Siegfried Sassoon - Memoirs of A Fox Hunting Man

I chose to read this as a prelude to ‘Memoirs Of An Infantry Officer’, which is part of my WW1&2 reading list.  This is the first part of a trilogy, of which ‘Memoirs Of An Infantry Officer’ is the second installment and ‘Sherston’s Progress’ the third.  It’s indicative of the kind of reticent emotional life upper class Englishmen were living around the time of the wars that Sassoon choses to write his first volume of memoir with a specific focus on fox hunting.  Having safely assured his audience that no ghastly subjects like feelings, emotions or sexual desires will rear their ugly heads, Sassoon waxes lyrical about the joys of village cricket and fox hunting.  In some ways, it struck me as a bit absurd.  However, in its best parts, it also had a meditative, golden quality of people and places warmly remembered. 

As far as friends or companions go, he only really mentions his groom, Dean, and a friend Stephen.  He seems to be on friendly terms with the people he meets from school at point to point races and hunting but, for the most part, he’s a very solitary figure living a sleepy village existence with his old aunt.  He travels quite large distances by train or bicycle in order to go hunting as a young boy.  He pines to live in a neighbourhood where hunting is more active and when he does manage to leave, seems to enjoy life more.  His aunt is in agreement about this, and is said to have bemoaned the situation of such an active boy in such a decidedly quiet milieu.  

For a book purporting to be a memoir, it’s strange that there’s scarcely a mention of his immediate family in the entire book except to say his parents separated when he was 4.  Wikipedia relates that his father later died when he was around 9, which doesn’t get a mention.  His mother lived until 1947 (when Sassoon was 60ish) but is never mentioned, nor are his two brothers.  This all gives the impression that family life was not happy and, therefore, should not be discussed.  It’s terribly bad form to bring up topics that aren’t jolly, don’t you know old bean?  It's rather strange to have such silence on subjects like family but Sassoon bashes on undaunted by the fact that the only relationships where he seems willing to discuss his feelings are those with servants or horses!  “Aunt Evelyn”, the woman he lives with while not at school, does feature on occasion but always in a kind of Bertie Wooster and Aunt Agatha “aged relative” sort of way.  Sassoon does an admirable job of portraying her as a warm, kind woman.  However, he describes their relationship in such a distant way it really is almost like a “Jeeves and Wooster” character, only not as amusing.

When he’s not at school, another topic that goes almost completely untouched, Sassoon lives with his aunt and subsists on an independent income that allows him to do some hunting and play village cricket.  In many passages he seems to indicate that he’s not that rich, but the reality seems quite the contrary.  He goes to Cambridge for a couple of years, which also goes unremarked upon, and leaves without a degree to take up hunting in earnest.  This kind of indifference to his career struck me as a privilege only a rich person could afford.  His neglect of his career rather endeared him to me, with the exception of the fact that I don't like hunting.  

A subject that does receive major attention is the horses he buys and sells.   I found it telling that there is more information about the first hunting horse he buys than there is about any human being.  His relationship with his groom, who also acts as his mentor in hunting matters, also receives voluminous coverage.  The groom seems to be one of his major companions in early teenage life and tells a lot of stories from the various hunts, cricket matches and point-to-point races he’s involved with.  The image I was left with from his recollections of early life was of a sad, lonely boy estranged from his family with plenty of money but only a servant as a friend.

As he becomes more proficient in hunting, he graduates to riding with his old school friend, Stephen, who lives nearby in an area where they hunt more intensively.  This is one of two relationships that seem especially close in the book, although obviously Sassoon would never mention this himself.  There are clues, like describing people he especially likes in glowing terms as sportsmen and making more frequent reference to them, but, on the whole, he seems more comfortable reserving feelings of affection for horses or servants.  One inkling of a closer relationship comes when the war starts and Sassoon shows one of his fellow soldiers a photo of Stephen he carries with him, which struck me as an odd thing to do if Stephen really were just a hunting friend.  The other ‘special friend’ Sassoon seems to make is Denis, who is master of the hunt for a couple of years near where Stephen lives and employs Sassoon as some kind of assistant.  When he moves to a bigger hunt, he takes Sassoon with him and the two spend lots of time together working, living and hunting but never revealing anything deeper about their relationship.  In both of these cases, I felt there may have been more to the relationship but Sassoon seems determined to only write about coverts, hounds, ‘chicken hearted skirters’ and ‘hard bitten sportsmen’ and never writes an emotional line in the entire book.

