Book Review: The Art of the Deal

By Donald J Trump

The Art of the Deal is the best, hugest, and most successful treatise on the conduct of business ever written. If you don´t happen to agree you are a stiff and a lightweight. As Trump himself frequently tells his large crowds at campaign rallies, his two favorite books are The Bible, and coming in at a distant second, The Art of the Deal. As Bill Maher aptly put it “One of them is about a perfect being who teaches humanity the right way to live, and the other one is The Bible”. Trump likes his Magnum Opus so much, in fact, that any fan who holds a copy aloft during a campaign rally will cause The Donald to stop explaining how the wall will be built and instead sign the proffered book while lavishly complementing his adoring fan. Before resuming his speech Trump will then admonish Barack Obama for his lack of leadership and urge him to read his book.  

It is all too easy to get carried away when dealing with a man whom Charles Dickens would have called “too Dickensian”. As a somewhat professional reviewer of literary works I shall attempt to lay out the sage advice that Trump deigns to share and also draw upon his own words to explain some aspects of his presidential campaign that has puzzled media pundits. Although I enjoyed reading The Art of the Deal, I would like to point out that this isn´t an endorsement of his campaign, I´m not stumping for Trump.

Born in Queens in 1946, Donald Trump has real estate in his blood. His father, Fred Trump, came from humble beginnings but managed to make it good as a real estate developer through grit and hard work, the kind of man that Republicans have worshipped since the dawn of time. Fred Trump mostly built rent controlled apartments in Brooklyn and Queens, and stayed away from the glitzy Manhattan skyline that Donald Trump set out to, quite literally if you take Trump Tower into account, remake in his own image. His father, Trump writes, was a tough businessman who didn´t much care for fripperies and wasn´t impressed by high rollers. No surprise then that his father found all the expensive marble lavished upon Trump Tower and the bi-monthly polishing of all brass railing in the building a bit too extravagant. It makes you think that if Donald Trump`s business acumen runs in the family, his penchant for over-the-top drama does not.

The first chapter of the second best book ever written is titled Dealing: A Week in The Life. Any office drone or wage slave who has given up on the dream of upward mobility may peruse these pages to learn how one of the wealthiest people in the world lived during the neon tinted days of 1986, when the book was written. Trump rises early to sip his coffee and read the newspaper, before taking the elevator down to his office (He still lives and does most of his work in Trump Tower). His days are long and filled and deal-making as well as with meetings with interesting and influential people. On a typical Friday, according to the second best book ever written, he meets with a Greek shipping magnate as well as numerous architects and contractors working for him, before sauntering down to the lobby where David Letterman awaits his arrival with a film crew in tow. A week in the life is clearly tough and hectic. Therefore it´s no wonder that, when picking the marble to be used for renovating his private apartments shortly before meeting with the shipping magnate and Mr. Letterman, Trump opts for “…as close as you´re going to get, in the twentieth century, to the quality of Versailles”. If Trump, who claims Swedish ancestry, were to find himself at a dinner party in Stockholm, he might want to tone it down a bit and say that the marble was a leftover from a previous construction job and that the quarrymen were unionized.

The surprising, and surprisingly resilient, GOP front-runner has had his fair share of controversies since he launched his campaign in late June. When confronted with adversity, Trump has consistently gone on the attack, even when a lighter touch might have been more advisable. In the second best book ever written he explains:

“I´m very good to people who are good to me. But when people treat me badly or unfairly or try to take advantage of me, my general attitude, all my life, has been to fight back very hard. The risk is that you will make a bad situation worse, and I certainly don´t recommend this approach to everyone. But my experience is that if you´re fighting for something you believe in…things usually work out for the best in the end.”

Picking a fight with Fox News after the first Republican debate might not have seemed to be particularly wise for a populist candidate, but since he perceived that the questions he was asked by Megyn Kelly amounted to a slander on his larger than life character, he saw no choice but to leap into the breach.

The second aspect of the Trump campaign that is elaborated upon in The Art of the Deal, is his reluctance to hire pollsters or any kind of political consultants. Trump is himself, and unabashedly so, when he speaks to a fired up Crowd in Jacksonville Florida or Reno Nevada. Trump writes that he places no trust in committees or marketing surveys, instead he has always relied (or so he says), on his gut instinct and what people are telling him on the ground.

“…I don´t trust fancy marketing surveys. I do my own surveys and draw my own conclusions… If I´m thinking about buying a piece of property, I’ll ask the people who live nearby about the area…I ask and I ask and I ask, until I begin to get a gut feeling about something. And that´s when I make a decision.”

