What Are You Reading

[Harp]

Embarrassed to say, not familiar with Teweles, and I've read a fair share of market, trading, investment books.

but as you note, the screens (like oil today) tell you what you need to know.

Telweles is a joy to read.

Just looked at oil. Texas light tea at $10.42; never, ever, thought I'd see this.
Texas light now at $2.76

 

[Harp]

I left Telweles at home the other day and took Cicero's basic work-a lighter, much lighter paperback.
Intended to read his Tusculan Disputations this morning on the train; forgot where I left Cicero inside
my strewn mess of an apartment. Found a baseball paperback, Slider lying around the office. Baseball withdrawl
starts to set in...season's iced. It'll do instead.

 

[zebedee]

John Wyndham's 'Day of the Triffids', Joseph Conrad's 'Lord Jim' and Henry Miller's 'Tropic of Cancer'.

 

[belfastboy]

Reading Sir Roger Scruton's "The Face of God". The type of book to read a short section and then spend a much longer time contemplating.

 

[belfastboy]

I left Telweles at home the other day and took Cicero's basic work-a lighter, much lighter paperback.
Intended to read his Tusculan Disputations this morning on the train; forgot where I left Cicero inside
my strewn mess of an apartment. Found a baseball paperback, Slider lying around the office. Baseball withdrawl
starts to set in...season's iced. It'll do instead.

It is a rainy Saturday morning here in this neck of the woods. Serious baseball withdrawl here as well. On a normal rainy Saturday I would be settling in to watch the BlueJays play...alas. More sad news...I read this morning that Steve Dalkowski passed away yesterday.

 

[Fading Fast]

Love is Blind by William Boyd

Boyd is one of the modern novelists I really enjoy as he can write a gripping spy novel like Restless or a book about one woman's journey through the twentieth century like Sweet Caress with equal eloquence.

Love is Blind is of the latter style as the novel opens, in the 1880s, with us meeting Scotsman Brodie Moncur born to into the large brood of a corrupt and tyrannical minister just as he is about to break free of that oppressive home. Owing to the kindness of a once-wealthy neighbor, Moncur, after learning he has only modest talents as a pianist, embarks on a career as a piano tuner - an "in-demand" and well-compensated career in an age when many homes had a piano and top concert pianists were kinda, sorta the rock stars of their age.

After proving his value to a piano manufacturer in Scotland, he is sent to the company's Paris store to be the assistant manger to the owner's son setting Moncur on an odyssey that will take him around much of Europe, Russia and even to an island off the coast of Malaysia.

In Paris, despite successfully growing the business, he becomes aware that his boss is stealing from the company. But because, as noted, his boss is the owner's son, he is all but powerless to do anything about it. Also at this time, Moncur has his first outbreak of tuberculosis - a quite common-for-the-period and, often times, lethal disease that will stay with him the rest of his life. At this point, he is offered the opportunity to work full time for the renown concert pianist John Kilbarron and his brother/manager Malachi.

Again, things go well at first for Moncur - his talents at tuning a piano reduces the pain John experiences playing - but he also meets and starts an affair with John's lover the - tall, almost gangly, wan and captivating Russian singer, Lika Blum. From here, it's off to Russia where John is commissioned to write a concert and open a theater. More drama follows: Moncur continues his affair with Lika behind John's back; Malachi catches wind of it leading to duels, break-ups and cross continental hunts as John and Lika try to build a life away from the Kilbarrons, but the past keeps coming back.

This is not Boyd's best effort as the whole is less satisfying than the parts. Yes, you care about Moncur and Lika, yes you learn a lot about the elite world of concert pianists (and, even more interesting, the incredible mechanical sophistication of their pianos), and yes you learn the late-19th-century scientific view and medical treatments for TB (a lung disease made a bit more poignant in our coronavirus age), but somewhere along the way, you realize you're reading a well-written soap opera that holds your interest but doesn't do a lot more.

