6 Smart Books: Relating to Money
Stock selloffs, continuing foreclosures, cheap dollars: Money remains on all of our minds. Here we have six books chosen by our editors and writers that look at our relationship to money, and our relationships with each other. One is a straight-ahead investing guide, another an examination of how money troubles affect the way we get along with each other. We also have a book of essays by Michael Chabon on fatherhood and family life, essays by Chuck Klosterman on expectations vs. reality, and two novels, one about money and class in England over the last half century, and another about police detectives in contemporary Brooklyn.
The Investor’s Manifesto
The title might echo Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, but “The Investor’s Manifesto” isn’t exactly revolutionary. Instead, this straightforward handbook by William J. Bernstein offers simple advice about portfolio design, retirement planning, determining your ideal stock/bond split and avoiding unnecessary fund fees.
Bernstein has a number of suggestions for those traumatized by the recent financial collapse. Many of his tips are sound, like “Buy fuddy-duddy, low-cost index funds.” Some are self-evident, such as, “Investors should design their portfolios to minimize the chances of dying poor.” Others are just plain weird: “Learn to recognize the panicked messages from your amygdalae,” he writes, referencing a part of your gray matter that processes emotional reactions. They are “the frantic shrieks of your reptilian brain, which wants nothing more than to make you poor.”
This last bit comes from a chapter on investor psychology, where Bernstein — a trained neurologist — tries to explain how the human brain’s emotional circuitry affects our everyday financial decisions. Another chapter briefly summarizes the evolution of capital markets. Both of these chapters are digressions, but they are welcome ones and should encourage readers to explore “neuroeconomics” and financial history more deeply on their own.
Aside from the occasional scientific term related to brain function, “The Investor’s Manifesto” is a plain-English introduction to investing. At a time when a specter seems to be haunting the markets, the timing seems right: Even the experienced among us could use another introduction to investing. If Bernstein is right, investors have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
In Good Times and Bad
Strengthening Your Relationship When the Going Gets Tough and the Money Gets Tight
In this age of economic uncertainty, when everyone is worried about finding a job, keeping a job or losing a job, few of us consider the effects of money matters on our relationships.
Here, a husband-and-wife team – he’s a family counselor who’s appeared on “Oprah” and she writes a newspaper column on finance – examines the ways in which couples can cope with financial insecurity, even hardship. They offer advice regarding simple yet important areas, such as how to talk to your kids about financial distress, how to enjoy a holiday season when money is tight, how to allow yourself the freedom to enjoy yourself even though times are tough.
The book has clear advice on such things as addressing our fear of money (admit it, even investors don’t always understand it), the nature of our relationships with money (what does having it tell us about our needs, what do we think it can do for us), figuring out who controls the money in a relationship (this is an area rife with danger for couples, especially when the main breadwinner loses a job and relies on the other to pick up the slack). As for the coming holidays, the Neumans say that this is now the time to have a discussion with your children about what they expect from the holidays, and what you can afford, and how everyone can pitch in to make it work without giving in to excess.
The book does have its share of Oprah-inspired feel-good projects, but they don’t detract from the overall sense the authors bring to a touchy subject.
Manhood for Amateurs
Reading the precisely crafted prose of Michael Chabon is nearly always a pleasure, even when his crystalline language is deployed in short essays, as in this compilation.
Instead of the fantastical worlds of his novels “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” and “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” Chabon writes in these essays about the everyday — though often extraordinary — experiences of being a father and husband.
In one piece, he deftly dissects how the design evolution of Lego blocks signifies changes in the way kids are expected to play. In one of the most charming snippets, he relates how a love of the “Doctor Who” television show binds him and his children as a “family of geeks.”
Not all of the pieces hang together in service to the overall themes, and one suspects a slimmer, more exclusive collection might have been at least as effective. But that’s a quibble. For fathers or husbands, Chabon’s reflections offer an opportunity for them to recognize the riches of their own everyday lives.
Eating the Dinosaur
Did you ever wonder why it’s fun to spy on your neighbors, or what on earth Garth Brooks could have been thinking when he created his alter-persona Chris Gaines? Probably not. But Chuck Klosterman has.