After he has let you in on a week of the Trump life and laid out the elements of his philosophy, see the quotes above, prospective readers are treated to a dazzling account of successful business deals. These include buying and renovating the Commodore Hotel in New York and building a gigantic Casino Hotel in Atlantic City. I don´t know the full details about the golden haired property mogul´s business deals, but if his own account is anything to go by then he must certainly be among the most successful people in his business. Some will no doubt point out that his businesses have gone bankrupt several times, the Trump Plaza in Atlantic City that he lauds in The Art of the Deal among them. I suspect the truth might lie somewhere in between these conflicting accounts.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Art of the Deal, even if the pages were sometimes so permeated with Trumpness that it became almost cloying. The book would be ideal for someone who is learning English since the language is so simple and straightforward, with a distinct lack of verbal ostentation or flourish. That, however, isn´t what you’re after in this genre, and when it comes to giving a glimpse into a life where everything is never enough and modesty is a problem that losers are saddled with, The Art of the Deal delivers. The one thing I wouldn´t want delivered to my doorstep, though, is the special Donald Trump edition of the Cadillac Allante that GM, in all their wisdom, decided to make.

Book Review: The girl in the spider´s web

By David Lagercrantz

The Girl in the spider´s web is the fourth installment in the best-selling Millennium series. Keen readers will no doubt be aware of the fact that the series creator and the author of the previous three books in the series, Stieg Larsson, sadly passed away a few years ago. There are some who would passionately argue that this book which I´m about to review should never have been written in the first place. I´m not about to wade into that debate, mainly because I wouldn´t know what I´m talking about, but I am going to talk about the book itself, which is a convincing enough work of fiction to stand on its own merits.

The reins of the Millennium series have been handed to David Lagercrantz, author of international footballer Zlatan Ibrahimović’s autobiography, I am Zlatan: My story on and off the field. This may not sound particularly relevant, but I assure you that it most certainly is. Writing about Ibrahimović’s spectacular life required the verbal ambidextrousness of Ernest Hemingway ditching his trademark staccato sentences to write a Tudor drama in iambic pentameter. Several of the brilliant and hilarious quotes from the book were actually not taken from lengthy interviews with Ibrahimović himself. Like a consummate musician delivering a symphony on the fly, Lagercrantz improvised quotes that perfectly encapsulated Mr. Ibrahimović. If anyone could pull this off then, it would had to have been Lagercrantz.

Although he possesses left of center political views like the late Stieg Larsson, the two men are very different. A scion of privilege whose father was the editor of the country’s largest newspaper for twenty years, Lagercrantz´s origins story is considerably different from that of Stieg Larsson. Stieg came from very humble, blue collar beginning. His father worked in a smelting plant and later died of arsenic poisoning. It´s very rare that an author´s life is more exciting than that of his characters, but in 1977 Stieg went to Eritrea to train a squad of female recruits to the Eritrean People´s Liberation Front in the use of mortars, a weapons system he had mastered after he was conscripted into the Swedish military.

Little more than a year has passed since the events in the last book, The girl who kicked the hornet´s nest. The equal parts dreary and world weary journalist Mikael Blomkvist returns together with everyone´s favorite female antihero, Lisbeth Salander. There has been a lot of talk about whether Lagercrantz could “handle” Lisbeth Salander. The answer is quite simple, the Lisbeth Salander he portrays is not the same character as Stieg Larsson wrote about because that would simply be an impossibility. As an author entrusted with carrying on with a late colleagues work, Lagercrantz should be allowed a certain amount of leeway. I was not disappointed with the new Lisbeth Salander, and she wasn´t that different from the old one. The die-hard fans will probably not agree with me, but the rest of you can relax, the ship has been left in good hands.

The plot centers around the artificial intelligence research of the deeply flawed but brilliant genius Franz Balder and National Security Agency, possibly the least loved government agency in the history of the United States besides the DMV. With an ageing Mikael Blomkvist´s career in journalism on the ropes, a scoop about Balder and his ground-breaking research might be his last and best chance to stay relevant as a left of center journalist who is so noble he can´t be bought off by special interests and who is so boring that he makes Mitt Romney leading the Sunday sermon in a Mormon church seem interesting by comparison. Thankfully Lisbeth Salander is, as always, pursuing her own shadowy agenda, and the two of them soon cross paths once more. Faced by an implacable enemy from Lisbeth´s past who will stop at nothing to destroy her, she and Blomkvist must work together to save the life of Dr. Balder´s autistic son and stop his father´s research from falling into the wrong hands.

The plot is thoroughly enjoyable and perfect for a rainy day. Lagercrantz largely succeeds in doing the original Millennium trilogy justice. I did, however, feel that there was more to be wrung out of the story. Especially since I know that a sequel will be arriving in a smiling Amazon box before too long. Lagercrantz could easily have tied up all loose ends and made the book a hundred pages longer, as it stands now the avid reader will be left waiting for a sequel to see how it all ends. That said, I thoroughly enjoyed reading The girl in the spider´s web, and catching up with Blomkvist and Salander.

Book Review, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

By Reza Aslan

“You´re a Muslim, so why did you write a book about the founder of Christianity?”

