The Blue Grotto

Geeky Science Post of the Day. . .

     I recently subscribed to a new magazine called Science Illustrated.  When I look back at my early academic career, I can see that the chilling, sinking, damp, depressing, suicide-watch-inducing feeling I got every time I had to sit down in a science class was a little bit of a tragedy.  I dreaded science.  When I think back, it's all boring memorization of photosynthesis elements and experiments that are meant to, but don't, excite young students.  The bottom line is that I had a string of terrible science teachers who never made the effort to link their subject to the real world or make it interesting.

     Over the past few years, I've become fascinated enough by math and science to go back and read some really cool books aimed at "laymen".  Here are a few books that will blow your mind:

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1)  This was the cutting edge of physics in 1979.  Physics is so fascinating because you're either dealing with numbers too big to imagine (e.g. distances in the Universe) or too small to imagine (e.g. quarks).  This book will fry your brain:

 

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2)  Then move on to this, which is current cutting edge "String Theory" physics:

 

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     And then there's this one.  Have you ever read about the Fibonacci number sequence that occurs all over Nature (for you finance people, it is also widely used in the charting of market instruments)?  I think the Fibonacci number sequence is the result of God sitting around and deciding to stir a super-cool feature into how the world works!  (Note:  This book is fascinating, but the author tries to be witty and funny, and his efforts go over like a turd in a punchbowl each and every time.  Cringe-worthy.)

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     Anyway, here's a page about icebergs that I scanned from the premiere issue of Science Illustrated:

 

You'll Start to See Lots of Previews for This Christmas Day Release. . . .

Charlie Wilson's War (2003)

By George Crile

A scan of the Grotto Literary Dept. Editor's own copy

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     On Christmas Day, Universal will release the Mike Nichols-directed, Aaron Sorkin-penned movie of this nonfiction page-turner, starring Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts.  Unfortunately, I find Tom Hanks to be well on his way to the annoying category of super-actors (Hoffman, Pacino) rather than the cool, reliable, professional, watchable category (Denzel, Russell Crowe, Leonardo DiCaprio).  And Julia Roberts, while excellent in Erin Brokovich, is not on the Top 20 list of best actresses. [I can also only imagine that with that director, that writer, and those stars, the movie will undoubtedly cast America in a silly, negative light.] 

     Enough of the movie.  Read the book.  It's the crazy story of how an anonymous, insignificant Texas Congressman and a CIA agent orchestrated the funding of the wildly successful Cold War campaign of the mujahideen against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

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This Book Reads Like a 318-page Footnote to a More Interesting Book You Didn't Buy. . . .

The Tycoons (2005)

How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J.P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy

By Charles R. Morris

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     If the textbooks you've ordered on the history of mass production in America are not detailed enough for you, you need this volume!  I found it interesting indeed, but after reading it I felt like I had just spent a few days flipping through the balance sheets and income statements of a railroad or an oil refinery, not a pleasurable history of American business.

     I would recommend it to my friend Drew, who reads just about every book that is published in a given year, but others might find it a little on the dry and flaky side.

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Here's a Pretty Good Beach Read About Poker Savant Stu Ungar.

     One of a Kind

     The Rise and Fall of Stuey "The Kid" Ungar, the World's Greatest Poker Player

     by Nolan Dalla and Peter Alson

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     When you hear the best poker players in the world talk about Stuey Ungar, it's almost eerie how they speak of him as being so far up on a different plane.  He won the World Series of Poker three times, and if he hadn't been such a drug addict, who knows how much more successful he could have been.  It was as if he could see his opponents' cards, and in typical genius fashion, he had no idea how to run any part of his life away from his narrow field of expertise.  After winning millions of dollars playing cards, he died young and penniless in a fleabag motel in Vegas, his heart giving in to years of cocaine and crack.

     I would like to offer one excerpt here.  It's a hand that Stu played in a high stakes cash game against the previous year's World Series winner.  This is by far the creepiest (i.e. perfectly accurate) call I've ever heard of anyone making:

 

When Fiction Is Stranger than Truth. . . Because It's Not Really Fiction!

     A few months ago I was scanning the New Releases shelves at Borders in the Time Warner Center in New York and this book caught my eye:

     It's an account by a South Africa-based reporter for The Economist about a failed 2004 coup attempt against the corrupt and tyrannical dictatorship of Equatorial Guinea, a tiny West African country rich with offshore oil reserves (I actually remember reading in the newspaper about the planeload of mercenaries being busted on the tarmac in Zimbabwe). 

