What I Just Read

Analysis of the underlying strategic imperatives behind India's Partition. The author was the aide-de-camp to India's last viceroy, then later went on to have a long diplomatic career for India.  This book didn't exactly teach me the following insight, but India's Partition certainly helps illustrate it: if you're a former colonial power and you'd like to maintain dominance over your former colonies, just follow these four simple steps: 1) Draw arbitrary borders through and around your colonies to make a patchwork of pseudostates, 2) Make sure that within those arbitrary pseudostates are different peoples who hate each other, 3) Use these antagonisms: favor one group and then another, establish a client oligarchy with one and then another, etc. Maximize animosity and conflict where you once ruled. 4) Sit back, relax, and enjoy neo-colonialism! You've now established near-permanent economic dominance over your former colonies. There's a further irony: i...

Forgettable and quite honestly unpleasant 1930s-era novel about libertines in New York City. At least I hope it's forgettable, because I'd like to forget I read it. The plot and characters are nihilistic and the novel is dark. Not the kind of novel I'd recommend to brighten your day. The story centers around a young, damaged woman who's into herself, who's both shallow and (unluckily for her) beautiful. She easily attracts men, everywhere, all the time, and her rampaging sex life even grosses  her  out (the book implies that she's slept with dozens and dozens of men, yet she's still in her early 20s--and remember, this is the 1930s). All the depredations, decadence and dramas she gets caught up in eventually catch up with her, but to the reader it's an empty story without even a proper ending. Imagine something like Truman Capote's  Breakfast at Tiffany's  with an irritating, unlikable Holly Golightly. That said, the novel has some interesting pr...

A beautiful collection of sayings, dialogues and stories from early Christian ascetics and mystics of the first few centuries of Christianity--men (and women too) who left "the world" to go out into the desert wilderness in imitation of the life of Jesus Christ. Not only did these "sayings" have significant influence on Eastern Christianity, on Coptic Christianity and on the Hesychastic movement within the Eastern Church, there is also a tremendous resonance in this work with many ideas and aspects of Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism (see the reading list below with links to book reviews here on this site). It's quite striking. The more I read about religion the more I see commonalities everywhere, all the time. This is a book to be read a few pages a day, slowly and meditatively. It puts you in a calming place, in a place of a healthy, humble daily routine. The stories and anecdotes deal with universal questions: how to live a good life, how to behave, how to deal...

Follow-up book to  The Eudaemonic Pie , which was a readable story about a group of genius chaos theory physicists attempting to beat roulette. In  The Predictors Thomas Bass picks up the story some ten years later as the original Eudaemonic founders Doyne Farmer and Norm Packard move on to real prey: they want to use chaos theory to beat the stock market.  They start what could be called one of the early quant funds, and the story intersects with a who's who of the late '80s/early '90s investing scene, including Paul Tudor Jones, D.E. Shaw, Tom Dittmer (whose firm, Refco, infamously transformed Hillary Clinton's cattle futures account from $1,000 into $200,000), Solomon Brothers, etc. You learn about the founders' doubts, their fears, and their moments of astounding overconfidence, where they wade into domains where they haven't a clue what's going on. Any experienced investor would be mortified to watch these guys attempt to trade oil futures at the NYM...