The most awkward interview in the history of television must certainly have been when Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner interviewed Reza Aslan about his new book. No scholar, at least no one of distinction, likes to brag about his credentials, but the most awkward interview ever gave him no choice in the matter. After a hilarious interlude of stunned silence, Aslan replies that he is a scholar of religion with four different degrees as well as a fluency in biblical Greek, who has been studying the origins of Christianity for twenty years. The anchor doesn´t seem to grasp any of this and continues to press him relentlessly. At this point he understandably loses his patience and points out that “…this isn´t a Muslim opinion, this is an academic work of history…”. He also makes the rather convincing point that, being a scholar of religion, writing about Jesus is kind of your day job.

Fox News aside, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth offers a rare and fascinating glimpse into the life of one of the most famous people who ever lived. The crucial distinction that Reza makes early on is that there is an ocean of difference between Jesus the man and Jesus the Christ. Most people, I´m sure, knows at least the basics of Jesus´s life. Born into poverty in the small town of Nazareth, the young carpenter sets out on a divinely inspired mission with his apprentices in tow. A communist before there were any, and a hippie born way before the Swinging Sixties, he preaches about love and forgiveness but is unfortunately nailed to a cross by the rather nasty Pontius Pilate. After three days Jesus miraculously rises again and joins his father in heaven, with Pilate probably feeling rather cross (no pun intended). This version, as told by Hollywood-Catholic Mel Gibson in The passion of the Christ, doesn´t really match what leading scholars such as Aslan have found out about the real Jesus. Although the circumstances and significance of Jesus the Christ is also explained within it´s pages, the main purpose of Zealot is to shed light on who Jesus really was.   

Finding any accurate information about someone who lived two thousand years ago isn´t easy, especially since Jesus was crucified and one of the best sources of information about ancient romans is to study their often elaborate tombstones. These will reliably tell you about it´s owner´s name and occupation, but to a crucified criminal a tombstone was a rare luxury indeed. Maybe that´s why Aslan had to study Jesus´s life for two whole decades.

What we know for certain about the real Jesus is that, just like the Christ, he was born in Nazareth and ultimately crucified by the Romans. Unlike in The Life of Brian, the two unfortunate men crucified to his left and right were not merely bandits, they were so called “lestai”, a term used for rebels and insurrectionists who violently resisted the Roman occupation. This means with almost complete certainty that Jesus was also a dangerous and subversive “lestai”. Rather than being hanged next to someone who had nicked a loaf of bread in the marketplace, Jesus and his crucifixion-companions were the historical equivalent of dangerous terrorists. As some of you will no doubt already be thinking, this sounds rather like an altogether different man than the peace loving Marxist hippie who turned a woven basket into a fish. That´s because, Aslan argues to Fox News chagrin, the real Jesus was decidedly more Che Guevara than mother Theresa.

Zealot covers, besides Jesus, the violence and oppression in one of the most politically unstable provinces of the Roman Empire. Even before Jesus was born, there had been numerous self-proclaimed messiahs who rebelled against Rome, even one who was also called Jesus. All of them were put to the sword, while the wealthiest Jewish families happily supported the empire out of their own self-interest. The reasons for this lack of public order are many, and includes many hardships as well as the occasional drought, but at the heart of it lay the Monotheistic nature of the Jewish faith. While the Romans worshipped a variety of different gods, the inhabitants of Judea were certain that their deity was the only one. When the Romans conquered a different people, such as the Gauls or the Carthaginians, their gods were often welcomed into the roman Pantheon and the locals could continue to pray to whatever idol that took their fancy, as long as they also worshipped the emperor. For the descendants of Moses, who were rather more serious about their religion than most people are today, this presented a bit of a problem. In fact, from the perspective of the Roman state, most of what Jesus the man championed and believed in would´ve been viewed as sedition and treason. The man who was called Jesus of Nazareth was a Jewish ultranationalist and religious fundamentalist who wanted to overthrow Roman rule and restore his people’s ancestral home to the care of their almighty monotheistic god. With an attitude like that Christianity would have never become the Roman state religion, which happened during the reign of Emperor Constantine in the fourth century CE.

Granted, not that much of Jesus´s life is known for certain, but what Aslan writes is not guesswork, his conclusions are based firmly on scripture and contemporary sources. In case you would like to argue with him, come prepared, since Zealot contains more than fifty pages of notes explaining his various sources in greater detail than you could ever imagine. Unless you have also spent the last twenty years of your life studying Jesus, that is.

