Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Sunday August 8, 2010
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NEW IN PAPERBACK Insights into the very -- and not so very -- young
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ISBN NA
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Reviewed by Nora Krug
The problem with writing about children, Alison Gopnik admits in "The Philosophical Baby" (Picador, $16), is that "practically everything you say turns out to sound like a greeting card." But that hasn't stopped Gopnik, a philosopher and a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, from having a lot to say about them. "Many profound questions about human nature can be answered by thinking about children," she explains, including those "about imagination, truth, consciousness, and also identity, love, and morality."
That's a lot of profundity for some very small shoulders (and some might say it has the ring of a greeting-card platitude). But Gopnik mines science and philosophy to illustrate, effectively, how many of the central qualities of children -- imagination, lack of inhibition, curiosity -- help us understand human nature. She explains, for example, how imaginary play and early learning about cause-and-effect foster the "evolutionary advantages" of being able to "think about future, past, and present possible worlds." And those "noes" of the terrible twos? Maybe not so terrible: "Being able to say 'no' and 'uh-oh,'" she writes, "immediately puts you in the world of the counterfactual and the possible -- the road not taken, the possibility that isn't real." In other words, childish negativity primes us for the capacity to change and grow for the better. Such insights may offer little practical help to the parent struggling with a child's tantrum, but understanding the young mind may be the most valuable step toward figuring out how to manage it.
At age 27, Christopher R. Beha found himself in something of an existential crisis -- feeling not only detached but also detached from his "sense of detachment, alienated from (his) own alienation," he explains in "The Whole Five Feet" (Grove, $14). He'd survived Princeton and cancer, had recently gotten a promotion at a job he didn't love and broken up with a girl he still loved. His debt was mounting, his novel remained unpublished, and he'd moved back into his parents' Manhattan home. "This attack, such as it was," he writes, was "not wholly unexpected." But rather than seek solace in the kind of things that make for racy memoirs -- drugs, sex, alcohol -- Beha finds a far more wholesome remedy: the Harvard Classics, a 51-volume anthology also known as the five-foot shelf, that comprises works by the likes of Plato, Cervantes, Emerson and Martin Luther.
In "The Whole Five Feet," Beha chronicles the year he spent immersed in these volumes. Part memoir, part Western-literature survey, the book is less gimmicky than its premise suggests. Beha's initial romantic notions -- reading and ruminating while sipping wine at a Manhattan cafe -- are interrupted by real life: the death of an aunt and his own illnesses. "The one common feature of all these books," he concludes, "was precisely the fact that they kept sending me back into the world."
From our previous reviews:
Ward Just revisits the inner circles of Washington, D.C., in "Exiles in the Garden" (Mariner, $14.95), a novel about a senator's son who chooses journalism over politics. Jonathan Yardley, who included the book on his 2009 favorites list, praised its subtle and sensitive portrayal of a father, a son and the city that shaped them.
As a family gathers to mourn its patriarch, its dysfunction is laid bare -- to darkly comedic effect -- in Jonathan Tropper's novel "This Is Where I Leave You" (Plume, $15). Carolyn See suggested the book as a worthy diversion "on a dreaded family holiday."
Kate Walbert weaves the personal and the political in "A Short History of Women" (Scribner, $15), a family saga told through the lives of five generations of its female members. Valerie Sayers called the book "a witty and assured testament to the women's movement and women writers, obscure and renowned."
Former Washington Post Book World editor Marie Arana "draws on her knowledge of Peruvian culture and politics" in "Lima Nights" (Dial, $15), a compelling novel about an unlikely couple that "shows us how easy it is to deceive ourselves and others when following a forbidden path of sex and love," wrote Frances Itani.
"Lit" (Harper, $14.99), Mary Karr's third memoir, "is a story not just of alcoholism but of coming to terms with families past and present," according to Valerie Sayers.
Ron Charles described Colson Whitehead's "wise, affectionate novel" "Sag Harbor" (Anchor, $15.95) as "a kind of black 'Brighton Beach Memoirs'" that's "spiced with the anxieties of being African-American in a culture determined to dictate what that means."
"Wildflower" (Random House, $15), by Mark Seal, tells the story of Joan Root, "an extraordinary adventurer," environmentalist and filmmaker who died mysteriously in Kenya in 2006, according to Rachel Saslow.