Sure you can draw timeless parallels to this or that - a young man with a unique talent suffering from a debilitating disease or his and Lika's star-crossed love affair or, even, the mendacity of so many people Moncur encounters - but those parallels don't somehow do that on their own. And, yes, Moncur has a philosophy on life that ranges from spirituality without religion to a Forrest-Gump-like "just keep moving forward no matter what is thrown at you" approach, but its feels haphazard and superficial.

And, very definitely, yes, the writing is Boyd brilliant in spots, but also - in what is a modern-book tic / meme / norm as, I'm guessing, "market surveys show" the public wants/ it sells books - foul language and awkwardly explicit sexual details seem forced and break Boyd's more elegant prose. I did enjoy it, but recommend Restless or Sweet Caress if you are looking to give Boyd a try.

 

[Unkei]

Right now I am reading,A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia by, Thomas Keneally. It is a fascinating read covering the reasons the British chose Transportation as a means of relieving their over crowded jails and getting rid of troublesome characters. It tells of the transport on the ships as well as the very real troubles that met the ships on arrival, first at Botany Bay..then other locales. It paints a very good picture of the physical hardships transportees and military alike faced, as well as the political infighting of the military and civil authorities, and the troubling relations with the natives or aborigines. A great read!
Cheers,
Unkei

 

[Fading Fast]

Eight Men Out by Elite Asinof, published in 1963

Note: My comments are based on this book, published in '63, which had been considered the "definitive" book on the White Sox scandal for years, but new information has come to light since that expands on the story and contradicts some of Asinof's points. See here https://jacobpomrenke.com/black-sox/the-black-sox-scandal-a-cold-case-not-a-closed-case/ for one example of the newer information.


First, a couple of lessons from the book and life: the world was just as corrupt and mendacious in 1919 as it is today. Whatever level of corruption and mendacity you assume, you are too low, then and now.

Surprisingly, the scheme to throw the World Series in return for money was thought up and put in motion by the players who, then, reached out to the gamblers who, even in their line of work, had to be a bit taken back by players, apparently, offering up a fixed World Series on a silver platter. "Anything interesting happen in your day, Dear?"

The eight White Sox players who collaborated on the fix all had their individual motivations - some seemed all about the money, others seemed a bit about the money and a bit about raising a (cloaked) middle finger to a sport and an owner they felt were cheating them.

And they weren't wrong. Think what you will about players today landing hundred-plus-million-dollar contracts, the alternative in 1919 was players treated like the owners' chattel who grudgingly paid them a small percentage of their true economic value (as can be seen by the small salaries the players received relative to the large dollar amounts the owners received when they traded a player).

The White Sox Eight felt particularly aggrieved as they believed owner Charles Comiskey was especially penurious versus other owners. Nothing angers a man more than seeing someone else get paid more for doing the same job. To be sure, the players were still paid, in general, three to six times what the average American was making in 1919, but again, nothing infuriates a man more than seeing someone else get paid a larger amount for the same work. (The article in the link at the top argues this relative-to-other-teams pay disparity noted in Asinof's book did not really exist; regardless, the owners absolutely did "own" the players and captured the majority of their economic value.)

To launch this scheme, the players reached out to the gamblers. The smarter ones (read Abe Rothstein, "The Big Bankroll") kept several arm's lengths between them and the fraud, leaving the day-to-day interaction to the lower-level gambler hacks who made a complete mess of it. Corrupt activities suffer from a lack of a legal construct to enforce contracts making translating them into action - executing on a plan requiring trust covering large sums of money to be paid over several weeks - incredibly difficult to manage.

And none of them - not one of these second-tier gamblers or amateur-crook players - handled this well. Instead of using game theory strategies to build incremental trust, everyone was greedy. The gamblers outright cheated the players which was stupid as the players then lost heart in the scheme.

