The Global Cold War - Odd Arne Westad

The Cold War was a continuation of colonialism through slightly different means

"Truly seminal", "eye-opening", "sharply observed and deeply researched", "excellent book". Those are some of the definitions provided by some reviews of The Global Cold War by Odd Arne Westad. For some reason, the book-review industry is full of laudatory expressions, and this blog is not the exception. In this post, and to the extent of my abilities, I will try to write a review without adjectives and completely fact-based:

• Westad does an extracts a lot of information from the Soviet archives. In fact, this was one of the first books ever to do it. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the American archives, even though they have clearly been open to the public for longer.
• The first two chapters of the book summarize the founding ideologies of the USA and the USSR and their changes throughout history. I recommend this part to all readers.
• The rest of the book is recommended mostly to European and American readers, who obviously have an Euro-centric view of the Cold War. Enlightened audiences from the developing World (or, as people used to call it before, the Third World) should be well aware that the main scenario of the fight between the USA and the USSR was not Europe, but the rest of the World.
• In a context where the cinicism and simplism of the so-called Realist theory permeates academia, it is quite refreshing to read Westad's argument that USA and USSR interventions throughout their History have been at least partly driven by ideologies. 

The Chicano - Edward Simmen

The best way to pave a way in America's academic life is to come up with a definition for a term that has remained loosely defined. How many academics have achieved tenure for providing a definition for words like "globalization", "governance", "development", or "Renaissance", just to mention a few examples?

Ed Simmen became a worldwide reference for Chicano affairs with his book The Chicano: From Caricature to Self-Portrait. After publishing The Chicano, Simmen became a reference on Hispanic affairs, and he moved to Mexico, where he became a reference on American immigrants affairs... Simmen's cast a long shadow, as this text on Chicano affairs from the late 1980's shows. 

The reason why The Chicano was fundamental for both Simmen's career and Hispanic studies in general is that Simmen provided the first operational definition of chicano in this book. According to Simmen, a chicano can be defined as "a dissatisfied American of Mexican descent whose ideas regarding his position in the social and economic order are, in general, considered to be liberal or radical and whose statements and actions are often extreme and sometimes violent (p. xiii)." Simmen crafted this definition in 1971. It is worth noting that, a couple of years later, Reagan would famously declare that "Hispanics [the word 'chicano' is no longer used as it is considered derogatory] are conservative, they just don't know it."

Remarkably, The Chicano is not an academic book, but a collection of short stories. The fact that a linguist collecting short stories was able to set the terms of the debate on what chicanos are is a testimony of the lack of interest that this group arose among mainstream academia in the United States. Similar to North of the Rio Grande, which collects a series of short stories about Mexicans in the United States, The Chicano presents a number of short-stories on Mexican-Americans. The quality of the texts is heterogeneous: big names in American literature such as Jack London ("The Mexican"), John Steinbeck ("The Flight"), and Ray Bradbury ("The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit") join semi-anonymous and sometimes amateurish writers in a single book. I particularly found most of the stories naive and full of stereotypes. Sadly, the first stories, written the late 1860's and 1930 show Mexican-Americans as brave and gallant men ready to run away with their beloved as soon as possible, while the latest stories, written between the end of World War II and the late 1960's are full of stereotypes: Mexicans (and Mexican-Americans) are lazy, ugly, dirty, and all they do is drink tequila and listen mariachis...

After moving to Mexico, Simmen published a third book called Gringos in Mexico, which is (you guessed right!), a collection of short stories written by Americans living in Mexico. Simmen didn't have enough time to issue a fourth book collecting short stories written by Mexicans about Americans in Mexico. Life is sometimes too short...

North of the Rio Grande - Edward Simmen

Ed Simmen belongs to that sort of Texans that is about to disappear: he is a person who tries to build a bridge between Mexico and the United States instead of pretending that Texas is unique in the Universe. The highest points in Ed's academic career were North of the Rio Grande, a compilation of short stories written by Mexican-Americans in the United States, and Gringos in Mexico, which simlarly collects stories written by Americans living in Mexico. 