On the whole, I found this book quite boring and remarkably unforthcoming for a memoir.  In this sense, I suppose it’s a good example of the buttoned-up, repressed style of operation that was in fashion for men of this time and social class.  He wants to present himself as ‘a hard riding swell’ and a gentleman, but is totally disinterested in opening up in any meaningful way.  The book gives a fair representation of the author’s love of hunting, although it seems a very class conscious and stuffy world.  It was at its best recalling idyllic pastoral scenes with a faintly mournful tone, which is probably given more context in the second book of the trilogy, ‘Memoirs of An Infantry Officer’.  My favourite quote was,

“It is with a sigh that I remember simple moments such as those, when I understood so little of the deepening sadness of life, and only the strangeness of spring was knocking at my heart.” (p101)

Maybe he writes such an idyllic, nothing-could-be-jollier type of nostalgia because he wants to draw a stark contrast with the war later on.  Maybe he does it because that’s the way ‘officer and a gentleman’ type WW1 British public schoolboys go about talking about their lives.  Namely, by fastidiously avoiding the main events of their lives and focussing predominately on fox hunting, jolly hockey sticks and depicting himself as the freshest of all country bumpkins.  

Taken on its own, I found it a rather strange little book of nostalgia.  It’s well drawn in places but suffers for simultaneously attempting to be personal while staunchly refusing to broach any feelings more intimate than, ‘I loved hunting and found it immensely good fun’, which, in the final analysis, is not frightfully illuminating stuff! 

Adam Fergusson - When Money Dies

 Originally published in 1975, The Death of Money covers hyperinflation in Weimar Germany in the early 1920s.  I chose to read this book as I became increasingly worried about ‘modern monetary theory’ in 2021.  This period of low interest rates and bond, and even equity, buying by central banks to stimulate the economy began after the global recession and despicable bank bailouts of 2008.  Many, including me, speculated that this would create inflation and this book, first published in the 1970s, was re-published around 2008-10.  Inflation actually remained remarkably low, undershooting the US / UK central bank target of 2%, for most of this period.  This book was also the beginning of a reading project about WWI, the intervening period and WW2.

Germany funded WW1 using debt in the form of war bonds, which caused its currency to weaken even before hyperinflation.  After Germany lost the war, and was burdened with huge reparations to be paid in hard currency, money printing began in earnest.  Not having been invaded, Germany still had large amounts of industrial infrastructure intact after the war ended and, with the help of a weakening currency, began to undergo an export boom.  The stock market also boomed.  This confused Germany’s leadership, who thought the economy needed to be stimulated in order to meet reparations payments. The central bankers refused to raise interest rates for this reason and even argued it would make inflation worse by raising the cost of capital.  Instead, all monetary problems were solved by printing money.  However, as the mark weakened and weakened against its foreign counterparts, officials thought that it was the strength of foreign currency that was causing the problem rather than inflation or devaluation of their own.  As Fergusson writes,

“That the government and the Reichsbank were dominated by the notion that a huge ‘passive’ balance of payments made constant devaluation inevitable hardly seems sufficient explanation of their total, blind refusal to connect the mark’s depreciation with the money supply…the budgeting deficits of the Reich and states alike were considered by writers and politicians ‘not the cause, but the consequence of the external depreciation of the mark’.  (p251)

The situation continued to deteriorate as French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr to guarantee payment of reparations in goods like coal.  The German government provided financial support to domestic resistance in this region, again by printing money.  Thus the  Reichsbank ended up in a situation where it was printing money to buy foreign currency to pay reparations, printing money to fund projects and finance entrepreneurs to bolster the economy and printing money to pay for striking workers in the occupied territory.  All this left the country awash with worthless paper money.  However, the continued printing helped political and commercial interests, in the short term, and so it went on:  

“It remains so that once an inflation is well under way (as Schmolders has it) ‘it develops a powerful lobby that has no interest in rational arguments’.  This was as true for Austria and Hungary as for Germany.” (p253)

In a similar vein, Lord D’Abernon, British ambassador to Germany at the time, remarked, “Inflation is like a drug in more ways than one… It is fatal in the end but it gets its votaries over many difficult moments.”

Fergusson rejects any suggestion of scheming or Machiavellianism on the part of the government or the Reichsbank and sees these institutions as overwhelmed by their circumstances and the enormity of their difficulties:

“In practice, inflation proved no means of escaping foreign obligations except so far as it contributed to the economic collapse of 1932 which wrecked the reparations programme for good.  

