Googled: The End of the World As We Know It
Ken Auletta
Penguin Press
Unless you live in a cave or have never touched a keyboard, Google
has touched your life, perhaps in ways you didn't even realize.
Author Ken Auletta, whom you may recognize from his regular columns
in The New Yorker, is a keen observer of media and the new
communications paradigm. As the author points out, Google's impact
and growing influence is both the result of its insideout kind of
thinking - starting with the assumption that the old ways of doing
everything should be challenged - to the personalities of its
founders. And if you think that is small potatoes, consider
Google's anticipated ad revenues this year: $20 billion. That is
more than the amassed prime time ad revenues of NBC, ABC, CBS, and
Fox combined. CEO Eric Schmidt told the author that Google will
become the world's first $100 billion media company.
This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly
(Hardcover)
Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff
Princeton University Press
We saw a television interview with the authors, and we were
fascinated. Despite what seems like a dry academic topic, it is
immensely captivating and vitally important. According to an
article in The Washington Post, "A popular refrain during our
modern-day financial crisis is that we have forgotten the lessons
of economic history. But Americans are not ignorant of the past:
Many are obsessed with it. Countless investors scrutinize stock
charts and bet on history repeating itself. However, few win this
way. Our problem is not ignorance of history but an inability to
know which bits are most relevant to the present." As Martin Wolf
writes in The Financial Times, "The four most dangerous words in
finance are 'this time is different.' Thanks to (the authors) no
one can doubt this again. The authors have put an immense amount of
work into collecting the data financial institutions needed if they
were to have any chance of making quantitative risk management
work."
Eating the Dinosaur
Chuck Klosterman
Scribner
The world is probably divided into equal parts of those people who
know and read Klosterman (in GQ and Spin) and people who have no
sense of humor. If you don't know where you fall, read this passage
from the author to determine if you would enjoy the book. "During
the summer of 2008, I was interviewed by a Norwegian magazine
writer named Erik Moller Solheim. He was good at his job. He knew a
lot of trivia about Finland's military history. We ate fried pork
knees and drank Ur-Krostitzer beer. But in the middle of our
playful conversation, I was suddenly paralyzed by an unspoken
riddle I could not answer: Why was I responding to this man's
questions? My books are not translated into Norwegian. If the
journalist sent me a copy of his finished article, I could not read
a word of it. I don't even know what the publication's name (Dagens
Naeringsliv) is supposed to mean. I will likely never go to Norway,
and even if I did, the fact that I was interviewed for this
publication would have no impact on my time there. No one would
care. The fjords would be underwhelmed."
The Return of the Great Depression
Vox Day
WND Books
If you want to get some real insight into the global economic
crisis, why not read a book from an author whose description reads:
"Vox Day graduated in 1990 from Bucknell University with degrees in
economics and Asian studies. He is a member of the Science Fiction
and Fantasy Writers Association, the International Game Developers
Association, and Mensa; and he helped found the techno band
Psykosonik. In addition to his weekly columns, he transmits
contagious and controversial memes daily from the Vox Popoli blog."
Frankly, we haven't read or even scanned this book yet, but the
combination of the author's background and subject matter promises
an interesting mashup that we are looking forward to ingesting.
According to promo material for this book, Day "turns to the six
scenarios presently envisioned by the world's leading economists
and assesses which is most likely to unfold. (Day) concludes that
the most probable scenario is a Great Depression 2.0 that will be
larger in scale and scope than that of the 1930s."