It turned into a version of Keystone-Cops chaos. The gamblers promised the players upfront money and, then, reneged (in part so that they had more money to actually bet on the game and in part because they held the players in contempt). The players, having decided to cheat and some having already taken some money, had no good response to not getting the said promised money as they had already corrupted themselves and the gamblers always held out the promise of more money "after the next game."

It was particularly fun seeing the players - angry as all heck at the cheating gamblers - lie to the gamblers about their intentions in game three resulting in most of the gamblers losing their shirts (not Rothstein, he saw the risk of betting on individual games and only bet on the full series). To be sure, it's a complex moral equation at play when you are rooting for the group of cheaters that got cheated by the other group of cheaters - sigh. A few smart leaders could have managed this scheme much better.

And nipping at everyone's heels all throughout was the media who heard the rumors and smelled the stink, but couldn't get well-sourced-and-confirmed information. Owing to liability concerns, the stories that were printed were vague and qualified. The somewhat-real story only broke because a few of the cheating (and cheated by the gamblers) players, well into the following season, decided to confess (in a moment driven by a mix of conscience and a desire to hurt others - players and gamblers - who seemed to get away with more money).

And those confessions - made in Chicago to the District Attorney's office - set off a firestorm of public fury and legal machinations. At least by today's standards, everything, including the confessions themselves, were executed in a slipshod, intentionally-disingenuous or outright-crooked manner to tip the outcome one way or another.

The confessing players were duped into signing liability waivers; payoffs (think Rothstein pulling strings from far away) made evidence disappear; other evidence or documents suddenly appeared out of nowhere; investigations were funded by rivals; high-priced attorneys - mysteriously paid - popped up to defend the players and no one would accuse the judge of impartiality.

Out of this poorly aimed circular firing squad came a legal exoneration for the players on, kind of, a technicality. But the public was less kind and Major League Baseball - after its own "investigation -" went into high-dudgeon mode against the players resulting in not one of the eight ever playing in the major leagues again (some did go on to play semi-pro and exhibitions games, etc.).

So what were or are the lessons? The public was cheated as its national pastime - never fully honest to start with - was corrupted in its marquee event by some of its marquee players. The expression "Say it ain't so, Joe," referencing famous Shoeless Joe Jackson's role, sadly came into the American lexicon.

The owners were greedy bullies who were handed a scandal owing, in part, to their greed and bullying.

The cheating players were cogs ground down by the owners, but again, most professional ballplayers didn't cheat and earning a multiple of what the average American earned minimizes one's sympathy for those who did cheat.

The newspapers somehow, for the most part, missed the biggest sports and cultural story of its day until it was handed to them.

The gamblers - well, few go into the gambling racket because they have a high regard for the law and, as in every "profession," there are the smart ones who rise to the top (Rothstein) and the hacks who were handed an easy victory but made one unforced error after another until they lost the game.

If there's less fixing of games today and less gambling by players, etc., it's not because human nature has improved, it's because the the vast sums of legal money that sluices to everyone involved in Major League Baseball today reduces the incentive to risk it all on cheating. But as we've learned, some still do and aways will.

Despite the new information since its publication, Eight Men Out is still an excellent place to start one's discovery of, perhaps, the sports world's most notorious scandal: a scandal that revealed as much about America in 1919 and human nature always as it did about the sport of baseball itself.

 

[LizzieMaine]

That really is a great book, and it helps that, unlike many baseball historians, Asinof is also a very fine writer. He was a White Sox fan himself, born during the 1919 season, and he grew up hearing the story. For him, it was personal.

His primary source among the players, and the only one who was willing to talk to him at length, was Happy Felsch -- who, plied with alcohol, spared absolutely nothing. He was eaten up with self-loathing over what happened, and he desperately needed to spill his guts.

For another perspective, look up a Sports Illustrated article written by Chick Gandil in 1956, in which there's a great deal of self-justification-disguised-as-candor on display -- https://chicagology.com/baseball/1919worldseries/gandilmystory1956/

 

[Fading Fast]

That really is a great book, and it helps that, unlike many baseball historians, Asinof is also a very fine writer. He was a White Sox fan himself, born during the 1919 season, and he grew up hearing the story. For him, it was personal.

