A soporific tale about the pernicious effects of greed.
355843
"The Summons," John Grisham's latest novel, is not a legal thriller.  It is a slow-moving story about a law school professor named Ray Atlee who is summoned home one last time to see his dying father.  Old Judge Atlee is a revered figure in Clanton, Mississippi.  He has been respected as an outstanding and fair judge for nearly half a century.  He is also beloved as a charitable individual and as a man who truly loves his hometown.  However, the judge never had much time for his sons, Ray and Forrest.  He never forgave Ray for leaving Clanton to become a professor in Virginia, and Forrest has been an alcoholic and a drug addict for years.  When Ray comes home to meet with his father and his ne'er-do-well brother, he is in for several rude shocks.
Ray finds out that his father has been hiding a rather important secret and it weighs Ray down with a responsibility that he is unable to handle.  Throughout most of the book, Ray drives around (or flies) from place to place, seeking answers and conferring with his father's friends and acquaintances.  (Ray has had few meaningful relationships of his own since his divorce, and other than his job, his one passion is flying small planes.)  He is not cut out for a cloak and dagger existence. Occasionally, Ray receives threatening notes and he has the feeling that he is being followed.  Will his pursuers catch him before he finds out the answer to his father's secret?
The only thing that kept my interest was my desire to find out the true story behind the old judge's secret, and the solution turns out to be both unexciting and far-fetched.  The substance of "The Summons" is the exploration of the life of a lonely middle-aged man, his dysfunctional brother, and the colorful characters of Clanton, Mississippi.  The main theme is how greed can warp a person's judgment and distort his personality.  Unfortunately, the mystery at the heart of "The Summons" is simply not enough to carry the novel, and the characters and plot are too thin to sustain more than a passing interest.
3739609
The Cartel is a disturbing, hyper-realistic look at the violent world of the Mexican drug trade.  Yet aside from its well-developed characters and fast-paced plot, ultimately this is a novel about the search for the meaning and justice in a world ruled by the wicked.  Here is a protagonist who reluctantly experiences the loss of faith while staring in the face of pure evil.  It speaks to all who know the disillusionment that overwhelms those who fight for good, only to be trampled by men with more money, power, and the willingness to harm others.

If Friedrich Nietzsche taught us that life is nothing more than the will to power and the eternal recurrence of the same, this nihilistic philosophy is novelized in The Cartel.  People of faith ought to wrestle with stories like this -- stories written by those who stare into the abyss of evil and, tragically, find themselves unable to cling to hope any longer.
775699
Beginning in 1693, the new continent of North America, the rush to tame a wilderness, capture the resources, greed driven destruction of forests, suppression or extermination of the native inhabitants, this in a land that today sees demonstrations, pro and con, on behalf of non-native would be citizens.  And the pointing of fingers and more demonstrations on behalf of a planet being deprived of life giving resources, forests.  As a youth, I once lived where small family logging operations were common.  I spent hours in my much beloved forests, marveling at the beauty of life but also seeking solitude.  Watching men and machines harvest the trees, steam engine driven saws, a team of oxen brought to the scene to rescue a mired Caterpillar tractor and I thought of the vastness of the forest and its inexhaustible supply of timber, the sawmills roughing the logs, the outer parts of the logs sold as slab wood by the truckload while the semi-finished logs were trucked away for further processing.  Trees I considered beautiful cut down and gone, replaced naturally by new trees, suckers growing from the stumps, now three or four trees from the suckers where once there was but a single tree.  In my small world, the forest was so vast I saw no harm.  The author has copied my small world and magnified it to show what was really happening in this new world.  Vast forests destroyed, lumber harvested ruthlessly by greed, thousands of acres set afire to clear the land, trees that were a hundred of years old gone.  Native inhabitants considered little more than pestilence, used as fodder for the more dangerous work as their environment was destroyed.  Thievery as trees were poached from remote sites, there were no drones or other flying machines to monitor owner property.  The author weaves all these small scenes into the big picture, every tree destroyed having an impact on the environment, one less air purifier as air pollution itself increased from burning waste.  Hill sides stripped bare sliding into rivers.  Follow the news casts for one year in California, as wild fires consume growth followed by drenching rains carrying land with the houses and inhabitants into flood of mud.  While the story does follow some families and people, after all the very destruction is caused by people.  As the story progresses it becomes apparent the world climate is changing.  Subtract some trees add some population.  Air purifiers disappearing, polluting agents filling the void.  This is happening the world over, Indonesia being stripped of the rainforest, greed driven, indigenous people displaced, deprived of their livelihood.  Same story in the Amazonian rain forest.  Nature is plagued with such creatures as Gypsy Moths, Wooly Adelgids, or Pine Bark Beetles.  Nature recovers.  Nature is plagued by man. Nature does not recover.  Mankind loses.  An eye-opening account of the past, present and continuing destruction of our planet.  We only have this one planet.  This book should be required reading in schools, the impact of the story impressed on any future generations, lessons learned but seemingly unheeded.  Five stars and more if I could alter the rating system.
2604545
The protagonist of this sultry Southern tale, Belinda, has lived into her twenties yet never tasted life. Her sheltered, Christian fundamentalist upbringing made her mama proud and her a good girl, but also left her ripe for the picking.