The Reichsbank’s display of naivete in its credit policies of 1922 and 1923 should finally dispel any suspicions of financial Machiavellianism on the part of Havenstein and his associates.  They staunchly denied that higher discount rates would moderate the inflation and, on the contrary, opined that they would merely raise the cost of production and push up prices further.  Loudly as they later asserted that these inexplicably cheap credits were given principally for ‘profitable’ projects, the favoured firms who benefited from this largesse turned the money to their best advantage - either by turning it into material assets or into foreign currency, or simply using it to speculate against the mark and drive it downwards.  The only financial conditions which Havenstein understood were those which prevailed before 1914” (p252)

The government was trying to keep the country stable and keep up payments on an impossible schedule of reparations.  Commercial interests were trying to maintain, or even increase, the value of their own interests using the government and the central bank as a source of cheap credit to buy assets or even speculate against the mark, the exact opposite of what politicians and central bankers wanted.  As such, the country blundered along towards hyper-inflation and eventual stabilisation in 1923.  Even though it seems perfectly obvious in hindsight, it’s noteworthy that neither one of the government, monetary institutions nor the general public had much interest in tackling inflation as it occurred.

The biggest losers from this situation appear to be the middle classes and retirees.  Many had fixed pensions or other types of annuities, or had invested in war bonds or other fixed income assets that paid a set number of marks.  These rapidly lost all value during the early 1920s.  Meanwhile other asset owners, and especially manufacturers, initially benefited from the weakening of the currency and the subsequent export boom as foreigners flocked to buy things cheaply.  Likewise, initially unionised workers could demand pay rises by threatening to strike.   The middle class and the unorganised labour force felt the pinch severely as the cost of living soared and their wages failed to rise enough to keep pace.  As the situation deteriorated, a more general, and perhaps far greater loss took place - that of what could loosely be called ‘societal principles’.  As the rules of preexisting order crumbled around them, citizens did whatever it took to survive:

“There were few in any class of society who were not infected by, or prey to, the pervasive soul-destroying influence of the constant erosion of capital or earnings and uncertainty about the future.  From tax-evasion, food hoarding, currency speculation, or illegal exchange transactions - all crimes against the State, each of which to a greater or lesser degree became for individuals a matter of survival - it was a short step to breaching one of the other of the Ten Commandments.  Whereas the lower classes with the further goad of unemployment might turn to theft and similar crimes (the figures up by almost 50% in 1923 over 1913 and 1925) or to prostitution, the middle and upper classes under a different kind of strain would resort to graft and fraud, both bribing and bribable.” (p236)

The rising tide of money had covered many financial indiscretions and when it was withdrawn, scandals abounded.   Some of the more noteworthy figures involved in scandals were Barmat (p238), Kutisker, Jacob Michael and the Shlarek brothers.  Many of these people were Jewish; hyperinflation was a period when antisemitism became more intense.  After stabilisation, many high ranking government and bank officials were found to have been taking bribes in exchange for credit.  More generally, the receding tide of credit uncovered those who’d been swimming naked:

  

“Stabilisation had ended the period when entrepreneurs could borrow as much as they wished at the expense of everyone else.  A vast number of enterprises, established or expanded during monetary plenty, rapidly became unproductive when capital grew short.” (p228)

Attempts were made to reevaluate mortgage and government debt, the latter at 2.5% of face value and that only after reparations had been paid (chp 14). Even though the general losses are inestimable, some indication of the monetary devastation that had occurred emerged.

“The seal of permanence had been put on the people’s losses; as Bresciani-Turroni described it, ‘the vastest expropriation of some classes of society that has ever been effected in time of peace’. (p207)

The monetary fiction was over, and German society lay in a sickly state that it would not recover from for decades:

“With inflation alone, noted Gunter Schmolders, can a government extinguish debt without repayment, or wage war and engage in other non-profitable activities on a large scale:  it is still not recognised as a tax by the taxpayer.” (p249)

Another important consequence of the inflation was political radicalisation.  Some parts of German society still felt that the loss of WW1 had been a capitulation by politicians and that the army would’ve won the war if it had been given a fair chance.  These same factions opposed reparations as a gross injustice.  The appointment of President von Hindenburg (1925-34), a former general and war hero, could be seen as an example of this mindset.  Another could be the banning of “All Quiet On The Western Front” as unpatriotic.  After the inflation, when many people had lost everything, the rules of what had been known as ‘normal’ society had evaporated and antisemitism was on the rise. The country was highly unstable.  