I will not talk about Gringos in Mexico here. Maybe I will do it someday. I will only let the reader know that, while Gringos in Mexico includes some "big names" like Kerouac or Jack London, the only professional writer included in North of the Rio Grande is Stephen Crane, who is not even  Mexican-American but happens to be one of the first American writers to use Mexican characters. The difference between Gringos in Mexico and North of the Rio Grande is evident: at the time both books were published (1980's), Americans saw Mexico is a friendly exotic place next door where it was possible to do stupid things without fearing any legal consequences; for Mexicans -particularly poor Mexicans-, the United States was the promise of a better life. The possibilities of having a young promising American writer going to Mexico were as high as the possibilities of having a young Mexican manual worker crossing the border in the opposite direction. American artists used to go to Mexico, whereas Mexican workers used to go to the U.S.; the quality of the artistic outputs produced by each community was obviously different.

And that's probably the main feature of North of the Rio Grande: the book is fantastic as a documentary but fails miserably as an artistic product. With few exceptions, the stories contained in North of the Rio Grande are full of clichés and, probably worse, are actually quite amateurish. The classical image of a drunk sleepy Mexican laid on a cactus and wearing a big hat and a sarape leaving everything for mañana permeats most if not all of the stories the book. Most of the authors presented in the book would be completely forgotten if not for Ed's efforts to go to obscure university quarterlies trying to find chicano writers regardless of their quality as writers. 

Try googling names like María Cristina Mena, Sandra Cisneros, or Carlos Flores. The first entries will probably be Facebook or LinkedIn pages of some random people, but at one point, these three names belonged to leaders of opinion and somewhat recognized writers among the Mexican-American community. In fact, the profiles of the authors is probably more interesting than their stories: sons of illegal immigrants who had to work as handimen and study at the same time, went to college, and eventuallly got a job as a community college professor; not bad for a first generation immigrant. The problem is that such a background hardly allows for producing high quality literature. In a way, North of the Rio Grande reminds us that there are too many people who want to write and to few people who want to read.

Despite being composed of mostly boring stories, I would still like to recommend North of the Rio Grande. It has a lot of value as a historic document: also, as the Mexican-American communities integrate into the mainstream American community, terms like chicano or people like Cesar Chavez will be part of the past. And it's always more fun to learn about the past using novels and short stories than History books. 

No será la Tierra - Jorge Volpi

En alguna ocasión, Luis González de Alba escribió que dejó de leer a Carlos Fuentes cuando éste, a fin de atraer lectores extranjeros, subió sus notas al pie de página al texto principal.

Jorge Volpi, hijo literario de Fuentes, ha empleado la misma “técnica literaria” desde el inicio de su carrera, y en ese sentido se le adelantó a su papá: no tuvo que esperar a que el mercado mexicano de lectores le quedara chico.

En su “trilogía de la maldad”  Volpi mezcla situaciones de vida de personajes históricos no mexicanos con artículos enciclopédicos un poco por encima del nivel de Wikipedia y los adereza con detalles novelescos. Así, Volpi ganó el Biblioteca Breve con En busca de Klingsor, su primera novela, y durante muchos años fue presentado como el primer escritor mexicano que no se miraba el ombligo al momento de redactar desde tiempos de Alfonso Reyes. El truquito le funcionó… hasta que dejó de funcionarle. La fórmula se le agotó, como suele suceder. En su vida post-escritor, Volpi empezó a hacer política y a vivir del presupuesto, dirigiendo la tele pública y fungiendo como agregado cultural en varias embajadas mexicanas hasta que, emulando de nueva cuenta a Fuentes, escribió un artículo en contra de su jefe, Felipe Calderón.

No voy a decir que No será la tierra es un libro aburrido. A mí me entretuvo, a pesar de haber leído otros libros de Volpi, y creo que a los que no han descubierto a este escritor, la fórmula les puede parecer novedosa. Pero No será la tierra tiene limitaciones considerables: al empezar con la conclusión de la historia, se pierde todo elemento sorpresa, que fue lo único novedoso que Volpi le dio a la literatura mexicana con En busca de Klingsor: la dignificación del thriller policiaco. Para ser un libro que trata sobre tres mujeres (o 5, Volpi nunca deja claro quiénes son las protagonistas), hay demasiada testosterona y muy pocos estrógenos. Volpi podrá argumentar que eso se debe a que el narrador es un personaje masculino, pero como quiera que sea el personaje resulta poco creíble: un periodista que conoce la intimidad de varias personas con las que ha hablado, en el mejor de los casos, tres veces en la vida. 

En breve, No será la Tierra tiene muchos problemas de diseño para que merezca ser tomada en serio, pero es muy largo para que se la pueda considerar una novela ligera. Recomiendo este libro con la mínima aprobatoria.