Adam Kramer is all too eager to pick the ripe fruit; he brings the excitement to Belinda's life that had been lacking until now. Having been hired to find an rich old lady's granddaughter and last surviving relative, Adam draws Belinda into a plot to defraud dying Gracie of her money. Impersonation! Quite the way to rebel against the straightjacket of moral conformity.

Before the end of the novel, Belinda will have been dragged through the mud, tormented and exposed to ridicule--and I shan't tell you whether this greedy Southern girl gets a happy ending.
4650727
The Vanderbilts were one messed up family, elevating conspicuous consumption to heights that are eye-popping even by today's super-rich standards. Basically, the fortune got diluted with each generation and the succeeding generations were unhappier. the story of Gloria Vanderbilt is probably the most well-known today, and it's just tragic. This book is a peek into the Gilded Age, an era that eerily reflects our own with the gulf between the rich and the poor. But man, those rich people knew how to party! And they liked their houses. (The writer uses the various houses they built as a metaphor for the "House of Vanderbilt" itself and the descriptions of the architectural monstrosities filled with antiques and art make us wish there were even more pictures in the book. The story might have been better served if the narrative had focused on just one generation of the family though, as it tends to ramble a bit. And everybody seemed to have the same name, which makes us wish there'd been a family tree in there somewhere.
3815247
When people think of "Wall Street" they think about the classic line "Greed, for lack of better word... is good," and they remember a pretty good movie. I'm here to tell you that it wasn't.  Instead of making am movie about the exciting and dramatic Wall Street world in the 80's, Oliver Stone shamelessly makes a flat movie about a criminal.
The only reason why I give this movie two stars it contains some of the great "all time" movie lines including:
"Money's only something you need in case you don't die tomorrow."
"You're walking around blind without a cane, pal. A fool and his money are lucky enough to get together in the first place."
But as a whole, I find the movie to be a cheap attack on capitalism. The truth of the matter is that the real life stories of M&A and corporate takeovers were exciting enough. Stone had no reason to louse up a good concept with a convoluted plot about that includes every financial headline of the 1980's (insider trading, offshore banking, junk bonds, and corporate takeovers).  If you are interested an exciting and engaging account of Wall Street in the 80's, read Michael Lewis classic LIAR'S POKER.
591280
In the good ole' days, movies showed people killed for any of the following reasons: they were young, they were at summer camp, they were in the vicinity of Jamie Lee Curtis or Neve Campbell, they had a family cabin...

...they fell asleep, they sought cheap lodgings, they annoyed a guy who thought Rube Goldberg had neat ideas for how to kill people--bad guys  who later died for medical reasons or the sin of wearing leather.

Of late, we see folks killed for being born in the wrong zip code.

In Purge Two we watch an effort that began with the rich merely killing  other rich people  as retribution for high contractors' bills to this latest expression of the reprehensible--the 1%  out to gun down  any of the 99% in sight.

The latest is Purge Anarchy.  Another title might better be: Purge: One Per Centers to the Wall.

Before these films, the Hostel franchise revealed what is going on better than any other Hollywood softcore-snuff series:  the rich have way too much disposable income.  Our vaunted trickle down economy floats on the blood slowly squeezed and  crushed from the poor.

This greases the rails that launch the latest bloated yacht or finances another Mc Mansions Towers  with rich guys' entrances for Trump or his ilk.

Conspicuous Consumption has been overtaken by something worse: rich folk who view killing the rest of us as thinning the herd.

Purge is not about anarchy: it is a call for payback.  Well dressed people in their carefully  tarped dining rooms stand around a man they will bludgeon to death and elsewhere yawning plutocrats bid for the last hunt of the evening on three brace just flushed and captured prey.

These rich folk reveal indecency based on complete lack of feeling beyond their whims and a sense of entitlement that knows no bounds.

Surely some decent person will step from his  fortress to aid another and end this waste and destruction and insanity.

