the resolution authorizing the war in Iraq. I follow politics closely (the same way that most normal guys follow sports) and have always been intrigued by Chafee’s reputation as a maverick as I like maverick types in general. I admit that my opinion of Chafee was mixed and biased before reading this book. I say this because I liked his independence but didn’t understand why he would continue to be a Republican and run for reelection as one when his support for the Republican leadership would only further the causes he was so much against (just a note: after losing reelection he left the Republican party to become an independent and now supports Obama for president). After reading this book, I can say that my opinion of Lincoln Chafee hasn’t changed all that much but I do have greater respect for the complexities of his thought process in taking the political stands he did.

To me it seems like Chafee had an inner struggle to stick rigidly to his principles or to be pragmatic. It is apparent he has a strict personal code that he abides by which can at times make it hard to be pragmatic. For example, he goes on and on about how incompetent and dangerous he finds President Bush and how there was no way he could have voted for him in 2004, yet rather than support Kerry who had a shot to defeat Bush he chose to write-in the name of Bush’s father for president saying that he couldn’t have voted for Kerry since he had voted in favor of authorizing the war in Iraq to begin with. I admire such steadfast adherence to one’s principles, but he wasn’t always consistent. For instance, he justisfied sticking with the Republican party for pragmatic reasons in that Rhode Island would lose federal money if he were not part of the ruling party, and he also seemed to have some unfounded idealism that he could change things from within (which eventually faded of course).

I found Chafee a highly honorable and principled politician who isn’t cut out for the highly polarized warfare that characterizes the national politics of today. This is really too bad as I hope Chafee can someday play an important role in government again. I also hope one day that the political environment becomes less toxic and more receptive of the bipartisan consensus that Chafee envisioned. Yes, this book is very biased as it’s one man’s perspective of events that he experienced and about political positions he firmly believes in, but it’s a fascinating perspective on the events that shaped US politics over the past few years.

...is called “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy. It’s a story about a father and son’s journey of survival being among the few remaining survivors of an apocalypse that destroyed most living things and the world as known by humanity. They travel (i.e. walk) this dangerous road through desolate stretches of land with the goal of reaching the coast, holding on to some unfounded hope that there could be some salvation there. What else could they do? Their journey takes them through harsh weather in which they forage for canned food in buildings abandoned years previously, constantly hiding themselves and their few belongings from bands of desperate cannabalistic robbers (i.e. the “bad guys”). We never learn what caused this cataclysmic destruction and we never know the principal characters’ names; they’re just referred to as “the man” and “the boy”. I think this is because the emphasis of the story is on human nature and what lengths people would go to for survival, not on how the situation came to be. I think the characters are nameless because in this particular situation they are intended to represent any of the few “good guys” left in the world and how they would think and act.

The first thing that struck me about this book was the minimalistic style in which it was written. For instance, the sentences are terse and abrupt, dialogue is not in quotations, and short contractions like “can’t” and “don’t” are spelled without the apostrophe. This more than anything gave me a strong sense of desolation and disconnect. For this very reason, I had a hard time getting into this book. In fact, I put it down for a couple of months and then came back to it. I never really felt connected with the story or the characters. I felt hopeless for the characters and that it didn’t matter if they died and death was my expectation for them.

Another thing that impressed me was the detail describing the father and son’s predicament and their mental state through their ordeal. Just to give one example, although it seems obvious to me now, it would not have initially occurred to me to think about how important having adequate shoes would be on such a journey and how hard to come by they would be after years of anarchy and lawlessnes and how you would have to improvise ways to protect your feet. Also, it was interesting to see how the son (less than 10 years old, I think) matured in some ways and how the dynamics of the relationship with his father changed as they engaged in activities they needed to do for their survival that in ordinary circumstances would have been morally questionable. The father and son began working more and more as a team in making decisions and the son started gaining his father’s insight as if the father were training him for the inevitable day when he would have to fight for his survival alone.

Although I never entirely connected with the story, as I contemplate what I just read I appreciate the story’s nuances more and more. So, I recommend it and will probably need to read it again myself at some point to understand it more fully.