In "K Blows Top" (PublicAffairs, $14.95) former Washington Post writer Peter Carlson "does a marvelous job of recounting" Nikita Khrushchev's 1959 visit to America, "one of the most outlandish episodes in the annals of Cold War history," according to Jacob Heilbrunn.
Woody Holton's biography "Abigail Adams" (Free Press, $18) stands out in its portrayal of the wife of President John Adams "not as a forerunner of modern feminism but as an 18th-century woman making the best of a difficult situation," wrote Rosemarie Zagarri.
Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Taylor reveal "the complexity of a simple-seeming virtue" in "On Kindness" (Picador, $13), according to Michael Dirda.
Nora Krug reviews paperbacks monthly for The Washington Post. She can be reached at krugn(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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CHASING GOLDMAN SACHS: How the Masters of the Universe Melted Wall Street Down ... and Why They'll Take Us to the Brink Again
Suzanne McGee
Crown Business
ISBN 978 0 307 46011 0
398 pages
$27
Reviewed by Donna Foote
I pity any author peddling a book about the financial crisis after the publication of "Too Big To Fail," "The Big Short" and dozens of other exhaustive investigations. Yet "Chasing Goldman Sachs" is an exceptionally lucid, well-written account of how and why the financial system broke down; readers need only beware that, despite its title, this book reveals very little about Goldman Sachs.
By now the stories of risky mortgages, underregulated banks and ludicrously complex investment instruments have become familiar. McGee's book takes the reader much deeper into the history and culture of Wall Street, which is the true cause of the financial disaster. The mortgage meltdown -- like Hurricane Katrina or any perfect storm -- could inflict as much damage as it did only because the conditions for destruction were already in place.
A contributing editor at Barron's, McGee encourages us to think of Wall Street's historical function as a money grid, a utility that ensures reliable, efficient flow of money from point A to point B. This mundane but reasonably lucrative duty, she argues, used to make up the bulk of what investment banks did. However, beginning in the 1980s, several things happened that took Wall Street in a very different direction. One was the rise of a shadow banking system, in the form of hedge funds and private equity firms. These lightly regulated entities earned outsized returns by pursuing risky strategies that would have been unthinkable for most traditional Wall Street banks; over time, private equity firms and hedge funds became the Wall Street banks' best clients.
A second development was that investment banks found that they could make more money by implementing their own investment strategies than by advising corporate clients as they used to do. In the old days of the dot-com boom, for example, a firm like Morgan Stanley would underwrite an initial public offering for an Internet company, taking a fee for selling shares to outside investors. Today, an investment bank is just as likely to make its own investment in the company, taking on greater risk for potentially greater reward.
The third and perhaps most transformative development happened mostly in the 1990s, when the largest investment banks -- Bear Stearns; divisions of Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley -- all became publicly traded companies. This move increased the capital available to the banks, but if it had any other positive effects, they are hard to find in McGee's account.
The drive to maximize profits to shareholders, to improve the return on equity -- the ultimate yardstick used when "chasing Goldman Sachs" -- led Wall Street firms into all sorts of behavior that separated their best interests from society's. Whereas the earlier structure of private partnerships encouraged bankers to keep track of the overall risks their banks were undertaking, the growth and profit imperatives of shareholder companies meant one thing only: Make more deals happen to generate more fees. As one former investment banker tells McGee, "We lost the checks and balances, a system that provided a kind of curb on excessive risk-taking, when we moved away from the partnership model." Public ownership also created a compensation-for-performance system that lavished eight- and nine-figure salaries on some bankers, whether or not the work they performed was ultimately beneficial to their clients or even their firms (in the case of the now-departed or forcibly merged Lehman, Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch, much of it was clearly not).
The disturbing implication of McGee's masterful book is that even the more aggressive ideas for regulating Wall Street -- such as compensation caps and breaking up big banks -- seem unlikely to prevent future crises, even if Congress had chosen to include them in the recent financial reform package. Some of the system's weakness reflects human nature, but much of it, she concludes, is built into the fiduciary duty of public companies. As McGee demonstrates, any given investment strategy can be interpreted as reckless or prudent, depending on circumstances; shareholders seem likely to always demand that their bank be as aggressive as the next firm. Today's Wall Street does not encourage and barely allows anyone, as former Citigroup chief Charles Prince put it, to stop dancing as long as the music is playing.
James Ledbetter is the editor of The Big Money, the Slate Group's business news and analysis website.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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