“The population is ripe,” Joseph Addison wrote home to Alexander Cadogan (both British diplomats) “to accept any system of firmness or for any man who appears to know what he wants and issues commands in a loud, bold voice.”  Addison had another significant point to make:

“Economic distress is leading the people to be much more amenable to authority as representing the only hope of salvation from the present state of affairs.  Unemployment is taking the gilt off the gingerbread of democracy, while the working classes realise that striking is useless since nothing would be more welcome to employers.” (p188-9)

Fergusson writes that:

“In German minds democracy and Republicanism had become so associated with the financial, social and political disorder as to render any alternatives preferable when disorder threatened again…” (p248)

And, assessing the condition of the German people, concludes elsewhere: 

“They had little enthusiasm left for democracy, and were themselves moving towards authoritarianism through sheer weariness of spirit and an almost complete indifference to anything except their own lack of material comforts.” (p189)

Such was the downtrodden state of the vast majority of Germans, a narrative that squarely blamed foreign imposed reparations and the preceding government while promising some degree of material security and the restoration of national pride was a very appealing one.  And those not polarized towards Hitler and the right went towards the Russia-backed revolutionary left, which was scarcely less destabilising in terms of the effect it would have had on foreign politics if it came to power. 

“It is thus not astonishing that there are in this country great numbers of ordinary mankind - excellent fathers and husbands of families - who can think of foreign politics only in terms of war.” (p245) Lord D’Abernon 

All this made me wonder if ‘modern monetary theory’ will eventually lead to disastrous consequences like hyperinflation and societal collapse.  It certainly seems like a loss of faith in money can have extreme outcomes.  In the modern world, there doesn’t seem to be a direct equivalent to reparations.  On the other hand, the refusal to raise interest rates, even in the face of increasingly buoyant markets and economies, and the huge amount of cheap credit available today both seem similar.  Perhaps central bankers are overconfident about their ability to finely control inflation and the economy.  I wonder if they’re unwittingly enacting Lenin’s famous quote - "the best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency."  When inflation rises, it may become very hard to control.  Currently, central bankers say they will target an average of 2%.  So if it has been lower for a long period, it can afford to be higher for a few quarters or years.  However, it seems dangerous to me to have negative real interest rates for so long.  Such heavy manipulation of the bond market by central bankers and the seeming necessity for easy credit conditions to keep the party going are both highly worrisome as well. 

This was a good and thoroughly researched book with lots of interesting vignettes.  The book relies heavily on contemporary British political and diplomatic papers relating to Germany.  It shows its age a bit in the academic language and tone. I found it a bit lacking in terms of a clearly sketched overview of the period it deals with along the lines of the ‘Epilogue’ chapter that does exactly that for the period directly after the inflation.  It also wasn’t very detailed in its explanations of the technical aspects of monetary policy and central bank discounting.  In fairness, it is a general account and not a technical one.  The book is well indexed and footnoted and makes frequent reference to Bresciani-Turroni’s ‘The Economics of Inflation’, so perhaps that is the place to turn!  

NOTES

P195 - point about inverse of Gresham's law

Andrea Pirlo & Alessandro Alciato - I Think Therefore I Play

 This was a fun 150 pages of war stories and anecdotes.  Written informally and littered with average jokes, Pirlo clearly wants to give the impression he’s a laid back guy who doesn’t take himself too seriously.

He loves playing for Italy, taking the piss out of Rino Gattuso for being stupid and playing PlayStation against Alessandro Nesta.  He complains about Simone Inzaghi’s infantile diet, plain spaghetti and baby biscuits, and his pre-match ritual of going for several shits and stinking out the dressing room.  He’s still haunted by the 2005 Champions League final when AC Milan squandered a 3-0 lead and lost on penalties to Liverpool.  He modelled his iconic free kick technique on the Brazilian Juninho Pernambucano and hoped to be the all time top scorer of freekicks in Serie A history.  An internet search reveals he came up four short of Sinisa Mihajlovic’s record of 28.  He’s a big fan of Antonio Conte, his coach at Juve, and is full of praise for the owners of the two clubs he played the most games for - Silvio Berlosconi (AC Milan) and Andrea Agnelli (Juventus).  

Aside from some great stories and a lot of not-so-great jokes, Pirlo has a lot of opinions and presents himself as something of a thinker. 

“I know how to think…Generally speaking, I reckon I’m a fairly switched on guy and I’m not ashamed to express it, defend it and, where necessary, shout it from the rooftops.” (p143) 

On the basis of this book, I’d say the jury was still out!  Among his better judgements is a prescient argument for introducing video technology, the omission of which he rightly claims is very unfair on referees.  This book was published in 2013 and it was duly introduced in the biggest European leagues between 2017-19.  