I haven’t read any books to completion this year so far. I feel so embarrassed. Part of the problem is that since the start of the year, I’ve had a difficult time finding focus. I’ve started a couple of books but never finished them. I still plan to when I find my focus again. In the meantime, it’s not like I’ve been slacking off… entirely. I have been reading two textbooks (along with several dense journal articles) in preparation for my actuarial exam in May, just a month away. Quite possibly, they may be my companions next Jaunary through April as well, if I don’t pass the exam this time. It’s going to be tough, since as I said, I’ve been unfocused, but anyway, I share my thoughts on these required reading books here.

1) Investments by Zvi Bodie, Alex Kane, and Alan J. Marcus. This text figures prominently on the reading lists of many MBA schools, not just on the actuarial exam syllabus. It’s excellent for what it is, a survey of financial investments. I could find better texts with more comprehensive coverage on any one of the major topics the text touches on, like bonds and fixed income securities, portfolio management, arbitrage pricing and so on. Nevertheless, it provides a solid introduction. There’s a reason why it’s so popular, and I get why that is.

2) Options, Futures and Other Derivatives by John C. Hull. This text is also part of the ciriculum of many MBA program and is an intermediate-level introduction to the study of financial derivatives. It’s more mathematically intensive than the average business text, but it still uses hardly any calculus and is very wordy. The wordiness I think is good because the author does try to instill an intuitive understanding of difficult concepts. Still, I could get better intuitive understanding of the trading strategies presented in the text by skimming some books on options trading in the business section of Barnes and Noble or browsing some websites devoted to this topic. However, I recognize the book’s intent is to be more theoretical than practical. I guess it does the best it can presenting the ideas of geometric Brownina motion, Ito’s Lemma and the Black-Scholes pricing formula without using much calculus or probability. As I think about it, it’s pretty amazing how the author manages that. I like this text, but I still feel I need to go elsewhere to develop both more intuition and technical maturity.

... is called “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe. This is a book that I ordinarily would have never chosen to read on my own although this novel seems to be a classic and required reading in certain college courses (in fact, when I bought it, the cashier at Borders asked if I were a student since she herself was a student that was required to read it). I chose this book based on fateaccompli’s respect for this author (see her comments here and here ). Since I’d been quite satisfied with the other stuff I’ve read that she has recommended and because she was so enthusiastic about Achebe in particular, I figured I would check this book out, and I was certainly not disappointed.

Achebe is quite successful in building a well-defined, textured story in only a few pages. He introduces characters in “waves”. With an economy of words, he gives a quick, but strong impression of what a character is all about, and a little later on he reveals more to give an deeper understanding of a character’s background or motives. The storyline follows the life of Okonkwo, a prominent warrior who overcame a disadvantaged backgroud to become a respected leader of his African tribe. As a result of an accidental crime, Okonkwo is forced into exile for 7 years and during that period major changes happen in his homeland with the invasion of European religious missionaries that threaten his tribe’s traditions and way of life. Upon his return, things have changed so much that a man who was once viewed as an authority figure becomes no more than a common criminal under the new system.

A society is a held together by a complex set of rules that maintain order. On the deepest level, is one set of rules much better than any other? In the novel, there is a recounting of one discussion between a tribal elder and a missionary priest that emphasized the similarities between their belief systems. It seemed like both ways of life had strange elements to them, but that in their own way both systems worked.

What does it mean that in such a short time span a whole way of life could just be exterminated by the introduction of some foreign influence? Is it really that the missionaries used the power of their government to force people to submit to their will, or is it that the weaknesses in the tribal values were so prevalent that so many people were willing to voluntarily abandon them? Or, does it say something about how fickle people are in their beliefs that they could just change them without much fight?

This book raised many philosophical and sociological questions that I expect to be contemplating for some time to come…

... is called “The Pride of Chanur” by C.J. Cherryh. I had never heard of or read anything by this author before and in general don’t read much science fiction, but fateaccompli wrote very enthusiastically of her in an exchange we had here and recommended this as her favorite Cherryh novel. Since I liked her other recommendations so far, I chose this as my book of the month, which I finished just on time (i.e. yesterday).