The Price of Admission - Daniel Golden

Daniel Golden is an editor-at-large at Bloomberg News. Previously, he was an education journalist for the Wall Street Journal, where he authored a series of articles on how the admission processes of American elite universities have been corrupted to benefit the rich instead of promoting social mobility. Those articles eventually morphed into The Price of Admission. The idea of having a journalist waving the finger against elite universities in rightist media may seem bizarre at first sight, but that is not the case. As Noam Chomsky said recently when he asserted that the Financial Times is the best newspaper of the World: elites need to be well informed to run the show, even if that means hearing or reading unpleasant truths. 

Throughout the 280 pages of  The Price of Admission, Daniel Golden makes one single point: American elite universities' admission processes entrench privilege instead of fostering meritocracy. Throughout contributions in cash and connections with the country's political elite, wealthy alumni can basically buy slots for their children in the most prestigious universities of the United States. As these universities must also keep some slots for students who qualify for affirmative action policies (i.e., Blacks and Hispanics), poor whites and Asian-Americans have to compete for very few slots. 

Golden's book doesn't deal with the skyrocketing cost of university education ("the next financial bubble", according to some), but it's easy to see how a supply that remains constant or shrinks as more legacies (alumni children) have slots guaranteed in the best schools, and a growing number of applicants can result in higher tuition fees.

The most remarkable thing of the book is the number of people who agreed to speak on- and off-the record with Golden. That's, at the same time, the biggest strength and weakness of the book. It's a strength because first-hand testimonies obviously have a lot of power to the eyes of the reader. But the excess of testimonies make the problem look like anecdotical incidences rather than a systematic issue. Fortunately, Golden has the numbers to support his sources.

Martin Wolff and the Harvard Magazine reviewed the book rather unfavorably, partly pointing out that the problems described by Golden have been there for a long time. That's a mediocre attitude. Many problems have been there for a long time, and that's not a reason for not talking about them and eventually taking action.

Overall, this is a good book, but you don't have to read it. here is a video of Golden talking about the issue for 40 minutes.

Ariel - José Enrique Rodó

El Ariel de José Enrique Rodó es la mejor muestra de que los latinoamericanos no son de izquierda. El librito (45 páginas) es básicamente una diatriba contra Estados Unidos y su "utilitarismo" (i.e., una vida colectiva basada en la producción), así como la admiración que las élites latinoamericanas sienten por ese país.

Publicado hace más de un siglo, el Ariel ha sido referencia directa o indirecta de la izquierda latinoamericana antiestadounidense; es decir, toda la izquierda latinoamericana.

En lugar de una vida basada en la producción de bienes materiales, Rodó propone volver a los ideales grecolatinos, que llevan a una vida basada en las artes, el conocimiento de la filosofía, y la práctica de deportes. Variantes más modernas de esta corriente de pensamiento abogan por un regreso a los usos y costumbres de los indígenas prehispánicos.

El problema con este argumento es que griegos, romanos, e indígenas prehispánicos requerían una gran cantidad de esclavos para poder llevar el ritmo de vida que tenían. Abogar por un regreso a esa época dorada equivale a tener una élite pequeñita aprovechándose del trabajo de los demás, o bien una sociedad en la que todo el trabajo lo hagan robots. Quizá algún día lleguemos al segundo escenario. Por el momento, la utopía de Rodó lo es solamente para la gauche caviar; para el resto de los latinoamericanos, es una afrenta.

Apuntes para mis hijos - Benito Juárez

Junto con las cartas de amor que le escribió a su esposa, Apuntes para mis hijos es uno de los pocos textos personales que Benito Juárez dejó a la posteridad. Este breve libro, que abarca desde los primeros años de Juárez hasta su entrada en la primera plana de la política nacional, se lee más como un parte de sucesos que como un texto para un ser querido. La historiografía mexicana del priato utilizó este texto como base para escribir la historia oficial de México; no hay diferencia entre la biografía de Juárez que uno encuentra en un libro de texto gratuito de la SEP y Apuntes para mis hijos; así de holgazán era el priísmo; así de pragmático.

Los historiadores de las últimas generaciones se han esforzado hasta el cansancio en decir que Juárez era un ser humano de carne y hueso y no la estatua de bronce que el Estado mexicano puso en un pedestal inalcanzable. Tienen razón, pero los textos personales de Juárez revelan a una persona adusta, reservada y cuidadosa hasta el milímetro, casi como si supiera que sus palabras serían inspeccionadas con lupa por las generaciones siguientes. 