However, some sections make his thinking look confused.  He complains about being man-marked and says it goes against the spirit of football, which seems somewhat self-interested, to say the least.  He also makes the unsubstantiated claim that Deportivo La Coruna’s players might have been on drugs during the 2004 Champions League quarter final when they beat AC Milan 4-0 to overturn a 1-4 defeat in the first leg.  Generally, he seems admirably anti-racist and goes out of his way to defend Mario Balotelli.  However, he also gives a rather wooly exposition on how racist incidents should be handled when talking about Kevin-Prince Boateng’s decision to leave the pitch in the face of racist abuse.

“If one of my team-mates was a victim of intolerance and refused to carry on playing.  I’d go along with his wishes and those of the rest of the team.  It would be up to him to tell us how he felt and to take the final decision.  I’d leave the field only if the whole team was in agreement, though.  I think you’d have to actually experience something like that to know how you’d react.  It’s too delicate a subject to plan your response in advance.” (p132)

This seems to me to raise more questions than it gives answers!  So he would leave the pitch, but only if everyone agreed, which makes me wonder why players who haven’t been racially abused should have a say?  It also strikes me that the more “delicate” a subject is, the more need there is to plan your response in advance, not vice versa!  

Equally, Pirlo presents himself as above suspicion when it comes to fair play, doping and match fixing but also gives a half-hearted defence of Juve’s role in the “Calciopoli” scandal (p104).  I don’t know about the scandal in detail, but it seems a bit rich for him to slag off cycling for doping when Italian football is fairly notorious for corruption.  He also opines it would be a good thing if clubs could offer win bonuses to other clubs in the league to help motivate them, which doesn’t strike me as particularly thoroughly thought out.  Perhaps the best evidence that Pirlo isn’t quite as “switched on” as he likes to think are his comments about his tattoos.

“I’ve got well-hidden tattoos: my son Niccolo’s name in Chinese letters on my neck.”

This brazenly ignores the fact that Chinese doesn’t have “letters” but uses logograms called “hanzi”.  This makes “writing” a name like “Niccolo” impossible in any Western sense.  Usually names are “translated” by using a few characters to approximate the sound of the name, even though the meaning will be completely different.  So what Pirlo actually has tattooed on his neck are some random characters that might sound a bit like “Niccolo” but mean something completely different.  It’s not the sort of stuff that makes you think he’s any more intelligent than your average footballer!  Why on earth he wants a tattoo in a language he doesn’t even seem to understand, let alone speak is beyond me! 

In fairness to Pirlo, some of these woolier parts of the book may come from either the ghost writer or translator.  For example, the sentence “he was worn out and refused to speak to anyone apart from Daniele [Rossi] and I.” (p40) This uses the subject “I” when it should use the object “me”.  This wouldn’t even be worth mentioning if it wasn’t for the fact that the book then goes on to mock Gattuso for getting his grammar wrong on pp 48-49!  Obviously, I can’t tell if the error was Pirlo’s, the ghost writer’s or the translator’s, but if you’re going to mock other people for making grammatical mistakes, it’s probably best not to make your own a few pages before.  The “Thanks” written at the end of the book by the ghost writer may give a clue as to why it isn’t the best written book though.  Alciato, an Italian journalist, thanks everyone he can think of and then thanks his family finishing with the final sentences, “They’re always the first names on my teamsheet.  All of them.”  (pp 151-2)  To me, this begs the question of why they aren’t the first names on the thank you list but maybe I’m being too pedantic!  Whatever the case, I thought it was clunky and, generally speaking, I found the prose lost clarity and cohesion when tackling complicated ideas or subjects.  It has a nice informal tone when dealing with funny stories though, which is a redeeming feature.

I would recommend this book to football lovers as it is very short, takes no time at all to read and contains some wonderful stories and insights.  It has a light, jocular tone and even though some of the jokes are more likely to produce a groan than a laugh, it’s better than someone who takes themselves too seriously.  It’s not very well written, can be sycophantic and is more confusing than enlightening on topics like racism in the game and the “calciopoli” scandal, in spite of Pirlo’s claims to being an insightful thinker!

George Orwell - Coming Up For Air

 