The movie ends showing one such guy, a man who once acted horribly but who has grown to do something that might be deemed "good"- he stops a cycle of wrong and aids a good man.

Purge Two ends on a note that suggests we might turn from this movie's fantasy dystopia --one we actually seem to near more everyday.

An America where inequality and hunger of millions seems a juggernaut we all unthinkingly pull  rather than  stop

An America where talking heads stir discord and justify the philosophy of "I got mine.  If you don't, you're a tax leech who should shove off, swim out of sight and drown, quietly."

And an America where a woman who wrote bad fiction became the north star for political dolts and billionaires with way too much political heft, where rationalization not "exceptionalism" seems our dominant national trait.

A good movie to hash out over coffees with friends: the civilized who like to discuss, the edgy who like playing the devil's advocate, the enraged who like a good rant--all have lots to play with.

Let's all have another national dialogue.
2853336
This was an interesting film into a world that is not expounded upon to much, that of the financial world of bankers and traders. The ethics involved in both are crucial plot elements and the protagonist makes plundering and audacious errors.
3475473
Set in the not too distant future, this remarkable work of speculative fiction takes place in the drought-ravaged southwest. California, Arizona, and Las Vegas have militarized in order to protect their rights to an ever-dwindling water supply. Bacigalupi weaves an apocolyptic tale of greed, grit, and survival revolving around three utterly self-interested individuals: (Angel) a water knife--someone responsble for cutting water access to people whose habitations interfere with the Las Vegas monopoly on water, (Lucy) a Phoenix Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, and (Maria) a Texas climate refugee. This page-turning thriller is as dark as any film noir and utterly unflinching in its depiction of a world where the rich can find comfort and security in self-sufficient arcologies while the 99 percent are left to the mercies of dust bowl conditions and predatory cartels trafficking in human misery. This novel took me down a very frightening rabbit hole, but Bacigalupi is a writer I would follow anywhere.
921977
Oliver Stone's "Wall Street" chronicles the rise of unbridled greed, of reckless gambling with the other people's money, of soulless financiers whose God is cash.  Some of the details are dated now -- the opening shots of the World Trade Towers, the IBM dumb terminals everywhere, Motorola "brick" wireless phones, the dollar amounts thrown about as astronomical in 1985 -- but the story behind the details and the motivations of the characters are as good a lesson as you're going to find.  As a matter of fact, in the extras it is revealed that the director and cast used Bear Stearns as the model for their portrayals.  How ironic then that the tagline for the film, "Greed is good," should end up eulogizing the era of narcissistic excess that the movie portrays.
711364
A couple of generations ago, men in upper management who worked in the City (the financial district in London) had the manners of gentlemen, taking leisurely lunches and regarding caring about profits as somehow vulgar. In the last few decades the gentleman has been replaced by the "barrow boy," a sharp trader with an eye to profit and the main chance. Of working class or lower middle class background, the epitome of this type is the Essex man, originating in the county beyond the eastern suburbs of London and speaking an uncouth dialect full of glottal stops and strange vowels, where "my" rhymes with "toy" and "line" is pronounced "loin" (as in "a loin of coke").
 This novel is narrated by Frankie, an Essex girl, in her mid twenties, determined to succeed as a futures trader in a London exchange with an Animal House ambiance. (The appearance of an attractive woman on the floor is greeted with chants of "Beaver!"} Although Frankie is a "uni graduate" with a degree in French, she has no apparent intellectual or cultural interests outside of sex, booze, drugs, rock and roll, and money, money, money. Her widowed father is a retired electrician from the Ford plant who lives in Ilford, where she cannot stand to visit. When the novel opens she is working for a stockbroker, but manages to get a position as a trainee futures trader. Frankie finds herself instantly attracted to her boss, Tom, a vulgar but charismatic midwestern American, who has cufflinks specially designed to hold cocaine. ("Frankie, meet Charlie." Tom says as he offers her a snort.)
 Although Frankie knows that sex with her married boss is a big mistake, they are soon in bed together. Frankie insists that she is not in love with Tom, but they embark on an affair involving lots of drink and drugs, and increasingly risky behavior, including shoplifting and stealing and wrecking a "crap Porsche" (apparently a 924 with a VW motor, although this one appears to be a convertible.)
 Despite her excessive consumption of alcohol and drugs and her late night clubbing, Frankie passes her exams and becomes a licenced trader, a job that she loves. But at the same time we realise that the relationship with Tom is doomed. I'll not give away the ending. It was a surprise, but fit the "Frankie Stein" nickname Tom gave her.
 Reading this sort of summary, one might think this novel is a sort of "British Psycho" with a touch of "Fatal Attraction." But the flavour is very different; I think that is because Frankie is really likable as well at attractive. The sheer determination and will power that Frankie devotes to becoming a futures trader gives her a purity and beauty that redeems her very messy personal life. And she is of course drop dead gorgeous. I suspect many of us seeing her in action in the trading pit would fall in love instantly. Just reading her voice (I wish I could hear it read with an Essex accent) on the page had a similar effect on me.
4825859
I've read better, it's older types of writing.. two short stories in one.. basically the same feel.. greed turns out wrong..
4664379
It was a lazy week in the sleepy suburbs of a West African capital, and I was bored, attending as I had been a conference on something or something else. The lulling drones of the presenters hyphenated by breaks  Africans do love their breaks, after all. Coffee and lunch and snack; networking over piles of buffet rice and plantains. But I have never been very social  and wandering through the decaying lobby of the bedraggled hotel I stumbled upon a bookshelf with the odd assortment of books you are won't to find on bookshelves in dilapidated hotels in the third world. I started thumbing through them until I ran into Dickens. Specifically, a Christmas Carol. Now, I like Dickens, so I picked up the little book; realizing as I did in a flash of embarrassment that I had never actually read that story. Oh, I knew it of course by heart  it has been retold so often, the epicenter of our Christmas traditions  how could I not? I sat down, sun pouring through dust I had kicked up as I began to turn the pages.