His primary source among the players, and the only one who was willing to talk to him at length, was Happy Felsch -- who, plied with alcohol, spared absolutely nothing. He was eaten up with self-loathing over what happened, and he desperately needed to spill his guts.

For another perspective, look up a Sports Illustrated article written by Chick Gandil in 1956, in which there's a great deal of self-justification-disguised-as-candor on display -- https://chicagology.com/baseball/1919worldseries/gandilmystory1956/

I'm looking forward to reading the article which I'll do shortly - thank you.

I loved the book. As you note, fine writer - I don't think you need to be a baseball fan at all to enjoy it.

No matter what, the scheme would have eventually come out. But had there been one or two smart guys - best scenario, one smart player and one smart gambler who had partnered up and lead the scheme - everyone would have made a lot more money and, potentially, it wouldn't have been exposed till much later.

 

[Fading Fast]

That really is a great book, and it helps that, unlike many baseball historians, Asinof is also a very fine writer. He was a White Sox fan himself, born during the 1919 season, and he grew up hearing the story. For him, it was personal.

His primary source among the players, and the only one who was willing to talk to him at length, was Happy Felsch -- who, plied with alcohol, spared absolutely nothing. He was eaten up with self-loathing over what happened, and he desperately needed to spill his guts.

For another perspective, look up a Sports Illustrated article written by Chick Gandil in 1956, in which there's a great deal of self-justification-disguised-as-candor on display -- https://chicagology.com/baseball/1919worldseries/gandilmystory1956/

As the saying goes, that's his story.

Good read that is consistent with some things in the book and inconsistent with others.

Unless some new documentation appears, we'll never have the full, accurate picture - as with many things in history.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Gandil goes out of his way there to show up Buck Weaver, who had just died and was unable to defend himself. Some interesting allegations that didn't seem to turn up in any of the other accounts of the case.

 

[AmateisGal]

I'm reading Restless by William Boyd (thanks, @Fading Fast for the recommendation!) for fiction and for nonfiction, Lynne Olson's Madame Fourcade's Secret War.

 

[Fading Fast]

Helluva Town: The Story of New York City During World War II by Richard Goldstein published in 2010

More a pastiche of New York in WWII than a serious history, Goldstein's effort works because the vignettes he chooses poignantly connect every day lives to the big-picture struggle. Yes, the patriotic and pull-together efforts dominate in this telling, as even the mob gets a positive spin by helping the Feds protect the waterfront it controls from sabotage, but Goldstein does recount the racism that is also part of New York City in WWII and human history, well, always.

Goldstein points out that, at a high level, New York City's direct contribution to the war effort was really just two things: Brooklyn's Naval Yard and the City's transportation hub itself. The Pacific Theater had its West Coast equivalents, but New York served as a critical builder of ships and shipper of men to defeat the Nazis (some Brooklyn-built ships did head to the Pacific, too).

Through a series of stories, the Naval Yard comes alive as we see dignitaries like the first lady christening carriers and young women all but forcing their way into the Yard in traditional male jobs as men left to fight while demand for ships and shipyard workers increased.

Perhaps no story captured more of the regular New Yorker's experience in war than that of two Naval Yard welders - one, a pioneering woman, the other, a young man who left to fight - who had worked side by side welding in the Yard, married and, then, exchanged letters when he was overseas until she received a telegram informing her that he was killed in action. He had entrusted a letter for her, in case of his death, with a commanding officer, which she received a few weeks after the telegram. In it he wrote, in part, "Having died I at least tasted the full measure of happiness" and "I had no remorse for having died for a worthy cause."

Away from the Naval Yard in Brooklyn, Manhattan, with its two behemoth train stations and deep ports, saw men from all over the country - often, fresh out of basic training - alight and spend a few days or weeks until they were shipped out. Also, many on leave or still convalescing but mobile had stayovers in the City throughout the war years.