This was a strange mixture of a book.  The narrator, George Bowling, starts off by describing his life as a 45 year old insurance salesman with a wife and two children. On the day in question, he is going into town from the London suburb he lives in to collect new false teeth.  A chance occurrence starts him off reflecting on his life and the changes in society before and after the First World War. I liked the way the book started.  Bowling describes his ordinary life matter of factly and there is no romanticisation or sentimentality.  It is honest and funny, albeit in a somewhat dark way.  He also delivers a good criticism of suburban, lower middle class life; enslaved to a life of drudgery and mortgage payments. After this the book got a bit worse as Bowling embarked on a long, pretty boring recollection of his childhood.  He is the son of a small town seed merchant and loves fishing.  Somewhat inexplicably, and it is certainly never satisfactorily explained in the book, he finds an amazing hidden fish pond but never gets round to fishing in it despite fishing being almost his entire life.   The book improved a bit after this lull and Bowling goes on to talk about his life in the war, finding a job after it and getting married.  The section on marriage was especially enjoyable as it shows Orwell’s exceptional command of the British class system.  There are a huge number of subtle calibrations in the book: different types of travelling salesmen, the sub-genre of Anglo-Indian families, numerous categories of shopkeepers and so on and so forth.  In this sense the book is probably a bit of a British classic!   After completing his life story, Bowling cooks up a scheme of going back to the village he grew up in.  He keeps this secret from his wife and finances it with winnings from clandestine gambling.  He goes back to find everything changed and remains in a funk about how everything in the modern world is terrible and ugly compared to his nostalgia for life before the war.  This is one of the obvious themes of the book.  The other is that there is going to be another war soon as Hitler menaces continental Europe.  Bowling is considerably upset about this even though he reasons that he shouldn’t be as he can’t do anything about it and that it won’t affect him that much.  Written in 1938-9, it seems prescient about the impending Second World War although I imagine speculation on this topic would’ve been fairly widespread at the time. I liked the fact that not much happens in the book and it’s not dramatic or histrionic.  The domestic scenes at the beginning and end of the book are both good.  Much of the material in between is mixed - childhood is boring, the war is a bit better, the process of getting married is amusing because of its obsession with class and the trip back to his childhood town is pretty bad.  All told, the book felt like a bit of a pastiche of odds and ends that Orwell has connected by means of the life of George Bowling.  The result is ragtag and not at all exceptional.  The only unifying themes I could identify were dissatisfaction with the modern world and prophecy about the coming war.  Both have their moments where they are powerfully expressed but, ultimately, both are overdone and become tiresome.  The theme of the ugliness of the modern world was better handled than the prophecy about war.  The latter only really amounts to numerous depressing predictions about its inevitability.  Tone of the prose is lower middle class man who has bettered himself and I’m not sure how successful it is. Overall, this is not one of Orwell’s better novels and I would only rank it above ‘A Clergyman’s Daughter’ in terms of his fiction.  He does a better job of connecting the disparate themes and scenes in ‘Coming Up For Air’ but it still feels like a bit of a dog’s dinner.  There are some really good sections and it doesn’t suffer from being overly dramatic but, in the end, it’s not a great book.

Ray Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles

There were some aspects of this book I really loved.  The inventive description of Martian life and its objects was one.  Another was the hilarious way the self-important early arrivals from Earth are treated.  Namely, shot and locked up in a lunatic asylum!  Even though it was published in 1950, it still felt modern and many of the themes remain pertinent.

This book makes interesting, and sometimes unusual, commentary on subjects like science and technology, militarism, colonialism and the qualities of mysticism and materialism.  Being too young to remember the 50s and not being that well informed about that decade, I can imagine the book was perhaps more poignant in a contemporary context.  Historical facts like America’s great prosperity after the Second World War, its emergence as the dominant global superpower and the invention of the atomic bomb are all difficult to interpret from such a distance.  However, it was of note to me that it was written a full decade before a man went to space.  I got the impression that the book’s commentary on contemporary 1950s America was a bit lost on me, but that didn’t spoil my enjoyment of it.  Another unsubstantiated feeling I had was that its weirdness and otherworldliness was diminished as the genre of ‘science fiction’ became more and more popular, but I have no way of knowing this with any certainty.

One gripe I had about the book was its essential lack of narrative.  It reads like a collection of short stories or essays united by a Martian theme.  I wasn’t able to easily follow the fate of one character, unless they die, and very few of the characters recur in an identifiable way.  For example, the wonderful mixture of intergalactic and domestic themes in ‘Ylla’ left me wondering about the fates of Mr & Mrs K, but they only reappear obliquely.  On the other hand, these unexplained and unresolved aspects of the book do lend it a mystical quality that’s hard to apprehend directly.

I liked this book and would definitely recommend it.  I enjoyed reading it even though I’m sure quite a lot of its cultural commentary went over my head.  My complaint is that it lacks unity and cohesion but neither of these prove fatal to its success.

Ben Mezrich - Bringing The House Down

I’d heard of this book many times because it’s cited as the inspiration for the film ‘21’.  It’s such an amusing and incongruous story of MIT maths wizards posing as high rollers and trying to outsmart mafioso casino bosses, it would be a shame if it hadn’t.  Beyond being about and describing an incredibly good story, I didn’t find that much to enjoy in the book.