The novel is set in some distant section of space controlled by a Compact of alien traders (with mostly unpronounceable names) who had previously had no contact with humans. The plot revolves around the events set in motion when a mysterious “Outsider” (i.e. human) stowaway is found hiding on the vessel of a prominent Hani family, the Chanur, the Hani being a catlike, matriachal alien race. This “blunt toothed” and “naked hided” stowaway was claimed as property of a rival alien race called the Kif, who accused the Hani of robbery. The resulting psychological and politcal drama made for a more thought provoking read than I was expecting out of a science fiction novel (sorry I did have certain prejudices regarding the sci fi genre…). It also provided an interesting case study on leadership.

What impressed me the most about the novel was how intricately the details of the alien society were thought out. Each race of alien had its own culture with complex social structures. I liked that the different types of aliens didn’t automatically understand each other but that the difficulties of translation were thoroughly described. The encounters among the different types of aliens often seemed to involve a great deal of political posturing.

This book really seems to be describing the social intereactions among various human groups. It seems like you could replace the names of alien races like hani, kif, knnn, stsho, and so on with American, French, Saudi, Japanese, and so on. The distinction among the different human cultures seems quite trivial when considered against races of alien, including some who breathe methane or have multiple genders for instance.

There were some aspects of the novel I didn’t quite get into like all the detailed description of space navigation and some internal Chanur family conflict described near the end. On the whole, however, I liked this book and will likely read more from C.J. Cherryh in the future.

... is called “A Separate Peace” by John Knowles. I chose this book while browsing one of the featured titles racks at a Borders bookstore. What appealed to me about it was it’s billing on the back cover as “parable of the dark side of adolescence” between two friends. I seem to be into these type of coming-of-age stories involving some momentous event between friends or best friends because I never really had a “best friend”, and it fascinates me to think of what it would have been like and the range of emotions such a relationship would entail.

The story is set at an exclusive boy’s boarding school in New Hampshire in 1942, and it’s interesting how War World II influences the thoughts, the mood, the goals, and the actions of the characters, even the games the boys play for fun. The author uses rich language which provides the reader with sharp imagery not only of the physical world but the mental experience of the lead character, Gene, from whose perspective the story is told.

Beyond the pervasiveness of the war, what really intrigued me about this story were the questions regarding the meaning of friendship that were raised, like:

• When does love and respect become jealousy and rivalry?

• Have you ever lost sight of your own goals trying hard to accommodate your friend and being with him to the point where it’s not good for either of you?

• Have you ever used your influence to dupe your friend into doing something against his best interests for your own benefit and to exert your dominance over him?

• Have you ever attributed bad intentions to your friend only to realize later that it was you and not he that ever had any ill will?

I found this book very powerful, I highly recommend it.

… is called “The Stranger” by Albert Camus. I chose this book based on fateaccompli’s recommendation ( http://www.43things.com/entries/view/2372060 ). I really need to thank her for helping to reawaken my appetite for substantive works of fiction by recommending such thought-provoking books as I haven’t read much fiction in recent years. This is the second Camus book for me. I read “The Plague” when I was in college, both in English translation and in the original French. Although translations are good, there are subtleties that get lost in the process. If I can find the time to brush up on my French, I would like to read this book again in its original language.

The question that comes to my mind after reading “The Stranger” is that if we all die anyway and face the same eventuality no matter who we are, does it really matter how we live our lives? For a moment I just assume that there is no afterlife and no divine rendering of justice and that we make our own personal heaven or hell for ourselves while we’re alive. It seemed that Meursault, the anti-hero of the story, was able to adapt to any kind of situation with indifference because of his emotional detachment from anything other than his own fleeting sensory experiences of the moment. He didn’t commit any action with real intent for malice, but even if he did would it matter? Would it matter if every action he did was a good deed? No, it would not! Well, at least not in terms of escaping the nothingness of death. That’s the absurdity of life. We all face the same eventuality and living an amoral life as Meursault did or the life of a saint is in some way the same. It seems that there is something else that needs to motivate you to be a “moral” person, but I haven’t thought deeply enough about what this is yet. Well, it looks like I have something new to ponder if I some moments of idleness or boredom!