Here, Goldstein shows us the bars, nightclubs (famous ones the world over like The Stork Club or 21), movie houses, theaters, restaurants and other attractions all but overwhelmed with young men with money and, often, an exaggerated "I just want to have fun" attitude.

The famous Stage Door Canteen - set up mainly by volunteer actors and stagehands to entertain servicemen gratis - makes an appearance where stars and famous local dignitaries apparently really did, not only cook and put on shows, but also took out the trash and held the hands of many young boys facing war for the first time.

But as noted, Goldstein also shows the ugly, like the race riots in Harlem, sparked by a black women and GI's fight with a white police officer (the story, as always, has its confusion), but building over decades of indignities, slights, economic hardship and, sometimes, brutality. Antisemitism, too, rears its ugly head with attacks by Irish mobs on Jewish synagogues and young Jewish girls. Perhaps racism's sins were included owing to modern political proclivities, as most of New York's other WWII-era sins - political corruption, prostitution, black markets and organized crime - get passed over or, as noted, given a soft touch

Also making appearances are the German spies who were caught on a New York City beach after being dropped off by a U-Boat, the spectacular fire of the Normandie (seemingly sparked by an innocent workman's error, but the rumor mill of intrigue ignored that), New York's inconsistent and restrained approach to blackouts and Mayor LaGuardia both doing good and, sometimes, letting his ego get the best of him - like New York City itself.

There's so much here that it sometimes feels as if you're drinking from a firehose: the B-25 bomber whose pilot, on a foggy Sunday morning, lost his bearing and crashed into the Empire State Building, the beginning of the named-for-its-place-of-origin Manhattan Project, the plays that led to the movies "On The Town" or "Winged Victory" and much, much more.

But that's fine because Helluva Town is supposed to be gatling gun of vignettes that adds up to a fun popular read about New York City in WWII. It carries enough real, smart and detailed information and stories to make it more than a guilty pleasure, but it doesn't pretend to be what it is not - a serous history of New York during the war years.

 

[Old Mariner]

I recently got these from the Time-Life Seafarers set from a seller on etsy.

While I have only skimmed through them, I will take the time to read through them. The U Boats one covers both WWI and II which is nice.

 

[Bushman]

I recently got these from the Time-Life Seafarers set from a seller on etsy.

While I have only skimmed through them, I will take the time to read through them. The U Boats one covers both WWI and II which is nice.

View attachment 237698

I remember my local library had the full collection when I was growing up.

 

[Fading Fast]

Good Evening Mrs. Craven by Mollie Panter-Downes, a collection of short stories

Written for The New Yorker magazine between September of 1939 and June of 1944 by England native and resident Panter-Downes, an author with an acute eye for small personal details, these stories are the flip to all the "big" history books about England during WWII. Those books, like the recently released The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson (comments here: #8369), show you Churchill's and England's top-down, macro strategy for surviving the blitz and, ultimately, defeating the Nazis.

In those tomes of history, "the people" are often referenced as "enduring" the blitz's hardships with pluck, backing Churchill, taking in city refugees, supporting the fighting men, but all in a sort gray "background" way. "The people" show up almost as props in a play to highlight the achievements and struggles of their leaders. But here, Panter-Downes takes us into their homes, heads and hearts and shows a deeper and more-nuanced picture of "the people."

We meet older women whose lives had been flower shows and gardening finding new purpose and enthusiasm in making and distributing bandages for troops and clothes for refugees. Conversely, we meet a woman whose former, sorta boyfriend found a wife while on overseas assignment coming home to show her off as she, the ex-girlfriend, smiles pleasantly but dies a bit inside.

Older, retired men become air-raid wardens and find they actually can contribute, while a woman plots and strategizes to get a refugee family that's driving her nuts out of her house despite having enthusiastically taken them in during the blitz. In other words, Panter-Downes shows us real life; shows us the good and the bad, people doing small acts of charity and committing small acts cravenness.