No me quedo con mucho de este libro, pero sí quisiera recuperar el siguiente fragmento de una carta personal de 1865 (en pleno Segundo Imperio) citada por Héctor Cuauhtémoc Hernández Silva, miembro del SNI, al final del libro:

"Que el enemigo nos venza y nos robe, si tal es nuestro destino; pero nosotros no debemos legalizar ese atentado entregándole lo que nos exige por la fuerza; si la Francia, los Estados Unidos o cualquier otra nación se apodera de algún punto de nuestro territorio, y por nuestra debilidad no podemos arrojarlo de él, dejemos siquiera vivo nuestro derecho para que las generaciones que nos sucedan lo recobren. Malo sería dejarnos desarmar por una fuerza superior, pero sería pésimo desarmar a nuestros hijos privándolos de un buen derecho, que más valientes, más patriotas y sufridos que nosotros lo harían valer y sabrían reivindicarlo algún día."

Treasure Hunt: Inside the Minde of the New Consumer - Michael J. Silverstein and John Butman

Treasure Hunt was written in the early 2000's by Michael J. Silverstein, consultant at BCG. His main thesis is that middle class consumers are becoming more savvy and hence markets are bifurcating in a low-end and a high-end niche. Companies (and individuals) who get stuck in the middle will eventually disappear. The book offers a lot of the common wisdom offered in most business schools; namely, that companies must always look for new opportunities to specialize and capture a bigger share of the market. Phrases like "the time to act is now" permeate the book. Though short, the book could be summarized in a power point presentation.

The most interesting parts of the book are the interviews with families. Silverstein interviews families  to prove his point that middle class consumers are sophisticated purchasers, able to buy goods and services from the low-end and from the high-end depending on the situation. All the families, and Silverstein mentions it explicitly, consider they struggle to make ends meet at the end of the month. In addition to that, Silverstein shows the balance sheet and income statements of those families. With hindsight, what the balance sheets say is that, most of the time, the only asset of families was the house where they lived. (which was obviously mortgaged). Considering that families had a hard time paying their bills in the happy 1990's and at the beginning of this century, I wouldn't be surprised if, today, these individuals are underwater and aree considered low-class. And, assuming that they still have any purchasing capacity, I wonder if Silverstein would would still qualify those people as savvy consumers who can distinguish between different kinds of goods.

At some point, Silverstein also shows the FED estimates on the households' balance sheet. His series ends in 2000 or 2002, so he obviously couldn't see the explosion of subprime lending and what it meant for the balance between assets and liabilities. In line with the times, Silverstein expected economic growth to last forever...

Antonio López de Santa Anna ese espléndido bribón y la Guerra de Estados Unidos contra México, esa infame bribonada - Armando Fuentes Aguirre, Catón

En mi post sobre El último príncipe del Imperio Mexicano analicé la proliferación de novelas históricas en México. En realidad, en los últimos años, México ha sido testigo de una gran oferta de libros de Historia dedicados al gran público: desde biografías hasta análisis de episodios históricos en específico como el Telegrama Zimmerman, pasando por volúmenes que pretenden revelar la "verdadera" Historia de México, la oferta de libros de divulgación es muy amplia.

Las cosas no siempre fueron así. Hasta hace poco, las publicaciones sobre Historia en México eran de dos tipos: loas pagadas por el gobierno a los héroes y miembros panteón nacional, o monografías microhistóricas sobre temas tan apasionantes como la vida en los claustros de monjas en la ciudad de Puebla en el siglo XVII; estas últimas publicaciones, obviamente pagadas con dinero oficial (¿qué empresario en su sano juicio va a publicar un libro sobre monjas en el siglo XVII¿) servían para sobornar y cooptar a un sector de la academia (humanidades, historia, sociología) que podía ser crítico con el gobierno.

Dos factores hicieron que los historiadores comenzaran a salir, poco a poco y a reculones, de sus laberintos y su torre de marfil y se dedicaran a la divulgación: en primer lugar está la llegada del PAN al poder y la democratización del poder, que significó que los historiadores no oficiales (los que no estaban en la nómina del gobierno) tenían carta blanca para ajustar cuentas con el panteón oficial -y de paso engrosar las nómina de los organismos culturales del gobierno. Todos oíamos de niños que el PRI ocultaba la "verdadera" Historia de México; con el PAN muchos estuvieron dispuestos a contarla y otros tantos a comprarla. En segundo lugar, cuando llegaron a México, las editoriales españolas como Alfaguara y Planeta, creyeron, pendejamente y sin razón desde mi perspectiva, que México era un país de lectores. Se dejaron deslumbrar por la FIL de Guadalajara. Cuando llegaron a México, las editoriales españolas empezaron a publicar un montón de libros de Historia "verdadera" y no oficial. Durante unos años operaron con pérdidas, hasta que eventualmente el nicho de mercado se desarrolló y se consolidó.