Now I like Dickens, as I like many Victorian British novelists. I guess I was curious to see if the movies had stayed true to the little novel. I guess I wanted to say that I, to, had read it. But as I began to get engaged in the story, my motivation changed and I read because I wanted to read it. Thats what a good book does  so many books, especially classics, we read because we know we should  because we who are authors know it will improve out craft  because we believe that through the old books that are still read long after their creators are gone is transmitted wisdom we need in a world of frivolity and foolishness. This I expected; but to be entrapped in story, that was a pleasant surprise.

You all know the plot, so I won't bother going over it. But I will tell you what it means; which is not what most people think it means. It is not a tale of money, nor is it really a story of greed. Perhaps that is because greed is not what people want us to believe it is; in fact, the word greed has become so charged that any debate regarding it is immediately poisoned. Scrooge was selfish, people say. He was greedy, they go on, because he loved money more than people; and we all know that money is evil. Oh, Im not defending greed. Im defending money.

Money is evil, everybody says all the time, the perfect excuse for those of a certain political persuasion to nab some of yours to do with as they think you should, but almost never do themselves. But is it? Money is, after all, very simply a tool  a store of value and a unit of measure. Ayn Rand writes (yes, Im getting immense mirth at quoting her here, sure as I am that you believe her to be Scrooge incarnate), Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. We don't know what Scrooge did to get rich, but he didn't steal his wealth so obviously he was offering somebody value, and was therefore rewarded.

So why the story? Why was Scrooge so unhappy; and why has that despondency led him to become the poster-child for the evil of wealth? Charles Dickens calls him a miser. According to Dictionary.com a miser is, a person who lives in wretched circumstances in order to save and hoard money. Therein lies Scrooges problem  not that he had the money; but that in its frenetic accumulation he lost the plot, making himself miserable (the root of that very word being miser). He forgot that money was a tool to facilitate obtaining voluntarily that which he valued. No, the money did not make him miserable; it was his miserliness that did not allow him to employ his money in the pursuit of the things which had value for him; family, charity, respect, stature  happiness. That is what this story is about. It is a story about value.

So let me ask you, dear reader  what is it that you value? And do you pursue it? Or are you instead miserly, with your time, your attention, your discipline, your love, your poverty and  yes  even your money? That is the lesson of Mr. Dickens short Christmas story.
3503335
The narrator/author feels attracted by the county of Suffolk in England, which in his eyes is a God- forsaken, lonely part of the world and where he goes for a long hike. Here he obviously finds the landscape that corresponds to his feeling of life and his concept of history. History consists, to his mind, of calamities. The restless activities of man always end in catastrophes, unimaginable cruelty and destruction. So hiking in the flatlands of Dunwich becomes a journey of disorientation and fear. He meets other lonely people, outsiders. Sebald's reports tend to turn surrealist, scary. His figures have fallen out of time. They sit under primitive covers on the beach, mute, staring out at the sea. Or they are veteran seamen sitting in Southwold's "Reading Room" staring at the sea, or they are the last members of the unhappy FitzGerald family moving like sleep-walkers through their rooms under layers of dust. Places and times swirl around, the wanderer feels unable to tell if he is at the North Sea, at the Caspian Sea or at the Gulf of Lian-Tung. And as he mostly lingers in the past, he senses the most mysterious correspondences and coincidences that fascinate and trouble him.