Poignantly, we see a young married couple who had already slipped into a mundane day to day reenergized by his going off to war; nothing sharpens the mind like the threat of losing the good you had passively taken for granted.

Panter-Downes also sheds light on the rigid but changing-because-of-the-war class system in England as a dowager and her equally old housekeeper take in soldiers. The dowager is happy to adapt and give up the old standards, but the housekeeper, whose entire life has been "in service," doesn't want that way of life to change. A story consistent with others (see Remains of the Day) where the servants were, often times, more committed to the class structure and its rules than those at the top.

In a particularly sad story, a middle-aged and, what today we'd call, socially awkward woman, finds a communal experience when her heretofore anonymous neighbors share the apartment building's corridors as shelter through long evenings of the blitz. But later in the war, with the air raids waning, she is alone again in her apartment in the evenings as the neighbors return to their nod-and-move-on manners. Against her nature, she squirrels up her courage and knocks on the door of one neighbor under the pretense of taking him up on his blitz offer to "come by and borrow a book anytime." When she does so, she immediately realizes that the visit "isn't working" and quickly takes the book and retreats to another long night of loneliness.

On it goes through the war as another story shows a maid with an out-of-wedlock baby (when that mattered) coming to work for a lonely soldier's wife. The three of them, in a very modern way, form their own "odd" family as, in particular, the soldier's wife realizes the character of her "simple" maid and the unimportance of society's opinions.

And that's it as these short stories are simply a window into how "the people" experienced the war. These are the regular Brits whom the giants of history - the Churchills, the FDRs, etc. - are always saving, sacrificing, worrying about or fighting for. They are "the people" who appear as almost shadowy figures in those august leader's lives.

So, thanks to Panter-Downes, the next time we're reading how a crowd cheered on Churchill, we'll see that crowd as a little more complex than just "the people." We'll see them as regular men and women with kinds hearts and petty jealousies, with thoughtfulness and, sometimes, meanness, with fear and joy, with hope and sorrow - in total, we'll now see them as more than just "the people."

 

[Fading Fast]

The Big Bankroll: The Life and Times of Arnold Rothstein by Leo Katcher published in 1959

Born in 1882, Arnold Rothstein plowed his own path through life as, first, a successful gambler, then a successful owner of gambling establishments, and finally, as the incredibly successful owner, financier and / or middleman to many legal and illegal businesses in the Roaring Twenties.

Starting his "career" as a gambler, Rothstein had a choice: you can be a gambler or you can be the house - Rothstein chose to, mainly, be the house. You can act with strict integrity in a dishonorable system (and lose) or you can cut corners and, sometimes, outright cheat (as most others did) - Rothstein chose to cut and cheat.

The latter might sound terrible, but that was the way the game was played in his time (and, often, today as well). Basically, people who want to live lives of traditional honor and values need not apply to any position in the early twentieth century's gambling industry.

But within that world, there are rules around "acceptable" cheating - as crazy as that sounds - and Rothstein scrupulously abided by those rules, which, combined with his incredible success, placed him in a position of authority and respect in this border town to the legal economy.

And despite outsized success as a gambler, bookmaker, operator of gambling establishments and owner of racehorses - how he legally manipulated the odds and outcome of two horse races to win, in today's dollars, about $20 million, are edge-of-your-seat-exciting reading - all that was just a springboard to other more lucrative legal and illegal ventures.

While born into a respectable, religious and upper-middle class Jewish family, growing up, Rothstein never embraced his family's values and all but broke completely from his parents in his teens to carve out his early career in gambling. From there, after his aforementioned outsized success as a gambler and owner of gambling enterprises, he evolved into a sort of éminence grise of New York City and, to an extent, the northeast's organized corruption in an era when gangsters, police and politicians were, sadly, much more integrated than they are today (at least we hope).