Como todo mercado, la oferta es multivariada: hay libros muy buenos y otros que se colaron quién sabe por qué. El libro de Catón sobre Antonio López de Santa Anna pertenece al segundo grupo, aunque en este caso sí sabemos por qué Diana decidió publicarlo: la razón es que Catón es uno de los columnistas más leídos del país y, por lo tanto, es un éxito de ventas seguro. Si no lo agarraba Diana, otra editorial lo habría hecho.

No tengo nada en contra de las novelas históricas. Y me parece que la biografía es una rama de la Historia que ha sido injustamente menospreciada por la intelligentsia mexicana en general. Lo que me molesta del libro de Catón es que, haciéndose pasar por biografía, en realidad sea un panfleto con un solo mensaje: que la culpa de todas las desgracias nacionales es de los liberales radicales, y en específico de Valentín Gómez Farías, acaso el personaje más anticlerical del siglo XIX mexicano. Metodológicamente, el libro de Catón es un insulto. En algún momento dice que la situación de la deuda externa en México está peor hoy que en el siglo XIX, sin importar que en el siglo XIX México fue invadido militarmente precisamente por problemas de deuda, escenario que está lejos de materializarse hoy. Para decir que Gómez Farías era un traidor a la Patria que tenía contacto con las logias masónicas de Estados Unidos (sic), Catón recurre al libro Historia de la Iglesia de México del "padre Cuevas" (resic). En 650 páginas, no hay ni pies de página ni referencias a fuentes primarias o secundarias que hagan sentir al lector que no estamos ante el dicterio amargo de un viejito reaccionario educado en una escuela de curas. 

Pero el problema es que el libro es, nada más y nada menos, que el dicterio amargo de un viejito reaccionario educado en una escuela de curas. A título de ejemplo comento al lector que estoy leyendo en paralelo la biografía de Dean Acheson, Secretario de Estado de Estados Unidos en los 1940s y 1950s. De las 832 páginas que lo componen, alrededor del 40% son referencias a archivos, documentos de época, otros libros, o a conversaciones públicas o privadas. Para no ir más lejos: la monumental biografía de Santa Anna que está haciendo Enrique González Pedrero (reseñada aquí) se toma la molestia de hacer un trabajo de investigación serio sin perder atributos comerciales como la "frescura" o la "familiaridad con el lector." 

El libro de Catón no representa más que la salida de clóset de la derecha clerical de provincia de los años 1930s, que pretende que la Iglesia juegue un papel activo en la política y la educación del pueblo. Esa corriente política está condenada a desaparecer: México es cada vez un país más urbano y con la urbanizacíón viene la secularización de la sociedad en automático, al menos en los países occidentales. No obstante, cuando veo a la nueva derecha, su poco sentido común y su incultura, casi me dan deseos de que Catón y los abuelos se queden con nosotros para siempre...

The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How To Get It Back On Track - Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein

"Politicians are not merely waifs amid forces"

Over the last couple of years, it has become a commonplace to say that American politics is increasingly polarized and that's the reason why nothing ever gets done -or gets done through a very suboptimal process, such as Obamacare, or with disappointing results, such as fiscal policy, which now has to be approved every six months (fiscal cliff, anyone?). You can say that a commentator has nothing to talk about when (s)he retorts to the polarization of the American political scene, particularly Congress. If the commentator in question has a partisan bias, (s)he will obviously blame the other party for that.

The first two people who studied the disfunctionality of the U.S. Congress were Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, longtime specialists on congressional affairs. In The Broken Branch, they describe the reasons behind the divisiveness prevailing in American Congress and its consequences on lawmaking. In the conclusion, they obviously provide their policy recommendations to change the situation. The book doesn't say anything you can't find regularly in some common sense publications or columns such as The Economist's Lexington, but it's a good read to get an idea of where this polarization-destroying-America agenda came from. Probably the only problem with the book concerns the reasons provided by Mann and Ornstein behind the polarization of Congress. They attribute the situation to the breakdown of the Liberal coalition after Barry Goldwater, some changes in the internal functionning of Congress, and the arrival of Newt Gingrich and other radical conservatives to Congress in the 1980s, among other elements. All of these elements are certainly true, but nowhere do Mann and Ornstein talk about the real polarization and changes in social capital that the United States and other Western societes have been going through over the last couple of years (a good place to start reading about these changes is Francis Fukuyama's Trust). These changes are real: technology is making citizens change the way they interact with each other, and that is obviosuly changing politics. Without recognizing the profound changes societies are going through, the recommendations proposed by the authors, which stay mostly in the realm of politicians, are likely to go nowhere.