Where then, do we find the origins of the peaceful and hippie-like Jesus the Christ? To be brutally honest with you, I´m an Atheist and tired quickly of leafing through all the scripture that Aslan referenced. This book is certainly very interesting, but it´s not a page-turner. Decoding the hidden meanings of ancient scripture and religious superstition requires an understanding of the political climate of the time it originates from. Basically it all boiled down to the fact that the efforts of successive Roman emperors to violently suppress Christianity failed and the followers of Christ steadily grew in number. This was not due to the influence of Jesus´s brother James, who shared his more famous brother´s nationalistic view when it came to their religion. The founder of Christianity as we know it was Saul of Tarsus, a contemporary of Jesus and James. He was struck by an epiphany when travelling from Jerusalem to Damascus. Exactly what the epiphany meant or looked like remains slightly unclear, but since we are talking about religion and not science I suppose vagueness isn´t a deal-breaker. This epiphany came after Jesus had perished and the epiphany meant that Saul, now for some reason named Paul, believed that his was the one and only version of Christianity. Paul´s Christianity was, unlike the version preached by James, a missionary one, where converts who were not Jewish were welcome without first having to be circumcised. On top of this substantial benefit there was also the fact that the original temple in Jerusalem was burned to the ground by Roman soldiers under would-be-emperor Titus in 70 CE after the Jewish people had risen in armed rebellion. Without a sacred temple and a priestly cult anchoring the fledgling religion to the land of Jesus´s birth, the more universal version of Christianity preached by Paul was now rapidly picking up steam.

The intricacy of early Christianity’s history might require several years of study at a seminar to fully grasp, but Aslan manages to condense it to a version that is accessible to non-clergymen. The Fox News anchor who criticized Aslan might prefer her colleague Bill O´Reilly´s Killing Jesus. That book, I strongly suspect, covers neither Jesus the man nor Jesus the Christ, but the version of Jesus that HBO´s Bill Maher jokingly refers to as supply-side Jesus. If you are interested in reading about supply-side Jesus I would highly recommend The Reagan Diaries.  

Book Review: Once Upon a time in Russia

By Ben Mezrich

The early nineteen nineties was a period of immense social and economic upheaval in Russia. After nearly eighty years of communist rule, the Berlin wall came crashing down and with it the socialist republics of Eastern Europe. When the Soviet Union finally crumbled this was hailed in the west as the triumph of liberty over oppression. For a small number of immensely talented but unscrupulous men, this was not so much a moment to savor their newfound freedoms as a chance to get filthy rich if they acted fast enough. Once Upon a Time in Russia tells the tale of how modern Russia came to be by charting the rise and fall of the oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Written like a suspense novel yet based entirely on facts, it proves that actual history is often more dramatic and unbelievable than fiction.

Berezovsky´s tale is a tragic and Shakespearean one. A brilliant young mathematician who rose to be one of the most powerful and wealthy men in Russia, before falling from grace and dying under mysterious circumstances in his manor home in Berkshire, England.  For a man of boundless energy and ambition, the fall of the Soviet Union gave a young Berezovsky the opportunity to rise high above the vast majority of his fellow Russians. The old communist order didn´t go quietly, however, and Russia´s transformation from crumbling socialism to vulture capitalist free-for-all was exceedingly messy and corrupt. Old state owned businesses and assets were suddenly thrust into a cutthroat open market where they were often sold for a pittance. Berezovsky’s rise began when he and a Georgian business associate started LogoVAZ, a company developing payment systems and software for the old Soviet car company AvtoVAZ, manufacturers of the Lada automobile. I don´t know what kind of computing power they had access to in the old Soviet Union, but if Berezovsky had offered them a pocket calculator it would probably have been a vast upgrade. His main business scheme brilliantly profited of the rampant hyperinflation that Gorbachev´s Perestroika had unleashed upon the country. By purchasing factory fresh cars on consignment, paying only a small down-payment, he sold the cars on to various dealerships and only repaid his debts once the inflation had rendered the outstanding sums largely symbolic. This might would never have worked under normal circumstances, but the so called “Red Directors” who were appointed by the Russian government to run its formerly state owned businesses were hopelessly inept and corrupt. Like myopic dinosaurs they had more or less no idea what capitalism meant and had probably yet to swap their Mahorkas for decadent and capitalist Marlboros.

His rising wealth meant that Berezovsky could enter the game of politics and become a serious power broker in Russia. His moment of sublime triumph came during the Russian election in 1996. The incumbent president Boris Yeltsin was massively unpopular and virtually a dead man walking who battled a string of heart attacks as well as prodigious alcoholism. By all accounts his main opponent, the charismatic communist Gennady Zyuganov, looked set to win by a landslide. Berezovsky resolved to prevent this by any means necessary, and at the world economic forum in Davos that year he managed to assemble a cabal of fellow oligarchs who feared a return to communism more than they hated dealing with each other. Much political maneuvering behind closed doors as well as untold millions of rubles secured a victory for Yeltsin as well as a figurative jewel in Berezovsky´s crown. Here Mezrich delves into the minds of our favorite oligarch and tries to explain his motivations. It wasn´t just money, he reckons. Men like Berezovsky honestly thought that what they were doing were not only in their own best interests, but that it was also best for mother Russia. They dreaded a return to communism and sought to turn Russia into a neo liberal republic without any closet pinko sympathies. Electing the ageing Yeltsin, whose skin was wax-like and pale and his every movement slow and labored, meant that Russia would finally escape the clutches of Stalinism. I get the impression that there might have been some sort of healthy middle ground between an Ayn Rand-style free market and Communism. This is something that I remember Dilip Hiro writing about when I reviewed After Empire.  