     The inside flap mentioned that the plotters were inspired by Frederick Forsyth's 1974 bestseller, The Dogs of War, a "fictional" account of a coup against a tiny West African country, orchestrated by a greedy British mining executive and a top-notch mercenary for access to massive platinum deposits:

     I thought I'd better read The Dogs of War first, so I did.  It's an amazing book, but not exactly what you might expect.  It is not an action-packed thriller.  There are only a few pages of action at the very end.  It reads more like a stunningly detailed daily diary or manual on how to orchestrate a coup from soup to nuts.  Every single telegram and meeting dealing with opening bank accounts, setting up dummy corporations, facilitating arms buys and smuggling, and researching military strategy is accounted for in detail in the book.  It's eerie how real it seems.

     Then the penny dropped, and I did a little bit of Googling on Frederick Forsyth.  Seems that he was involved in a failed 1973 coup attempt of the very same Equatorial Guinea.  He apparently sat down afterwards and said to himself, "Well, that didn't work, so I might as well whip off a bestselling piece of 'fiction" and sell that!"

     His book is great.  I would advise you to skip The Wonga Coup, though.  It's a really boring grind, like a series of disappointing newspaper articles that you hope will be exciting but aren't.

     Here's the 2006 Times of London article about the Forsyth connection:

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From The Sunday Times

June 11, 2006

Forsyth: My Real Life Dogs of War Coup

Maurice Chittenden

FREDERICK FORSYTH, the bestselling author, has admitted being involved in a plot to overthrow an African government in a coup almost identical to the storyline of his novel The Dogs Of War.

The writer gave money to mercenaries in an aborted attempt to topple the leader of Equatorial Guinea more than 30 years before Sir Mark Thatcher, son of the former prime minister, was accused of backing a similar plot.

Forsyth, 67, said last week: “I don’t know whether I thought of it first and the mercenaries thought, ‘Wow, what a great idea’, or we were sitting around a table and they mentioned it first.”

The novelist, who also wrote The Day Of The Jackal, posed as a South African arms dealer to attend a meeting of gunrunners in Germany. He fled when his cover was blown.

Forsyth’s role in the aborted coup was first uncovered by The Sunday Times Insight team in 1978 from the diaries of a mercenary who had committed suicide during a siege in east London after he had shot a policeman. But the author denied it.

In The Dogs of War, a British tycoon hires a band of mercenaries to seize control of the fictitious African country of Zangora after the discovery of a £10 billion mountain of platinum. They land from a former naval attack craft called the Albatross and storm the dictator’s palace.

In real life, a soldier of fortune named Alexander Gay, who had fought in Congo and Biafra, chartered the Albatross in 1973 and loaded it with mercenaries to sail to the island of Fernando Po from which Francisco Macias ran Equatorial Guinea as president for life.

The plot was foiled by a Special Branch informant in Gibraltar. The boat and its invasion force were seized by Spanish police in the Canary Islands after a tip-off from the British embassy in Madrid.

“I took part in the plot in as much as I was chewing the fat and shooting the breeze with the others involved,” Forsyth said. “But as far as I was concerned any money I gave was for information and I pulled out before the plan was put into practice.

“Aerial photos of Fernando Po were brought to my flat. But I was not on the boat and did not know it had set sail. Luckily they never reached the island or they would have been slaughtered.”

Forsyth’s role is confirmed in a new book, The Wonga Coup, by Adam Roberts, former Southern Africa correspondent of The Economist, which focuses on the 2004 attempt by mercenaries to seize control of Equatorial Guinea.

While researching his book, Roberts found a previously classified Foreign Office cable in the National Archives that described the 1973 coup attempt.

Recognising the similarity with The Dogs of War, Roberts challenged Forsyth, who told him: “I originally postulated a question to myself. Would it be possible for a group of paid and bought-for mercenaries to topple a republic? I looked around and saw Fernando Po, and every story about the country was gruesome . . . I decided it could be done. If you stormed the palace . . . probably by sunrise you could take over, provided you have a substitute African president and announced it was an internal coup d’état.

“I began to explore the world of black market arms . . . I penetrated under subterfuge, using a South African name, and developed my theme.”

He said last week: “My true identity became known when one of the arms dealers, sitting in the back of his limousine at traffic lights, saw my photograph in a bookstore window in Hamburg promoting the German version of The Jackal.

“Someone called me and advised me to get out of town. I was half-dressed but grabbed my passport, left everything else and jumped on a moving train which dumped me in Amsterdam.”