Some of my disappointment might have come from the context in which I read it.  Having just finished ‘A Man for All Markets’ by Edward Thorp, I thought ‘Bringing The House Down’ would make a good follow up.  Especially given that I've been meaning to read it for more than a decade.  In reading Thorp’s autobiography, I had basically heard an earlier version of the same story.  This made most of the blackjack background and other explanatory sections in this book redundant.  It was also difficult to tell if these sections were helpful and clear because I already knew the material and couldn’t be impartial.  On the whole, I preferred the style and content of Thorp’s account.  Much of the same material is covered but Thorp’s is more matter of fact and he goes into more detail on the technical aspects of his systems.  Clearly, they’re very different types of book but it undoubtedly affected my reading of this book. 

 

The author uses various styles of writing at different points through the book.  In some he narrates the lives of the protagonists rather than profiling them and this has the effect of making it read more like a screenplay.  I haven’t seen the film but these sections of the book had an ambience of over-emphasis and breathless exaggeration.  I would’ve preferred less dialogue, which is always tricky to get right.  The author has clearly done his homework and the background information for the characters is strong.  This made me wish for more of this type of material.  I infinitely preferred the well researched backstories to the central casting descriptions of the Las Vegas high life accompanied by a similarly stock script.  Some sections are written in the first person when he meets people from the story for interviews after the event.  These tended to have a journalist tone to them.  I also had the suspicion that the story had been cleaned up a lot for public consumption but this is to be expected.  The presentation of Vegas and the gambling world was seedy, but in a very Hollywood way.  Perhaps the author wisely had an eye to future film rights when he was writing it or, more plausibly in my eyes, the protagonists wanted a more family friendly version!

For such a famous and high selling book, I was a bit surprised the writing wasn’t better.  It’s extremely easy to read, which is probably the most important factor for a best seller.  Nonetheless, some of the writing was clunky.  The sentence, ‘His family tree was made up of so many different races, you needed a pie chart to buy him a birthday present.’ (p17)  magnificently muddles the imagery of pies and trees.  It also made me wonder how many people are giving birthday gifts based on ancestral ethnicity and, if there are any weirdos like this, how many of them are using pie charts to help with the more complex cases?! I thought it was an absurdly bad sentence.

Perhaps I’ve been a bit harsh on this book. It gives a good general explanation of the field, narrates a wonderfully entertaining story and ultimately presents a lot of background and material in a highly readable 300 odd pages.  However, perhaps reading a book I enjoyed more about the same subject directly before reading this one has made me unduly harsh!  I would certainly recommend this book because it’s a good story but I didn’t think it was an especially good book.

Edward Thorp - A Man For All Markets

 I really enjoyed this book and felt that, given his achievements, Edward Thorp could be a lot more famous if he wanted to be.  Born into a poor family during the depths of the Great Depression, his experiences of childhood privation stayed with him; as did a fascination with numbers and empirical research.  His father had to leave university after a year or so for lack of funds and was always keen that his son get more education than he could.  The young Thorp seems obsessed with finding out how things around him worked and conducting his own scientific research, initially mainly in Chemistry.  This hunger for knowledge and understanding reminded me of the famous physicist Richard Feyneman but this was a far better book than ‘You Must Be Joking Mr. Feyneman’, which was insufferable.

Thorp’s interest in probability led him to develop a system for ‘counting cards’ at Blackjack, which allowed him to beat the casinos.  He then went on to develop ‘the world’s first wearable computer’ to help predict where the ball will land in roulette.  Following these investigations into casino games, Thorp turned his attention to the stock market and options trading.  Using mathematical models and arbitrage, Thorp’s hedge fund was at the leading edge of quantitative investment and options pricing theory between 1969-1988.  Returns averaged between 15-19% vs. 10% for the S&P 500 and the funds never had a down year even while the S&P 500 experienced three over the same period.  The funds also never had a down quarter, which is remarkable.

There were a few things that struck me as unusual about Thorp and the book.  One is that he seems to value a balance between his work and the other parts of his life.   Many successful people don’t seem to know when to stop, which could explain why they’re so successful.  Thorp, on the other hand, doesn’t seem interested in exploiting his blackjack strategy to the fullest financial extent and even writes a book to let everyone else know about it.  Equally, he publishes his option trading strategies (admittedly only some!)  in academic papers while running his hedge fund and also shuts it down in spite of its success and popularity.  It seems common for rich people, especially in finance, to claim that they’re not really in it for money and that they do it for the intellectual stimulation.  This usually strikes me as rubbish because most people in finance aren’t doing anything particularly intellectual and if they really didn’t care about money they could work in academia.  In Thorp’s case, he truly was intellectual and he worked in academia before, during and after the success of his hedge fund.