A case in point: On his walk he detects fading emblems of dragons on old railway wagons, which stir his curiosity. He finds out that they were intended as a present to a Chinese heir apparent to the imperial throne. What follows is the report about the decline of Chinese imperial rule in the 19th century, where the empress widow plays a central role. She has a strange fixation on silkworms. Neurotically and isolated in her palace she eventually just listens to the greedy noise of the worms feeding on leaves, a symbol of the historical process taking a turn to the monstrous and terrible. At the place where the English poet Swinburne lived Sebald later notices that the poet's birth and death dates correspond to those of the empress widow, that Swinburne's family dates from Kublai Khan, who had his mythological residence in Peking, the later site of the imperial palace, that Swinburne was totally emaciated, had a disproportionally big head with wild red hair on it, and that he was said to eat his meals greedily and monotonously like the silkworms. And at the end there is a lengthy discourse on the importance of silkworms with special regard to mourning silk in England and the rest of Europe.

Though one does not know, like the author, what all this leads up to, one cannot help being fascinated by these visions and gloomy moods. They are formulated in a conventionally correct style, which with its long participle constructions reminds one of Thomas Bernhard. It is admirable how the author produces art out of - nothing.
3370230
"Paddy's Lament" tells the story of those who lived through and died in the Irish Potato Famine of 1846-1847.  Throughout the book I kept wondering if my ancestors lived through the horrors described.
The economic setting of Ireland is laid out as that of an island of tenant farmers and large, often absentee, landlords.  Agriculture produced wheat and beef for export to England.  A small proportion of the land was planted in potatoes, the only food which could feed the population on such small acreage.  With the advent of the textile industry in England, wool became a more profitable crop than the traditional ones, if only the native population could be done away with.
A fungus led to the destruction of the potato crop in 1846.  Relief was available through the prohibition of the exportation of grain, a step which had previously been taken in other famine stricken countries.  The control of Ireland's destiny was within the control of the British Lords who regarded the Irish as a subhuman species of which they would prefer to be rid.  The aid extended by foreign nations, particularly the U.S., was a sharp indictment of British indifference.  The Famine would not have occurred in a country in control of its own fate.
The famine cause tenants to fall behind in their rents.  Massive evictions and destruction of homes followed.  Many Irish were forced from their home villages to travel across the land.  Is this why Mary McKeever's two brothers were born in the East, but she was born in the West?
Relief came in bits and spurts.  The British Lords commissioned the chef of the Reform Club, their gathering place, to create an economical recipe for Irish soup kitchens.  Emphasizing economy, he created a soup which was easy on the British exchequer, but provided little nutrition to the Irish.  Did William Casey eat this greasy water?
The famine led to widespread starvation.  The vivid description of the appearance of the victims is grotesque. Did Matthew Gallen's parents die this death?
Privation forced the Irish to abandon their homes in search of a new life beyond the hated British Empire.  The practice of the American wake, in which the family mourned the loss of the son or daughter who was to leave forever was a heart rending affair for all involved.  Many sought to avoid the wake by running away.  Is this why Thomas English and his brother ran away from home?
The reader accompanies a group of immigrants on a voyage in the stinking, rocking, wretched steerage section of a British ship.  The inferiority of the British ships as opposed to American is explained.  The sailor's grim prediction that there would be more room the further out they got became hauntingly true.  Again the details are presented in such detail as to turn the stomach of the readers even after all of these years.  Is this the type of voyage on which Johanna Lynch chose a crewman for her husband?
A new life started for the survivors upon arrival in New York.  The contrast between the lethargy of the Irish in Ireland and their industry in America spoke eloquently of the altered prospects for reward for their labors.  Although many stayed in New York, others moved out to rural environments more reminiscent of Ireland.  Is this how Patrick Nealon got to Bath, Maine?
The British realized that, as they ridded Ireland of its excess population, they were creating an America which was becoming Irish and anti-British.  The failure of the potato crop was an act of God.  The famine was an Act of Parliament.  This perception turned the Irish dissatisfaction with the British into an intense hatred.
This book helps us understand our past and what made us they way we are.
4422833
A grim tale of ten thousand "anti-social elements" deposited on an empty Siberian island in the Ob river in the 1930s. But, more than that, it is a story of how the brutal purge machinery was oiled and run at its lowest levels. (Reviewed in&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Russian-Life/dp/B00008CQIB/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Russian Life</a>)
1357948
Greedy sellers and gullible, uniformed greedy  buyers bring our economic system to its knees; a great read.