How the hell does he write dialogue like that? Seriously, it boggles my freaking mind even as I'm reading. I think to myself, Oh my god, there is more emotion, action, tension, depth packed into this page-and-a-half of nothing but barely adorned spoken lines by two characters than in an entire Dan Brown book. I read this book in two days and if I hadn't been sick on the plane I probably would have finished it in one. Unbelievable.
Monday, July 01, 2013
the places in between and liar's poker
The rest of the way home sucked. I got brutally sick on the plane and spent the last seven hours of the flight using every bathroom in economy at least once, and the back-right one at least six times. Turns out I also had a fever. So Sunday I was a dehydrated mess, although in the plus column Mom visited and bring Gatorade!
Anyway, some quick thoughts on Liar's Poker and The Places in Between, which I read back-to-back on this trip. Both are pretty well-written accounts of journeys taken by men in their mid/late-20s into utterly different alien worlds: in the former, the world of 80's boom-market bond trading; in the latter, the desperately poor series of communities on the road between Herat and Kabul in 2002. As you might imagine, the books have different tones and different lessons, although it was interesting to note how clearly and explicitly both writers drew lessons from their experiences. I wouldn't call either of these a great book but I enjoyed reading them.
The Places in Between definitely qualifies as an incredible adventure and something of a throwback to the days of Romantic (and then Victorian) Voyages Into the Unknown, a la Joseph Banks in Tahiti or any number of British Empire explorers. It's a footnote in the book but given my work I couldn't help zeroing in on the point he makes about the poverty of development work in a place like Afghanistan, where Westerners come into the country with prescriptions for how to run everything, produce grand strategies and plans in consultation with a tiny number of powerful people and absolutely no understanding of the priorities and needs of the vast majority of the people they are ostensibly there to help. And then they (the expats) leave after a year or two at most, and the next wave arrives and makes new plans. He compares capital-D Development unfavorably to old imperialism in the sense that the old regimes recruited people to spend years or decades living in the colony, learning the local language and culture. They did that in order to better exploit the colonies, of course, but they recognized the need to know how the places they'd taken over worked. We pay lip-service to that idea now but in many places, especially dangerous places like Afghanistan, it really is just that. Stewart writes with humility and honesty and his courage is pretty stunning. He's now a Conservative MP in the UK (he's Scottish), after apparently being Labour before. Wonder how that change happened.
Liar's Poker is about the meteoric rise and the beginning of the end of Salomon Brothers, where Michael Lewis first worked out of grad school. It's just about the insane culture of Salomon and Wall Street in the 80's and I'm not going to finish this thought now. Something something greed recklessness disproportionate power relative to value added to society blah blah blah. Maybe later.
Anyway, some quick thoughts on Liar's Poker and The Places in Between, which I read back-to-back on this trip. Both are pretty well-written accounts of journeys taken by men in their mid/late-20s into utterly different alien worlds: in the former, the world of 80's boom-market bond trading; in the latter, the desperately poor series of communities on the road between Herat and Kabul in 2002. As you might imagine, the books have different tones and different lessons, although it was interesting to note how clearly and explicitly both writers drew lessons from their experiences. I wouldn't call either of these a great book but I enjoyed reading them.
The Places in Between definitely qualifies as an incredible adventure and something of a throwback to the days of Romantic (and then Victorian) Voyages Into the Unknown, a la Joseph Banks in Tahiti or any number of British Empire explorers. It's a footnote in the book but given my work I couldn't help zeroing in on the point he makes about the poverty of development work in a place like Afghanistan, where Westerners come into the country with prescriptions for how to run everything, produce grand strategies and plans in consultation with a tiny number of powerful people and absolutely no understanding of the priorities and needs of the vast majority of the people they are ostensibly there to help. And then they (the expats) leave after a year or two at most, and the next wave arrives and makes new plans. He compares capital-D Development unfavorably to old imperialism in the sense that the old regimes recruited people to spend years or decades living in the colony, learning the local language and culture. They did that in order to better exploit the colonies, of course, but they recognized the need to know how the places they'd taken over worked. We pay lip-service to that idea now but in many places, especially dangerous places like Afghanistan, it really is just that. Stewart writes with humility and honesty and his courage is pretty stunning. He's now a Conservative MP in the UK (he's Scottish), after apparently being Labour before. Wonder how that change happened.
Liar's Poker is about the meteoric rise and the beginning of the end of Salomon Brothers, where Michael Lewis first worked out of grad school. It's just about the insane culture of Salomon and Wall Street in the 80's and I'm not going to finish this thought now. Something something greed recklessness disproportionate power relative to value added to society blah blah blah. Maybe later.
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