The Esquire columnist, whose books include “Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs” and “Chuck Klosterman IV,” this time around turns his attentions to expectations, reality and lack thereof. He delves, in this collection of essays, into the ethics of time travel, why we enjoy watching (some) famous people fail and the illogicality of answering questions. Although these topics are neither weighty —nor really even timely — his discussion of them never feels frivolous.
For example, Klosterman compares the suicide of Kurt Cobain — Nirvana’s lead singer — with the death of Banch Davidian cult leader David Koresh. Though, the parallel is (admittedly) far-fetched, Klosterman argues that the circumstances of Koresh’s death, and by long extension, Cobain’s, raise some interesting quandaries.
He points to the U.S. Treasury Department’s review of the 1993 disaster in Waco, Texas, where one Treasury analyst noted that a motivation for trying to root out Koresh’s cult was to “enforce the psyche of right thinking by retaliating against these odd people.” Conversely, one might argue that Cobain’s motivation for suicide could have been his frustration with not being unique, even given his rock-god status. The moral here, Klosterman believes: What people think of you matters. And even if you don’t care what people think of you, it still matters.
“Eating the Dinosaur” is about what people think about in the nether regions of their minds, and Klosterman’s thoughts on their thinking. His musings are often interesting — and quite often funny.
Past Imperfect
By Julian Fellowes
Reviewed by Robert J. Hughes
In this probing novel about new and old money, of aristocratic hauteur and the lives of failure after the promise of privileged youth, Julian Fellowes looks back at the pretty young things of 1960s and 1970s England and a dawning millennium of shifting mores that has rendered aimless an earlier entitled class.
Fellowes won an Academy Award for his screenplay for “Gosford Park,” Robert Altman’s classic movie of the hollowness at the heart of Britain’s 1930s upper-classes, and knows his way around the subtleties of aristocratic and well-to-do dress, speech and custom.
The narrator of the story is a writer who grew up among the upper class, and is asked by a former friend to seek out a possible lost heir. The man, Damien Baxter, a social climber who is now fabulously wealthy and at death’s door due to a fatal disease, claims to have fathered a child some 40 years earlier, and the narrator seeks out the several once-prominent women with whom Baxter may have had a liaison. The upshot will be that the long-lost heir will receive many hundreds of millions.
The narrator – and Fellowes – thus takes us through the byways of British life then and now, of how society has changed, of how minor aristocrats – of whom much was expected – failed to capitalize on their connections or gifts, of how new wealth and old money still battle over that most transitory of earthly goals, prestige and social standing.
Fellowes writes well and his dialogue is first-rate. Although for some Americans, an Evelyn Waugh-like dissection of the British ruling classes might seem passé in this age of fallen plutocrats, “Past Imperfect” should demonstrate to readers on both sides of the pond the elusive pleasures of money when life offers more tangible, if still fleeting treasures, such as love.
Rizzo’s War
By Lou Manfredo
Reviewed by: Robert J. Hughes
In his engrossing debut novel Lou Manfredo gives us a modern-day police procedural that is equally concerned with insights into character as with apprehending criminals.
We’re on familiar territory here, as a young newly made detective, McQueen, is shown the ropes by a hardened and wiser older cop, Rizzo, in the mainly Italian neighborhoods of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. As readers might expect, the older man frequently bends the rules to make a case, and gives the younger one much cause for concern about his own future on the force.
Yet, “Rizzo’s War” surprises you because while it doesn’t exactly upend the cliché of the good-cop/bad-cop scenario it offers great insights into the working lives of two dedicated men who are at different stages in their lives and careers. We think we may know Rizzo, but we don’t, not really, and McQueen’s own naïveté masks an ambition equal to his partner’s.
As a procedural, the novel offers a series of cases along with one that propels the story in a larger way. The real pull here isn’t the plot, but the relationships and the ways in which they unfold. And as we learn about the characters, we are also privy to the workings of the police department – which really never gets old. Who doesn’t want to know how criminals are caught?
Manfredo worked for many years as a court officer in Brooklyn’s criminal court and then as a court clerk. He knows the milieu of working cops, their language, their grand and petty passions, their daily lives, and it shows in his keen eye for detail and fine dialogue. “Guys like you and me, we just wander through people’s lives looking for things they wish never existed in the first place.”