And the proof that what I'm saying makes sense is the fact that Mann and Ornstein recently published a sequel to The Broken Branch with one of the most depressing titles I have ever read: It's Even Worse Than You Think: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism.

Picture taken on November 2009

All the Shah's Men - Stephen Kinzer

"it seemed more like a dime novel than historical facts"

-Dwight Eisenhower, on Kermit Roosevelt's account of the 1953 coup in Iran

All the Sha's Men was one of the most successful book in 2003. The Economist picked it as one of its top 10 books on History that year. The quality of the research done in American primary sources (Russians and Iranians obviously denied access to their archives) is undeniable.

There are several comments on this book around the web, from Wikipedia's to The New York Times', where Kinzer works as a foreign correspondent. The most interesting review that I found is the one published by David S. Robarge at the CIA's Studies in Intelligence (the CIA is the agency that orchestrated the coup in Iran in 1953). 

Most reviews agree that Kinzer's book reads more like a novel than a scholar text, and some of them mention that Kinzer goes too far to make a direct causal link between the 1953 coup and the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and 9/11 as an extension. 

While most readers will find the thriller-like style of Kinzer appealing, I think it trivializes the personality of the main actors of the plot. The book is also extremely partisan: Mossadegh was the good guy (Kinzer reckons he was a little bit stubborn, but most heroes are, anyway), the British were the bad ones, and Americans were good during Truman's term and became bad during Eisenhower's. That is, in a nutshell, what this book is about. My intuition tells me things had to be more complicated, but I can't get that information from the book. I will have to go to other sources, because Kinzer wastes too many precious paragraphs and pages writing like a novelist. Kinzer's style is excusable and even encouraged in introductory books, but All the Sha's Men is supposed to be an authoritative source on the 1953 coup in Iran. The bottom line is that this is a great book for non-experts; experts probably already read it and dismissed it for a lot of reasons, including but not limited to its style.

As usual, you don't even have to read the book or the reviews to know what it is about. The podcast below is an interview given by Kinzer in February in 2012, when the prospects of a bombing of Iran by Israel or the United States were serious. The fact that Kinzer is considered an authority on Iran 9 years after the first edition of his book is a testimony both of its quality and of the lack of interest to write about Iran from a scholarly perspective. In the interview, Kinzer discusses his book and the policy options of the United States to engage with Iran. 

Of Mice and Men - Lewis Milestone

This is a great movie. I have nothing to add to the description of the booklet:

Oscar-nominated for Best Picture of the year (1939), Of Mice and Men was adapted from the classic novel by American literary giant John Steinbeck and features stunningly memorable performances by Burgess Meredith (In Harm's Way, Rocky) and Lon Chaney, Jr. (The Wolfman, High Noon) and a moving, Academy Award-nominated score from legendary composer Aaron Copland. The film,set in the bucolic valley Salinas Valley of California in the 1930s, paints a bold, vivid picture of life in the Depression era and tells the tragic tale of men searching for a safe heaven from the cruelties of a world where true poverty is loneliness and alienation from the loyalty and kindness of other men.

George and Lennie are a pair of itinerant farm hands who dream of someday having their own modest ranch, but in the meantime toil for uncaring ranch owners. George (Meredith) must constantly watch over Lenni (Chaney), who has very few wits but an enormous strength which is always getting them into trouble when he finds a small animal or pretty girl that he innocently wants to caress. Always just a few steps ahead of disaster, the two friends land at yet another farm where circumstances and the help of a fellow dreamers seem to bring their fantasies within reach. It is all the more tragic then when Lennie finds trouble thatthere is no running away from and George is called on to carry out a final and ultimate act of friendship.