In Russian krysha means roof. Besides being the word for what you hopefully have over your head, it is also a Russian slang word for protector. In a society where corruption was rife and business success depended on having the powers that be on your side, a krysha was a well-connected individual you payed to keep various gangsters and unscrupulous government officials off your back. The distinction between the two doesn´t always seem to have been crystal clear. This was how the fateful partnership between Berezovsky and his protégé Roman Abramovich came into being. The future owner of the Chelsea football club grew up under humble circumstances yet eventually came to eclipse even Berezovsky himself. But to do so, Abramovich needed Berezovsky´s connections to help him bag that elusive first billion. Having come a long way since selling imported rubber ducks from his Moscow apartment, Abramovich now eyed the vast state owned oil companies with the same rapacious lust that might normally be reserved for a premier league footballer seeing a Range Rover with ostrich leather seats. Together with Berezovsky, he acquired a controlling interest in the oil giant Sibneft. Abramovich seems to be the kind of brilliant and self-made billionaire that Donald Trump would have you believe that he is, and both men were soon raking in the petro-rubles like there was no tomorrow.

At this point Berezovsky, with countless yachts and lavish mansions all around the Mediterranean, seemed to have it made. However, his constant need to be in the center of things eventually got the better of him. After helping Vladimir Putin get elected in 2000, he was summoned along with every other oligarch worth mentioning to an ominous meeting to be held at Stalin´s former Dacha outside Moscow. Putin explained to the gathered oligarchs in no uncertain terms that from here on out, they were allowed to keep making money as long as they stayed out of politics. The luncheon that followed was utterly delectable, but Mezrich is probably right when he paints the mood among the gathered oligarchs as being a little uneasy. What followed was Berezovsky taking on a fight that he lost spectacularly. After the Kursk submarine was lost at sea with all hands, he ordered his television company to attack Putin savagely. This attack failed to dent Vladimir Vladimirovich´s popularity, and Berezovsky soon had to flee to Great Britain to avoid being thrown into jail. His close associate, the former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko had previously been put behind bars under dubious circumstances and getting him released had taken all of Berezovsky’s considerable resolve.

For Abramovich, a man who has always avoided the media spotlight at all costs, Berezovsky was becoming a liability. He strongly encouraged his associate to buy out his stake in the oil company, Sibneft, that they owned together. This is said to have taken place under dramatic circumstances in the Swiss Alps in 2001. Mezrich skillfully builds up the suspense and allows himself the literal flourish of having Abramovich descend onto the ski-resort in a helicopter. The money he made out of this reluctant business deal could have made Berezovsky set for life, unfortunately he seem to have been more profligate than all the Kardashians put together. He constantly lavished huge sums on various projects to discredit Putin´s government.

His friendship and association deepened with the like-minded Litvinenko during their shared exile, but the latter sadly lost his life due to polonium poisoning in 2006. Naturally foul play was, and still is, suspected. As if things couldn´t have gotten any worse, Berezovsky faced a costly divorce while his coffers were drying up. Instead of trying to deal with the situation in a calm and controlled way, and maybe selling of a villa in Antibes or two, I suspect he wanted go out the way he had always lived his life, firing on all cylinders. In 2011 Berezovsky launched the largest civil court case in British history against Roman Abramovich. He accused him of blackmailing him into selling his share of Sibneft and demanded 3 billion pounds in damages. The ensuing trial was torture for Abramovich, who abhorred the attention of the media, while the British gutter press had a field day. Ultimately Berezovsky lost, and emerged from the courtroom a broken man.

The man they found dead in his mansion barely two years later was a mere shadow of who he was in his prime. A man whose story was one of incredible success and even more terrible setbacks. I am glad that Mezrich decided to tell his tale, and in doing so shine a light onto a period of Russian history that is steeped in wealth, power and corruption. 

Book Review: An Utterly Impartial History of Britain

By John O´Farrell

In the new BBC2 documentary “Are our kids tough enough?” a team of crack Chinese teachers are parachuted in to a British school to whip a gaggle of slothful youths into shape. They quickly discover that discipline isn´t quite up to their exacting standards, one young female even fled the classroom with tears streaming down her face when she learned that Zayn Malik had quit One Direction. “I found it difficult to understand such emotional behavior over a pop band”, was the understated yet hilarious response from teacher Yang Jun. Subsequently, when John O´Farrell points to the necessity of his book by lamenting the quality of the history education he received in school, I find it very easy to believe him.