I Would Describe This Book Recommendation as a "Carl Hiaasen Inside the Beltway"

Little Green Men

By Christopher Buckley (1999)

     If Carl Hiaasen switched from writing about South Florida sleazeballs to writing about Washington insiders (also sleazeballs), this might be the result.  It's pretty funny, and easily makes the cut for a good, light beach read for the summer months.

     John O'Banion is a smug Chris Matthews or Tim Russert-like political talk show host who golfs with all the big power brokers and gets invited to all the right dinner parties with his glamorous wife. 

     His life is turned upside down when he's abducted by "aliens" (a bunch of top-secret government agents who dress up like extraterrestrials to perpetuate a steady string of abduction tales for space-program funding purposes). 

     The funny bits of the book are the characters that are hilariously thinly-disguised versions of real Washington oddballs.  There's the fictional Vernon Jordan, the Katharine Graham, the Strom Thurmond, and my favorite, the Middle Eastern diplomat/power broker named Prince "Blandar."

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If Your Little Boy is Spending Too Much Time Playing With Dolls or Sitting Around a "Tree of Peace," Give Him This Excellent-Looking Book!

     I haven't read this new book, but it looks great!  Plus, I trust the reviewer, Mona Charen, one of my favorite columnists.

The Dangerous Book for Boys

by Conn and Hal Iggulden
(HarperCollins, 288 pp., $24.95)

Boys Gotta Be Boys

MONA CHAREN

For decades this country has more or less tamely been taking instruction from the likes of Gloria Steinem, who advised that “we badly need to raise boys more like we raise girls.” An entire generation of parents, weaned on feminist claptrap, dutifully set about cleansing males of their boyishness. As Christina Hoff Sommers documented in The War Against Boys, the feminists were able to bend the Department of Education as well as the National Education Association to their preposterous agenda. Competition was frowned upon; stories of adventure and derring-do were replaced by tales of care and compassion. Recess, a last redoubt for smothered boys to expend some of their energy, was abolished at some schools.

But of course, the idea that boys could be just like girls, if only we would abandon our silly prejudices and raise them identically, has run into a ditch. Even some of the feminists (the practical sort, not the theorists) who actually had children were astonished to discover that virtually straight out of the womb, little boy units and little girl units think and behave differently.

The American debut of Conn and Hal Iggulden’s The Dangerous Book for Boys marks how far we have progressed from the feminist Dark Ages of a couple of decades ago. Here is an absolutely brilliant compendium of things that captivate the male of the species — and it is flying off the shelves.

Start with the title. Nowhere do the authors, who are brothers, explain why the word “dangerous” is included, but I suspect it’s because they know the male mind. Any boy surveying titles on a shelf will be drawn to that word as a candidate is drawn to a microphone.

My 11-year-old son immediately set about making the “greatest paper airplane in the world” after opening to page 2. He certifies that the Iggulden model does surpass all previous efforts and we have one parked on the very top of a high bookcase to certify that it really flies well. It will require some advanced engineering to get the thing down.

In one- to four-page increments, The Dangerous Book for Boys provides instructions, drawings, narratives, and pictures on about 70 topics. Here boys can learn how to navigate at night by the stars, how to build a go-cart, what are the famous battles of history, how to teach your dog to play dead, how to make an electromagnet, the rules of English grammar, the phases of the moon, dinosaurs, five pen-and-paper games, baseball’s most valuable players since 1931, how to make disappearing ink, the basics of first aid, and some things to know about girls. Every experiment — including how to make a periscope, how to grow crystals in a water glass, and how to make a timer and tripwire — was field-tested by the authors and usually requires only household objects, though some suburbanites like me might require multiple trips to the hardware store, as our supply of wood, small bulbs, and clothespins is not what it should be.

Like most moderns, we have our share of video games about the house and those clearly appeal to a part of the male psyche. Some are even educational. But what they fail to do and what this book does so well is nurture a boy’s natural curiosity and desire to manipulate his environment. If you have a boy, were a boy, or even know a boy well, do you have any doubt that he would love to build a battery with “ten quarters, metal kitchen foil, blotting paper, two pieces of copper wire, cider vinegar, salt, an LED (light-emitting diode, available from hobby and hardware shops), and masking tape”? Do you doubt that he would be interested in learning the dots and dashes of Morse Code? Or that he would leap at the chance to make his own bow and arrows?