Another aspect of the book I enjoyed is Thorp’s irreverence for the other big wigs he mentions.  He more or less accuses Richard Feyneman of lying to him about his knowledge of research into blackjack strategies when they meet early in his career.  He also paints a wonderful picture of Warren Buffett as an extreme cheapskate, which perhaps shouldn’t be surprising given his style of investment.  Thorp meets Buffett early in his career and makes lots of money investing with him in spite of their different investment styles.  Normally, this would set the stage for lots of gushing praise, and there is some of that, but Thorp also points out how Buffett charges $8 for a photo with a cardboard cutout of him during Berkshire Hathaway’s AGM and how the ‘shareholder special steak dinner’ at Buffett’s favourite restaurant costs $21 during the AGM when it is normally $18!  A less amusing incident related in the book is how Thorp was suspicious of the regularity of returns at Bernie Madoff’s hedge fund and did some preliminary research into it by checking the trades the fund reported against transactions recorded by the exchange.  He discovered his dealing history was fictitious but was roundly ignored by the supposedly sophisticated investors he informed.  This was in 1991, a decade before another whistle blower tried to inform the SEC in 2001 and was also ignored.  Sadly, this is just one more example in a long history of regulatory bodies all over the world doing the exact opposite of their job (cf. SEC & FSA / GFC, BaFin / Wirecard to name two recent examples).

Perhaps the most suspicious part of the book is the episode where six partners at his hedge fund (PNP) are investigated with securities fraud and threatened with RICO charges in the late 80s before the fund was closed.  Thorp presents himself as an honest person and his statistical methods for trading should’ve prevented any interest in using nefarious practices.  However, his fellow managing partner in NY, James Regan, and five others seem to have conspired with Drexel Burnham to create fake losses to reduce their tax bill.  Thorp was never accused of any wrongdoing and the five partners convicted eventually had their judgements overturned.  In Thorp’s telling, Rudy Giuliani, US Attorney in Manhattan at the time, was desperate to nail Mike Milken, the junk bond innovator, because he had upset too many establishment figures by facilitating hostile takeovers.  To this end, Giuliani used the unprecedented threat of RICO charges against PNP partners and employees to try to get them to rat on Milken.  Some of this has a ring of truth to it.  However, Thorp is also very quick to explain that all of the charges related to people in the NY office where, he writes, the office operated with a very different ‘culture’.  This sounds a lot like someone trying to distance himself from the bad behaviour of other employees.  It also doesn’t inspire much confidence that the highly successful fund then closed.  I suspect the charges were a bit trumped up and it is undeniable they came with a highly unusual threat of extremely long sentences allowed by connecting the crimes to the RICO Act.  However, it also seems fairly obvious that Thorp’s partner was up to no good and that the two might have had a major falling out after this.  Thorp certainly doesn't make any effort to exonerate anyone from NY except by saying, more generally, that he thought the whole thing was motivated by a Mike Milken witch hunt.  Regan, his partner and the highest ranking miscreant, is scarcely ever mentioned.  Undoubtedly there’s more to the story than what’s in the book!

It’s inevitable that someone who’s had as much success as Thorp is going to be pretty pleased with themself.  However, overall I felt the book wasn’t too self-congratulatory.  He’s achieved some amazing stuff in his life and hasn’t made it his job to publicise this (cf. Buffett, Dalio).  Obviously, writing books isn’t exactly hiding your light under a bushel but it’s fair to say two of these (‘Beat the Dealer’ and ‘Beat the Market’) were designed to help other people.  Even if the advice of the second one was a bit after the fact and seemingly not as applicable as the first.  It’s not a spectacularly well written book and the author has some odd habits, like sometimes writing ‘I and my brother’ or ‘I and my wife’ as opposed to doing it the other way round, which he sometimes does.  Initially , I thought this was a sign of deep seated egotism but by the end I didn’t see Thorp as an especially self-centered person.  He is effusive in his praise for some of his former colleagues (NB - not Regan!), his academic collaborators and, especially, his wife.  Thorp is obviously a voracious reader, although not as prolific as his wife, and the book references lots of interesting articles, books and authors.  This aspect is made even more helpful by the fact the book has truly excellent notes and a good index, which spoke to me of a thorough and meticulous mind.  I probably would have preferred it if numbered footnotes were included in the main body of the text but this is a minor complaint.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book and felt it was a good mixture of stories from his life and advice about how he thinks and approaches problems.  He is without doubt a fascinating character and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this to anyone with an interest in probability or investment as he is a master of understanding both subjects.