His Utterly impartial history of Britain is just that, except for the occasional good humored joke about how awful Margaret Thatcher was and how she, in his mind, utterly ruined the largest island in Europe. O´Farrell´s trick to keep the readers engaged and on the edges of their seats throughout his 500 plus page brick is to not get awfully bogged down with details and tell the history of Britain with a hefty side order of humor. Since I would never expose my readers to any levity, his casual approach to two thousand years of brutish and bloody history was quite a shock, but I nevertheless persevered. I must admit that after a while his irreverent style started to grow on me ever so slightly.

Starting with Julius Caesar´s invasion of Britannia in 55 BC and ending with World War II and Clement Attlee´s Labor government, the reader is treated to a witty narrative that progresses briskly through the most momentous events in British history. If you feel that you could do with a bit of history in your life but don´t fancy yourself to be an expert, this book is a perfect start. If you already know that General Gordon made his stand where the Blue Nile met the White Nile and have read Alan Moorhead’s twin masterpieces most of what you read won´t be a surprise, but O’Farrell’s reasonably sharp wit will still bring out a big smile and quite a few laughs.  

This, I suspect, is crucial if you want someone to bear with you over two millennia of history in today´s world of ever shortening attention spans. When it comes to telling the story of how a nation came to be, the saga of great Britain is one of the more difficult and complex ones. To be honest, I´m not even sure if you can call Great Britain a country or if Scotland´s status is the same as South Carolina is in the United States. But then again I´m not British so I don´t understand cricket or why they stubbornly drive on the wrong side of the road either.    

Before the romans came along the Britons were a loosely organized patchwork of marauding tribes who painted their faces with blue woad. If you wonder what they would have looked like pre-civilization you have merely to travel to one of Greece’s islands and wait around the dingiest part of town until you spot a gang of British teens on a booze cruise. The woad and lice infested bear pelts may have gone out of style, otherwise the Britons you encounter will behave just like their ancestors.

After the romans upped and left, the British Isles headed off into the dark ages where they witnessed many Viking invasions and much drama. During the hundred year´s war they repeatedly humbled the French in famous battles such as Crécy Agincourt before Joan of Arc stepped in to save their beleaguered adversaries. By the time Queen Elizabeth saw of the Spanish armada, Britain was still seated at the kid´s table while Spain and Portugal ruled the world, but with king Philip´s ships rotting at the bottom of the Atlantic, Britain was soon on the rise. Advances in science and technology led to Britain rising above the pack and becoming top dog in the world following the industrial revolution. If someone had told Julius Caesar that the savages at the end of the earth would one day rule an empire over which the sun would never set, he would most likely not have laughed at you. Provided he spoke English. If you told the same story to a band of booze-cruisers swashbuckling around Kos, they would probably find it equally hard to believe. If BBC2 decides to make another season of the series, the Chinese super teachers will no doubt have their work cut out for them once the vacationing Britons return home.

O’Farrell sums it all up by noting the irony that by the time the empire had been lost, ordinary British people had just gained their individual freedoms. No doubt a writer who votes Tory would have ended the book with Margaret Thatcher´s trickle down economy instead of Clement Attlee´s social reforms, but there you are. Two thousand years of drama played out in one Great but also slightly damp and misty Britain.           

   

Book Review: The Ascent of Money

By Niall Fergusson

You might not think of it very often, but the financial system that permeates our very lives is a product of thousands of years of innovation that has today reached staggering complexity. No society on earth, even North Korea, has found it expedient to dispense with money. Renowned Scottish historian Niall Fergusson has undertaken the ambitious task of trying to explain in a reasonably straightforward fashion what it´s all about, and at the same time indulge in the favorite national pastime of occasionally bashing the French. While this may not strictly be a page turner (even though I read it pretty much from cover to cover, but that´s why I run this blog), it is nevertheless very interesting and thought provoking.

To explain to the reader what money truly is, Fergusson takes us back to fifteenth-century, and the swashbuckling Spaniard Francisco Pizarro. A conquistador who went to the new world to conquer for Spain, for God and in order to get filthy rich. In the last of three military expeditions to Peru in 1534, he bested the Peruvian emperor Atahualpa in a pitched battle. Pizarro had only a force of one hundred and eighty men and twenty horses, against him stood the multitudes of one of the most populous states in South America. Quite how he managed to win with such ease with a force that size of what you normally leave behind to guard the baggage train is an astonishing feat. If you thought Leonidas and his brave three hundred were outnumbered, think again. The defeated emperor duly promised to pay him off by filling his throne room once with gold and twice with silver. This mighty hoard was the beginning of Spain´s rise to become a world superpower, yet the abundant mineral wealth they went on to accumulate (read strip mine with slave labor) proved to be a curse as well as a blessing. The concept of money and wealth, Fergusson will no doubt tell you while pouring himself a Scotch and gazing out the window at a misty Scottish hillside, is not the same as metal coins. All things similar, an influx of precious metal will lead to inflation as well as hubris. While Spain grew complacent and relied almost entirely on their supply of silver from the new world, their enemies, the protestant Dutch, were busy setting up the world´s first stock exchange. The Spanish Empire were soon left hopelessly behind in terms of financial development, and their power soon started to wane. A silver coin is only worth as much as someone else is willing to pay for it. Money is not metal dug up from the earth, it is trust. How else could it be that people labor hard and only see the sweat of their brow as a number on a digital screen? Yet this system of ”virtual” money will let you hand over your make believe currency in exchange for a cup of coffee and the latest issue of The Economist, with no questions asked. This is because it is all about trust, not a sliver of precious metal with the head of some Spanish monarch stamped on its side.    