The Iggulden brothers appreciate a boy’s curiosity about nature, history, mechanical things, and magic tricks. But they also gratify a boy’s longing for stories of courage, extraordinary deeds, and sacrifice. Here a child can find the stories of Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, two climbers who scaled the west face of Siula Grande in the Andes in 1985 and almost lost their lives. Simpson broke a bone. Here is an excerpt:

The two men came to a cut in the ridge and Simpson started to climb down a face of sheer ice. He hammered in one of his ice axes and didn’t like the sound it made. As he pulled one out to get a better contact, the other gave way without warning and he fell.

He hit hard, his shinbone going through his knee and into the upper leg. As Yates climbed down, he [Simpson] tried to stand on it, appalled at the pain and grating of bones. The two men looked at each other in desperation. Simpson expected his friend to leave him. There was no other choice — a broken leg so far from civilization meant that he was dead.

Yates did not leave him, but I won’t spoil the story. You will also find here the life story of Douglas Bader, the flying ace who lost both of his legs in a 1931 accident but nonetheless served heroically in World War II.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

“Invictus” by William Ernest Henley is reproduced in full in the section titled “Seven Poems Every Boy Should Know,” along with “The Road Not Taken,” “If,” and “Sea-Fever,” among others. Yes, there’s a whiff of the English gentleman about this entire compendium — despite the additions of the Declaration of Independence and the “Mountains of the United States.” The famous battles are a bit skewed toward English history. The Somme, for example, is introduced this way: “The Somme was the river in France that Edward III had crossed just before the battle of Crécy. The area has had a great deal of British blood soaking into its earth over the centuries, but never more than on the first day of the battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916.” This clearly came straight from the English version of the book, published last year. But that’s no great fault.

A few minor quibbles: Some of the photographs and drawings have captions, others do not. The writing is not always crystal clear, and some of the explanations of large subjects (such as the earth’s movement and the seasons) are a bit too brief.

Suggestion for the next edition: One subject that I have found to be of intense interest to boys is poisonous animals and plants. Whose venom is, ounce for ounce, the most deadly? (I’ve heard it’s the black-widow spider, but the Igguldens can research the matter.) A section on this would be welcome, I suspect.

The Dangerous Book for Boys is a celebration of boys — their eagerness, their curiosity, their energy, and their purity of heart. It nurtures their spirits and elevates their spongy minds with proudly and unapologetically masculine topics. Good show.
Mona Charen is a syndicated columnist.

Here's a New Book by My Father. . . .

     This new book is a collection of articles and speeches by my father.  You can stuff it in your tote bag to take to the beach along with a new John Grisham or Danielle Steele. . . .

This Book Will Bring You Up to Speed on Why Google is Taking Over the World. . . .

The Google Story by David A. Vise (2005)

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     After my pal Gib D. announced to me in November 2004, "Dude, Google's going to take over the world," I decided I needed to find out what all the fuss was about, so I started reading a book called The Search.  It was about as enjoyable as jamming a Tabasco sauce-soaked pencil into my eyeball. 

     Luckily, my friend Suzanne started working for Google a few months ago and was able to recommend this book, The Google Story, which is much better.  You'll see that what Google is up to represents at least as much of a world-changing seismic shift as that of John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil's over a hundred years ago. 

     Also, it'll show you that what sets people like Larry Page and Sergey Brin, or Bill Gates, apart from the rest of the impressive pack of hugely successful entrepreneurs or brainiacs is that rare combination of both intelligence and business smarts.  When you combine the brains of a Stephen Hawking, for example, with the ambition and savvy of a Rockefeller, you end up with a Microsoft or a Google.

Here's a Book on a Fascinating Guy. . . .

The Prince

By William Simpson

   

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     This is the story of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, illegitimate son of Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud (one of Fahd and Abdullah's brothers) and a servant girl.  Overcoming his second-class status within the royal family, he pushed to become a star Royal Saudi Air Force fighter pilot and eventually the powerful Ambassador to the United States for over two decades. 

     The author is one of Bandar's buddies from his training days at Cranwell in England, so the book is quite biased, with scarcely a real criticism.  Nonetheless, it's a pretty interesting look into high-stakes, behind-the-scenes dealmaking around the globe over the last thirty years.  Bandar was at the center of countless negotiations during the Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II presidencies.  He's a masterful diplomat, and I am sure he must be an awesome poker player.