Rothstein earned his nickname "The Big Bankroll" by, on his way up, carrying a huge sum of cash to show his seriousness to the top gamblers. Later, when his career branched out from gambling, his large capital made him the go-to guy to provide funding for everything from bail bonds, fencing, money laundering, real estate, fixing the World Series (which he didn't really do) to backing buckets shops (shady brokerage firms in the pre-regulated days which acted, basically, as gambling establishments using stocks instead of horses as the game), narcotics and, when it was the thing, bootlegging.

It was his bankroll/capital, plus his extensive and high-level network of underworld and political connections - he was tight with Tammany Hall when it ruled New York City - his intelligence, his preternaturally calm personality (even in a storm) and his integrity (his word and his money were known as money good - crucial in a world that operates without contracts) that resulted in Rothstein sitting at the center of, but somehow legally insulated from, everything corrupt in New York City in the Roaring Twenties.

He had managed to be the one cog that gangsters, politicians and union bosses all needed to help coordinate, finance and, oftentimes, run their corrupt efforts; yet, he wasn't a gangster (or part of a mob), a politician or a labor leader.
Instead, Rothstein had become a sui generis figure sitting in the middle of many above-board and not-above-board businesses and schemes, but in a way that left him reasonably legally immune. If you dumped your morals overboard and lived your life to make money - and you had the particular type of brains, personality and emotional control that Rothstein did - his would be a smart path to choose, until it wasn't.

At his career peak in the Twenties, it's simply hard to keep track of all his businesses which range from gambling and bookmaking, to real estate, restaurants, bootlegging and narcotics. As bootlegging became more violent, he seemed to lean away from it (although he still financed bootleggers), but via his huge bail-bond business (which seemed, overall, legitimate), he became the lynchpin in much of the growing union corruption that labor leaders and politicians used to line their pockets. Sadly, as presented here, New York City's construction unions were all but birthed in corruption with politicians and labor bosses lining their pockets at the expense of their members.

With his place secured (for the moment), as the Twenties roared along, so did Rothstein - getting richer and more involved in everything. Oddly, despite his personality being a key ingredient to his success - he seemed to be good at surface friendships, at knowing whom to befriend and what relationships to cultivate - he appeared unable to form deep bonds with anyone, even his very decent wife Carolyn.

And while long-suffering Carolyn was his only confidant, it still had to be on his terms where he shared and confided when and only what he wanted. Proving as adept at choosing his wife as almost everything else, Carolyn accepted her role and, even when she finally asked for a divorce (no intimacy, him cheating and having everything on his terms wore even her down), she demanded nothing (he offered to provide comfortably for her anyway) and even remained a confidant after the split. Divorce lawyers would go out of business if most breakups were like this.

And right when his marriage was unwinding, Rothstein made a critical mistake that proved how tenuous his position had been all along. Usually a winner at poker - and always, until now, a disciplined player - he played sloppily in a high-stakes game and left many six-figure IOUs that, by gambling convention, he should have honored within two or three days.

But just at this time, Rothstein was cash poor and asset rich. He was financing so many investments - land development, bail bonds, bootlegging, restaurants and on and on - that he didn't have the liquidity to settle his IOUs and he didn't want to sell any of his businesses or investments. Basically, he was in a classic liquidity crisis - solvent (positive net worth owing to his illiquid assets), but unable to meet his bills with available cash.

In the legal world, this is settled, usually, by the individual, effectively, being forced to sell some assets to meet his debts (worst case - that happens in bankruptcy court); but in Rothstein's world, his attempt to bully time out of his creditors resulted in one trying to collect, in gangster style, by threatening Rothstein with a gun. Things went badly and down went Arnold for good.

After avoiding the violent side of his "business" his entire professional life, Rothstein died a very typical underworld death. But what the heck, he had a great run - unique and spanning a few decades - in a field not known for its longevity. And that's what makes The Big Bank Roll such a good read; it has that rare thing, a unique personality at its core. Author Katcher didn't need to exaggerate as the reality of Rothstein's life reads better than most fiction.