Having established the nature of money and why we can´t do without it, Fergusson tells the story of financial innovation in Italy during the renaissance, a bond market for government debt to finance large armies of mercenaries. This rip-roaring read continues with the birth of the first stock market in Amsterdam and the tale of the Rothschild family turning the tides against Napoleon. The pages are all jam-packed with financial history of great significance, as well as the occasional nugget of dry wit. To recount everything would, quite literally, take all day, but a great deal of it centers around that most apocalyptic and headline grabbing of all matters concerning money, financial crises.

This is one of the two occasions in the book where Fergusson is immensely proud of being a Scotsman and gleefully engages in some good old French-bashing. Besides being the cradle of the modern insurance industry, Scotland also brought the dandy come rouge come swindler John Law into the world. Brilliant but immensely flawed and unscrupulous, Law fled London after he had killed another man in a duel fought over the affections of a fair young lady. Lawson soon ended up in Amsterdam, without the lady, and quickly became involved in the stock market. After becoming the contemporary equivalent of a city banker with red suspenders, he moved to France. At this point he somehow convinced Louis XV and his regent that he should be made Controller General of finances and start the first French national bank, the Banque Genéralé. Law´s scheme consisted of selling shares in a sprawling company that enjoyed a monopoly on France´s colonial trade and printing money to stimulate the domestic economy. At first, everything was rosy and everyone involved made a tidy sum. However, the lofty expectations for the colonies in the new world bore little resemblance to reality and the scheme soon came crashing down. This crippled France´s economy, not to mention Law´s career. Ferguson makes the case that this economic collapse was one of the causes behind the French revolution. Moving on from the Mississippi Bubble, he covers more recent crises such as the Great Depression, the Savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and the Great Recession (the 2008 crisis covered exhaustively in Stress Test, review available on your favorite blog). As far as the most recent crisis is concerned, Ferguson´s account is naturally a bit limited since the book was written when it was still raging, and I would be so bold as to say I enjoyed reading the less contemporary bit a lot more, since he seems to lose the plot ever so slightly when he covers the more recent times. After Ferguson writes about Milton Friedman he seems to assume that the bespectacled libertarian´s views are some sort of universal truth and fully embraces supply-side austerity. When talking about the financial cries of 1929 and 2008, Ferguson gives all sorts of long-winded explanations yet opts to not mention the New Deal and the importance of regulating financial markets effectively. The remedies he suggests instead seems vague and far-fetched.  

The chapter about Chile and the fall of Salvador Allende is on the verge of being factually incorrect, since he paints Allende as the only villain without even mentioning that it was the Nixon administration that secretly toppled him. Ferguson seems to have overlooked the fact that the financial crisis in Chile that proved fateful to Allende was the product of the least loved US President of all time wanting to destabilize Chile politically and economically. Nixon is on the record of saying he wanted to “smash that son of a bitch Allende”.

Despite my criticisms The Ascent of Money is an interesting and enjoyable read. Ferguson ties it up neatly at the end when he suggest that the financial system is not something that is inherently evil, but mere a reflection of those that created it. Like a reflection of ourselves, where all the flaws and quirks of mankind are there to see if only we care to look. If you want more of Niall Fergusson, may I also suggest his thoroughly enjoyable “Civilization: The Six Killer Apps of Western Power”.

Book Review, Red Road from Stalingrad

By Mansur Abdulin

The plot of a feel-good book usually revolves around a thirty something woman who works for an advertising agency in the city, who one day meets an artsy man with curly hair. They move in together in a cottage situated in front of a meadow and starts a bed and breakfast together with a Labrador Retriever and lives happily ever after. If you really want to put things in perspective and feel better about your life then, trust me, you don´t want any of that. What you need to do is read Red Road from Stalingrad. Do that and I can guarantee you that you will never complain about anything ever again.

A Muslim Tartar born in Siberia at the time of the Communist revolution, Mansur Abdulin fought for the Red Army during the Second World War. In Red Road from Stalingrad, he tells openly and candidly what it was like to serve in an army infamous for its harshness and brutality, during what was quite possibly the most destructive conflict that man has ever fought. As a miner, Abdulin was exempt from being drafted when the war broke out, but his sense of duty and patriotism compelled him to volunteer. The recruiting sergeant even tried talking him out of joining the army, but Abdulin demanded to be allowed to serve. After training at an infantry school in Tashkent, Abdulin was offered a cushy staff job by a kindly general, but declined and asked to be sent to the front.