     As a servant of his beloved Kingdom, Bandar of course often found himself at odds with Israel and the U.S.'s Middle East policies , but the evidence convinces me that he is a good man who genuinely desires peace in the Middle East.  He despises the radical Islam that promotes terror, and he may be a key figure in speeding up internal cultural reforms in Saudi Arabia.  He also loves the United States, as a representative of his country and as a man. 

     One powerful anecdote from the book tells of Bandar, as a young pilot, having a blast at a party in England with another young man he took to be an American.  When he found out later in the evening that the man was Israeli, he said that he felt an immediate change inside himself from affection to hatred.  However, he also quickly said to himself, "This can't be right.  This doesn't make sense."  It was an important event in shaping his views on the Middle East.

     Another good sign is that everyone, and I mean everyone, loves this guy.  He is respected by diplomats and politicians of all stripes, even those across the table from him.  He also stays in close, close touch with his classmates from Cranwell and his early flying buddies, who make up his circle of best friends. 

     Anyway, it's a great look into the tedious, sensitive negotiations that never make the papers (and, by the way, into how clueless and idiotic Sandy Berger and Madeleine Albright are).

     I give this book a B, but I'm glad I read it.   

      

Here's One I Read While Battling a 60-Hour Case of the Hiccups in Uruguay.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt (1992)

     Yes, I was in beautiful Punta del Este over New Year's '03-'04 and came down with a paralyzing case of the hiccups that lasted for 60 hours.  I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy.  It did, however, allow me to plow through a stack of books while my friends were racing around from beach to restaurant to nightclub. . . .

     Anyway, this debut novel is told in the first person by a student at a small New England liberal arts college who gets accepted into a group of Greek scholars.  The first line of the prologue reads "The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation," so I'm not giving anything away by telling you that a murder has been committed.  I'll leave it at that, plotwise.

     It's difficult to nail down and articulate why this book is so good.  It's not a page-turner of the "twists and turns" variety, the characters are not heroic or particularly admirable, and it's set against a bleak and dull winter backdrop.  That leaves the writing.  It's just excellent prose, and it's certainly one of the ten best novels I've read (that's why it's appearing here in the exclusive Blue Grotto Book Recommendations category).

When People Talk About the Pleasures of Reading, They're Thinking of This Book.

     Back in September 1992, when I was packing up to move to Spain after graduating from college the previous May, I remember gathering together a stack of good books to read, as I knew I'd be spending countless hours on trains, crisscrossing around from Amsterdam to Oslo to Berlin to Paris, etc.  I polled some friends of mine I knew to be bookworms, and I was startled to hear back from both Amo and Drew Berkery (both of whom devour at least a book a week) that, by total coincidence, their top recommendation was Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry. 

     I said to the guys exactly what you're thinking right now:  "I'm not really into Westerns" as images of made-for-TV scenes featuring Ricky Schroder and Danny Glover danced around my head. 

     Against my gut, I packed the massive volume and eventually dug into it upon my arrival in Madrid.  After reading about 100 of the 945 pages, I realized that I had without a doubt been steered in the right direction by my trusted pals, and I loved the book so much that I began to ration myself to only twenty or thirty pages a night to prolong the genuine delight of the read as long as possible.  You've never been sucked into a story and cast of characters as rich as this, I guarantee.  When people talk about the pleasure of reading, they're talking about Lonesome Dove.

Here's a Great Read About the Tumultuous, "Wild West"-like Birth of Capitalism in 1990s Russia

The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia, by David E. Hoffman

     When I worked for Deltec Asset Management during the 1990s, we were very involved in the truly "emerging" Russian financial markets.  My direct responsibilities lay in the realm of U.S. equities, but many of my close colleagues and friends at Deltec were challenged on a daily basis with evaluating investment opportunities in all sorts of tricky global equity and debt markets.  It was a very exciting time, as Russian capitalism went through a wrenching and extremely painful birth.  My colleagues would return from exotic trips to Russia with ideas on what to buy, and those of us not directly involved in managing these instruments would nonetheless fire aggressively at these opportunities with our personal accounts.  We all owned loads of Gazprom, Rostelecom, Yuganskneftegaz, UES, and other recently-privatized companies representing the natural resource assets of Russia, as well as the burgeoning communications and technology infrastructure. 

     This book centers on the aggressive young guys who were true "robber barons", much more so than the 19th century cats here in the U.S.  You'll meet Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Boris Berezovsky, Alexander Smolensky, Vladimir Gusinsky, Anatoly Chubais, and Yuri Luzhkov, who scraped, bribed, and muscled their way to massive fortunes by appointing themselves as kingmakers in the new Russia.  You'll see how they rigged auctions, engaged in lots of back-room dealings, and dabbled in both character assassination and the other type of assassination.