For director Lewis Milestone (All Quiet on the Western Front, The Red Pony) Of Mice and Men was a labor of love.He had wanted to adapt the popular novel and play for film since he first read it, but lacked the studio backing. In 1938 he found himself on a legal battle over money he was owed by Hal Roach Studios, and Roach agreed to settle out of court by paying for the production Of Mice and Men. With script in hand, Milestone went to John Steinbeck for his approval and input. Steinbeck requested only a few minor changes, gave his blessing to the production and even took Mileston on a "field trip" to the Salinas Valley farm where the actual events which inspired his story took place. Of the film, Steinbeck would later say "it is a beautiful job. Here Milestone has done a curious, lyrical thing. It hangs together and is underplayed."

The film opened to rave critical reviews and, unfortunately,poor business at the box office. Of course, competing films that year included Gone with the Wind, The Grapes of Wrath (another Steinbeck adaptation) and The Wizard of Oz. Of Mice and Men has since been rereleased, remade on film and television and revived as a play many times for audiences who know a classic when they see one. Critics and scholars agree that this film version remains one of the most faithful and compelling translations of a literary masterwork.

The full movie is available here:

Scribble, Scribble, Scribble - Simon Schama

Simon Schama is a British historian at Columbia University. He writes regularly for The Guardian, The New York Times, The FT, Vogue, The New Yorker, and a bunch of other newspapers. Scribble, Scribble, Scribble is a collection of his essays written since the late nineties.

This book contains a lot of definitions are descriptions about a lot of places and persons. Here are some of them:

About Washington DC:

• Are there any city avenues more inhumanly broad than those of Washington DC¿
• (...) most of the young people who make up the clientele and who come to love the place aren't there because of the romance in the city, but because they need to live in an idea made architecturally visible: the idea of democratic government.
• (...) when the cherry blossom is doing its shameless thing, and the streets of Adams Morgan are warming to the kids on the block, it 's entirely possible to see Washington as not just DC, not just ideology made visible, but as an American community; and a good one at that.

About the Korean War:

• The Korean question is both relic and omen.

About 9/11:

• (...) if the script of Bloody Tuesday had been offered to a studio, it would have been turned down not for the scale of the horror, but for its failure to supply identifiable villains.

About Democracy:

• The first and greatest weapon a democracy has for its own defence is the assumption of common equity; of shared sacrifice.

About George W. Bush:

• Prayers (like vacations) are the default mode for this president, who knows how to chuckle and bow the head in the midst of disaster but not, when it counts, how to govern or to command.

About Isaiah Berlin:

• Though he genuinely admired American energy and forthrightness, the mistaken conviction that exhaustive iteration was the same thing as understanding depressed him.
• [he was] that unlikely thing: a seriously happy Jew.

About Winston Churchill:

• No leader who made jokes against himself was in much danger of turning dictator.
• Thrice he was the impassioned advocate of reduced arms expenditure, as Tory, Liberal and Tory again, and thrice again (in the naval arms race immediately before the First World War, in the 1930s and in the Cold War) he was gung-ho for rearmament.
• [it was] Churchill's fundamental decency, the quality that made Orwell forgive him his anti-socialism and and his sentimental imperialism. Though limited in education and social experience, Churchill nonetheless had no difficulty translating his own romantic feeling for nationality to the aspirations of other cultures. It was natural, then, for him to end up the friend of Michael Collins as well as F. E. Smith, Chaim Weizmann as well as Emir (later King) Abdullah, and to see that a two-state solution in both Ireland and Palestine was the only way to satisfy equally legitimate longings for homeland.

About Gérard Depardieu:

• Gérard Depardieu (...) must have worn the clothes of every generation after the Black Death.

About Pablo Picasso:

• Picasso regcognised in Rembrandt an ancestor of his own dangerous visual intelligence, which could move freely between the aesthetic convenience of the nude and the messier, sexier reality of the naked model: etched images of half-dressed women warming themselves by the stove. Nothing like that stripping truth would happen again until Manet and Degas.

About Bolognese sauce:

• Bolognese sauce isn't fast food.

About small children:

• Small children are nature's little conservatives. They are warmed by fulfilled expectations. They have favourites in the kitchen - and why deny them¿

About stews:

• Stews are bringers of contentment to a discontented world. I don't know of any other kind of food, except perhaps freshly baked bread and cakes, guaranteed to fill a kitchen with such a sense of abundance. They violate all the cool modern conventions, for they demand fat and time and copious carbs - mashed potatoes or parsnips, pasta or bread  to soak up the juicy mess.