He arrived at the outskirts of Stalingrad and was blooded during the savage fighting to dislodge the German troops stationed in the outskirts of the city. On November 6^th 1942 Abdulin killed a German soldier with an SVT rifle. As the first soldier of the 1034^th regiment to inflict a casualty on the enemy, he is awarded a medal for bravery. During the time he spends at the front, from November 1942 until November 1943, when he is wounded by a mortar blast and sent home, Abdulin is subjected to constant hardship and heavy fighting. Periods of rest are few and far between.

As a mortar man, Abdulin has to carry a piece of the disassembled mortar weighing between 20-30 kilograms as well as his regular kit when his regiment is on the march, which is to say nearly all the time. He notes that he is used to back-breaking manual labor and is certainly among the toughest men in his unit, having worked in the Siberian mines since he was a child. Yet the constant strain nearly brakes his body while the horrors he witnesses nearly brakes his spirit. He recalls one time when he falls down and starts to cry, unable to carry the mortar another step, but somehow forces himself to carry on. If someone like him is nearly done in, he notes soberly, his comrades must really be going through hell. These days many bankers from the city spend their weekend climbing mountains, engaged in supposedly tough military style marches. I wonder if they would have impressed the young Abdulin and his fellow soldiers.

Besides carrying the heavy mortar and being constantly under fire from the Germans, there was also an unending supply of vicious fleas to contend with. While the Germans had to take a nap before they resumed shooting at them in the morning, the fleas where a plague that never let up. While passing the burning wrecks of destroyed tanks, Abdulin recalls how he often fantasized about throwing himself onto their hulls, desperate for any relief from the itching flea bites. The Germans and the fleas and the heavy mortar notwithstanding, there was also constant famine and cold. Hot meals were served from field kitchens or “Kashas”, but these didn´t always reach the front and the soldiers often had to make do with what they could forage on their own. Having captured several German flare guns, they often managed to fool the German transport planes to drop their supplies over their positions instead. One time they hit the jackpot, and managed to get their hands on several crates of Christmas presents sent to the front from families in Germany. This treasure trove included, tobacco, chocolate, dried fruits, schnapps and pornography. Due to the fact that it was strictly banned in the Soviet Union, Abdulin and his comrades were shocked when saw the indecent pictures. Naturally, they couldn’t always rely on stealing supplies from the Germans and a state of near starvation was the norm. When they were served oatmeal porridge with sunflower oil after a particular harsh fight, Abdulin tells of how ecstatic he were, since he hadn´t eaten for several days. As someone who can´t swallow even a spoonful of porridge without a generous helping of milk and marmalade, this alone was quite enough to convince me of the war´s hardships.     

After his regiment had distinguished themselves in the fighting around Stalingrad, Abdulin´s 193^rd Division later became the 66^th Guards Rifle Division. This was a great honor, since the Guards regiments were the experienced elite of the red army, a privilege that came with better pay and conditions. Some of this was merely theoretical, since the frighteningly high casualty rate meant that combat units were quickly depleted and had to rely on a constant stream of reinforcements, meanwhile the supply situation was never dependable. Nevertheless, Abdulin and his comrades felt deeply honored and they could now wear a red star emblem on their uniforms and vehicles.

During the long marsh to the Dnieper, Abdulin´s regiment fought against several of Nazi Germany´s elite SS Divisions. The fighting was often so brutal and intense that you realize it´s a wonder anyone survived at all. Abdulin was one of a lucky few, and if you have seen the opening sequence of Enemy At the Gates, starring Jude Law, you know some of what it was like. And yes, the Soviets did have special squads led by Commissars assigned to the rear of the advance tasked with killing any who tried to flee. To charge into carefully prepared German positions was extremely dangerous, which Abdulin and his comrades did time and time again, but to refuse was to face a certain death. Once, when dragging an injured comrade towards the nearest first aid post, a cold hearted Commissar mistook Abdulin for a deserter and raised his pistol to shoot him. Luckily, from our perspective at least, the man is killed by a stray German artillery shell before he can carry out his grim work.

I myself had only read the classical German accounts of the eastern front, Guderian, von Mellenthin etc., and I must say it was both interesting and enlightening to see the other side´s perspective. The heroic men who climbed the steep cliffs of Normandy have rightly been praised time and time again, but those who fought in the east have not received the same praise, at least not outside Russia. This year marked the seventieth anniversary of the allied Victory in Europe, a victory that wouldn´t have been possible without men like Mansur Abdulin. He personally writes that the book came about because he felt that the story needed to be told, and since no one else in his regiment had decided to take up the pen, he did so reluctantly. It proved to be a story well worth telling, as well as a reminder that if you think that you have it too tough, you need to think again.