     The author is a reporter, so the reading pleasure comes from the actual story, not the prose.  I think you'll enjoy it.

For Your History Shelf . . .

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, by Daniel Yergin

     From the drilling of the first oil well in Pennsylvania in 1859, through the first Gulf War, this book is an engrossing history of the world told from the angle of the struggles to dominate the upstream and downstream flow of petroleum. You'll meet a parade of larger-than-life characters: John D. Rockefeller, Stalin, the Rothschilds, Marcus Samuel (the father of Royal Dutch Shell), Henri Deterding, Churchill, Calouste Gulbenkian, Hitler, Rommel, Patton, Admiral Yamamoto, King Faisal and oil minister Yamani, Mossadegh, the Shah, J. Paul Getty, Nasser, Armand Hammer, George H.W. Bush, and Saddam Hussein. The action bounces around from Pennsylvania, to Texas, to Russia, to Azerbaijan, to Iran, to Iraq, to Saudi Arabia, to Indonesia, to Venezuela, and to any and all centers of power on the Earth. 

This Book Has Had a Huge Influence On Me . . .

Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First, by Mona Charen

     My friend Terry urged me to read this book in the fall of 2004, and it deeply affected me.  It is totally free of any sort of emotional distortions or embellishments.  It just hammers home fact after fact after fact.

     I found an interview with the author (who is also one of my favorite columnists) on the internet, so here are a few excerpts I've chosen:

     On why she wrote the book:  "My book is about the moral failure of liberalism in this country to confront one of the two great evils of the 20th century. I say that fighting Nazism came very naturally to liberals. They despised what the Nazis stood for. They recognized the threat. They were prepared to go to war to be sure that nobody, and particularly not us, had to live under that kind of a regime. Their great moral failure in the 20th century was failing to recognize that the communist threat was equally evil and equally dangerous. And so my book is about showing how academics, religious figures, journalists, all of the major opinion makers in this country -- not all, but the liberal ones got it so badly wrong about the cold war, about what we were fighting for and about this country."

     Regarding the term "useful idiots", she explains that "they're the words of Vladimir Lenin, who, in his very cynical way, predicted that Western liberals and American liberals would swallow whole a lot of the lies presented by the Soviet Union and the communist movement and would prove themselves to be, in their credulity and in their naivete and in their sympathy for the communist cause, what he called useful idiots for their purposes."

More Summer Reading For You . . .

Snobs, by Julian Fellowes (2004)

The debut novel from Julian Fellowes, winner of the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for 2001's Gosford Park.  If Tom Wolfe targeted his sights on the nuances of status and snobbery of the British upper class, the finished product might be something like this.  The attractive and socially-ambitious upper-middle-class Edith snares Charles, an agreeable but dull young earl, as a husband to advance her social standing, and things get complicated.  The author captures every angle of the curious, intriguing phenomenon of social climbing, with hilarious results.

Read This On Your Next Cross-Country Flight . . . .

Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, by Ben Mezrich (2002)

This is a hugely entertaining read about a team of young card counters, and if you crack it as you buckle in, you'll finish it as you land on the other coast.  You can skip the author's next book, Ugly Americans, but he wrote a book in 2005 called Busting Vegas: The MIT Whiz Kid Who Brought the Casinos to Their Knees, which is pretty good.  Rather than counting cards to beat the casinos, the MIT kids in this one use "shuffle tracking" to do it.

This Is A Must-Read . . . .

Nicholas and Alexandra, by Robert Massie (1967)

This is one of my favorite books of all time.  Besides being a captivating and thorough account of the historical events leading up to the demise of the Russian monarchy, the quality of the prose is so good that you finish the book feeling as if you lived in those palaces, went to those winter balls in St. Petersburg, and saw the events unfold firsthand.  By the time the tragic conclusion arrives, you actually feel like the Tsar and his family are your own family, which makes it all the more powerful.

For Your Summer Beach Reading List . . . .

Nemesis : The True Story of Aristotle Onassis, Jackie O, and the Love Triangle That Brought Down the Kennedys (2004)

This story is wild, and wildly entertaining.  Apart from the shocking thesis of the book, which I cannot divulge, the peripheral stories of life around Onassis and onboard his yacht, the Christina, are far more scandalous and eye-popping than any prime-time soap opera you could find on the tube.