NONFICTION:CRISIS AND RECOVERY
Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present by Jeff Madrick
There are two good reasons for taking a job in a bank or other private financial institution.
One: You can earn a decent living, or better, without getting too much dirt under your fingernails.
Two: You can use your talent for economics to help enterprising people in business, local government and nongovernment organizations to get loans so they can build schools, houses, roads, factories or cupcake shops that will provide jobs and otherwise benefit the community.
Trouble is, complains author Jeff Madrick in “Age of Greed,” for almost half a century some extremely clever and occasionally unscrupulous people have concentrated so much on the first motive, they’ve forgotten the second. He sums up that process in a subtitle: “The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present.” Oddly, Bernard Madoff doesn’t appear in the book’s index.
Maybe his fraud was too simple. The recession was a bigger matter.
“Wall Street professionals got fabulously rich,” Madrick writes in an “Epilogue,” after describing what happened in meticulous detail. “They channeled hundreds of millions of dollars into wasteful investments that could have been spent on energy, transportation and communications infrastructure, health care and medical research, education, technical and business, R&D, and new, truly innovative consumer products and business equipment.
“But the largest cost of the crisis was the steepest recession since the 1930s. (Production) fell sharply. Eight million jobs were lost. And recovery in the subsequent year and a half beginning in mid-2009 was slow, and will likely stay slow, resulting in considerably higher unemployment and lower national income for many years (more) than could have been realized. Federal tax revenues were and will continue to be reduced accordingly, and the budget deficit will be much higher as a result.”
He makes a good case — and financial news junkies will savor it. Some will call it partisan. Regrettably, a considerable number will find it hard to plow through.
Those with the concentration to do that will acquire a good basis for judging the difference between the contrasting remedies for recession that arise from the work of two of the most prominent economists of the 20th century: Milton Friedman and John Maynard Keynes.
Friedman, mostly favored by Republicans, would reduce taxes and the size of government, confident that the savings to taxpayers would increase their spending as consumers and nourish job-creating private industry. Keynesians, mostly Democrats, would raise taxes so government would have money to improve public services that create jobs directly.
Carl Hartman, The Associated Press
NONFICTION:SECRET OPERATION
AREA 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base by Annie Jacobsen
Area 51, out in Nevada next door to the primary U.S. nuclear weapons test site at Yucca Flats, has long been a magnet for UFO obsessives. It’s in the middle of nowhere, and it’s top secret, two good reasons why the suspicious might be attracted to its operations. Throw in decades of classified CIA research and development on overhead reconnaissance technology, including the U-2 and A-12 spy planes and the earliest unmanned aerial vehicles, and its reputation as a place where strange technologies grow seems justified.
Annie Jacobsen, a Los Angeles-based journalist, does an adequate if error-ridden job of reporting on these black-budget projects, using the classic investigative method of interviewing dozens and dozens of worker bees from engineers to security guards and piecing their stories together. Then, like a test pilot who pushes her plane too far, she crashes and burns on the grisly tales of an unnamed single source, supposedly an Area 51 engineer and Manhattan Project veteran who leads her on a wild goose chase of honking absurdity straight down the UFO vapor trail into the very heart of conspiratorial darkness. There Jacobsen is told that Auschwitz butcher Dr. Josef Mengele, the German aircraft-designing brothers Walter and Reimar Horten and Soviet dictator Josef Stalin conspired back in the late 1940s to scare America silly with a Nazi-Soviet flying saucer crowded with wobbly 13-year-olds with large, surgically altered heads. Except that the thing crashed. In a barren corner of New Mexico. Really.
Unfortunately for Jacobsen, who imagines these sensational claims to be revelations, they are mostly old news. You can find them with only a few minutes’ searching on various UFO websites, complete with fraudulent U.S. government documents typed on old typewriters and copied and recopied until they are nearly as illegible as real 60-year-old government documents tend to be. Usually, of course, the crashed UFO and its critters are assigned an extraterrestrial origin, but a link between Nazis and UFOs is one longstanding variant of the standard narrative, as is the idea that UFOs were devised by the Soviets to scare the bejesus out of Cold War America.
In attributing the stories she reports to an unnamed engineer and Manhattan Project veteran while seemingly failing to conduct even minimal research into the man’s sources, Jacobsen shows herself at a minimum extraordinarily gullible or journalistically incompetent.
Richard Rhodes, Washington Post Writers Group
FICTION:HOLLYWOOD DRAMA
Spoiled by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan
High in the Hollywood Hills, Brooke Berlin is living like a Hilton sister. Her dad, Brick, is a famous movie star, and her big chance to impress him is just a few months away. Everything is going according to plan until she gets the ultimate surprise: Brooke has a half-sister named Molly.
Molly grew up in West Cairo, Ind., where she enjoyed a quiet life and dated the same boy since grade school. Molly learns her father’s identity from her dying mother. She decides to move to Los Angeles to join her new family.
It’s not an easy transition. Brooke doesn’t share anything, especially her father’s affection, and she goes straight for Molly’s social jugular. Brooke spreads rumors about Molly at school and refuses to acknowledge her existence.
In desperation, Molly befriends Brooke’s archenemy, who writes for a popular tabloid. That’s when the country girl begins to understand that the only way she’s going to survive in Hollywood is by fighting back.
When she realizes that Brooke’s attacks are fueled by misguided anger, the teens start to connect.
But the road to sisterhood has its casualties, most notably, Molly’s hometown boyfriend.
“Spoiled” is the debut young-adult novel of Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, creators of the popular comedic fashion blog . They have the right formula for an entertaining tween story, a healthy mix of drama, fashion and intrigue.
The characters are entertaining blends of the Hollywood elite: Brooke is a cross between Reese Witherspoon’s charming Elle Woods in “Legally Blonde” and Leighton Meester’s ruthless Blair Waldorf in “Gossip Girl.” Brick has Brad Pitt’s looks and Will Ferrell’s endearing naivete.
And the Hollywood commentary is classic. Brick refuses to let Lady Gaga sing on the soundtrack for his new film because “I don’t trust people who don’t wear pants.” Cocks and Morgan leave the story open-ended to allow for a few more Molly and Brooke stories. Here’s hoping they don’t wait too long.
Summer Moore, The Associated Press