 

[Tiki Tom]

For more than a decade, my summer tradition has been to read the latest installment of Martin Walker’s Bruno Chief of Police Series. He cranks them out like clockwork. Bruno is a small town cop in a picture perfect town in the Perigord in France (think woods, vineyards, castles, horses). Somehow his cases always seem to involve international intrigue and his long time links to French Intelligence. His on-and-off Paris girlfriend is high up in counter terrorism. Bruno himself is a country boy who knows everyone in the town, has a heart of gold, and —very importantly— frequently cooks up a storm for a cast of warm-hearted friends. But, like Cabot Cove, the sleepy town of St Denis seems to have an improbable rate of high profile murders. This latest book (#15, I think) involves Russian Oligarchs who buy passports from Malta or Cyprus so that they can gain a foothold in the EU so that they can expand their organized crime operations (money laundering, fraud, human trafficking, political assassinations). Pull a thread and it leads right to the very top in Moscow. Spooks, good friends, gourmet feasts, and murder most foul are the order of the day in the French countryside; with a dollop of history and current events thrown in for good measure. Word of caution... the books are a bit of an ongoing saga of familiar characters and romantic near misses. Also, as the series has gone on, it has become a bit formulaic. Still, the series has become something I look forward to each summer. The latest installment (just published) is called “a shooting at chateau rock.”

 

[Fading Fast]

The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner published in 2020

I'm a Jane Austen fan and I enjoy a good breezy beach read as this book has been advertised, so I took a shot on the latest output from the seemingly never-ending Jane Austen merchandising machine.

But, unfortunately, this one's on the disappointing side. Set in the '30s and '40s, the premise is that several lonely or broken-hearted locals, from the village where Jane Austen lived a hundred and fifty years prior, decide to start a historical society to preserve Austen's home (a cottage on an estate about to be sold to a big developer) and other Austen memorabilia.

It's disappointing because the writing and story are simply average. Additionally, many of the characters are anachronistically modern while others are just black-and-white heroes or villains. And all these efforts seem to exist in order to advance the author's political biases.

The plot itself is straightforward - will the society be able to raise the funds to buy the Austen "cottage" before the (of course) evil land developer buys the estate and demolishes everything to (of course) build a golf course? Being an Austen cognate, the story is also full of unrequited love, relationship misunderstandings and "marriage for advantage versus marriage for love" challenges.

Unfortunately, you can see the story's seams, see every gun hung and feel every "critical" moment when it's coming. And while we know it is very important to modern female writers to have strong female characters, in a period novel, a strong female character should be written to reflect what a strong female - there were plenty of them - would have thought and acted like in the 1940s, not like one that was transported back from 2020.

I often wonder if these authors (and there are many modern ones who make the same mistake) even bother to read newspaper articles and fictional stories from the period they write about to learn how to accurately portray a strong 1940s female. Authors like Ursula Parrot and Rex Beach (and others) were writing popular novels about smart, independent women in the '20s - '40s. You could also pick up any old newspaper to read about these fictional women's real-world equivalents.

In these books and newspapers from those times, authors would learn that there were powerful, independent, forward-thinking women, but they still thought and acted in a period-consistent way. They worked on the edges of the social constructs of their times and held the progressive views of their day, which often don't align with today's progressive views.

That, I'm guessing, is what modern authors don't like about period-accurate characters. So, instead of drawing them accurately, modern authors limn these women as if they were time-traveling heroines visiting some past era to show the people how backward and wrong their thoughts and actions are. I think authors like Ms. Jenner really want to write science fiction novels, but they don't know it.

The other thing that hurts this one is when Ms. Jenner's characters quote passages from Austen novels: few modern authors' writing looks good in a side-by-side comparison to Austen.

It's June and it's hot and I'd be very happy for a mindless beach read, but unfortunately, this one offers too little fun while irritating with its period-inconsistent characters' moral posturing.