But in general, this book is mostly aimed to the the Oxbridge / Ivy League Humanities crowd. For the rest of the World population, this book is a coin-toss: some bits are interesting, but most of it contains praises to artists and historians mostly unknown, at least to me (for instance: J. H. Plumb, Charlotte Rampling, Anselm Kiefer, John Virtue, Ruskin).

The book is also extremely verbose -or "eloquent", if you are British. British verbosity is something Americans love, which why they forgave Christopher Hitchens' atheism. But for the rest of the World, especially non-native English speakers, this book is a painful read.

13 Bankers - Simon Johnson and James Kwak

"Never before has so much taxpayer money been dedicated to save an industry from the consequences of its own mistakes. In the ultimate irony, it went to an industry that had insisted for decades that it had no use for the government and would be better off regulating itself--and it was overseen by a group of policymakers who agreed that government should play little role in the financial sector."

13 Bankers is one more book of the post-2007 financial crisis cohort. This is, along with This Time is Different, by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Roggoff, the "must-have" book on financial crises. The authors of 13 Bankers are Simon Johnson, former Chief Economist at the IMF, and James Kwak, former consultant at McKenzie, and both of them are co-authors of the blog The Baseline Scenario, created in September 2008 with the objective of explaining what the mess was all about. The Baseline Scenario is now one of the most widely read blogs on economics in the World.

With such a background, one might think that the authors would blame the crisis on supply-side explanations, but that is far from being the case. The main argument of the book is that banks are too large and have a tremendous leverage over Washington, in addition to having imposed the ideology that markets are self-regulating across the political spectrum. All this has resulted in a lack of effective regulation which, added to financial institutions whose failure brings the economy to its knees, has resulted in the worst crisis since the Great Depression. The solution to prevent future crises is, according to the authors, to break up banks that are considered "too big to fail" and cap and weight the size of their assets. The limit for a retail banking institution would be 4% and that for an investment bank would be 2.5% of US GDP (to give you an idea, the assets of Bank of America are equivalent to 17% of US GDP today). Comparing the policy recommendations of this book with those presented by Hank Paulson is striking: while Simon Johnson and James Kwak are under no illusion about the effectiveness of financial regulation, Paulson remains a convinced proponent of a market-based financial system with tougher rules.

The authors argue, rather successfully, that the crisis of 2008 is similar to the ones originated in emerging markets in the 1980s and 1990s, and which the United States tried to solve from the outside. Most of my American colleagues get offended when they read this. They even get offended when I refer to the 2007-08 financial collapse as "the Big Mac Crisis", just like the refer to 1994-Mexico as the Tequila Crisis, 1998-Brazil as the Samba Crisis, 1998-Russia as the Vodka Crisis, and so on. The reality, in any case, is that the quality of governance in the United States has decreased considerably over the last 30 years, basically since Reagan said that the government is the source of all problems in the World: reaching deals in Congress is harder, the budget of regulating agencies gets cut regularly in real terms, and so on.

The authors also argue, rightly, that the decision to break down the banks, or in fact any decision aimed to prevent a financial crisis, is political. Technocrats can only take you too far: regulations affect the balance of power between government and market participants, which has political implications. The authors say it better than I will ever be able to do it:

"while occasional libertarian academics and politicians have favored deregulation in its pure form, real companies see regulatory or deregulatory policies simply as a way to improve their market position or profit-making potential." 

Therefore the calculation to take any given policy measure must be taken using political parameters into account. Recognizing that this is Marxism would have made this book unsellable in the United States; but that's what it is: Marx's ideology applied to the rescue of markets.

At the time of its release, the media campaign around 13 Bankers was tremendous: building on the previous success of their blog, the authors created a website for the book where they uploaded all the reviews and material related to it. Kwak even authored an article for the Huffington Post that summarizes the book in one page (less than this post) and 4 charts!

As I said, this is one of the two books about the 2007-08 financial crisis that a person must have. The first added value of this book is that it collects a lot of material (press, other books, academic journals) around the subject; the second is that it makes complicated terms and definitions easy to understand (disclosure: the NYT agrees with this statement up to an extent, while the San Francisco Chronicle thinks that 13 Bankers is actually a tough read). Last but not least, 13 Bankers brings the Jeffersonian anti-finance populism back to the political arena.

On the Brink - Hank Paulson

On the Brink is Hank Paulson's personal recount of the financial crisis of 2007-08. This book was widely expected by specialists and non-specialists alike (at one point, it reached number 4 in Amazon's sales list), if nothing else because Paulson was probably the main decision maker during the 2007-08 financial crisis, which led to the nationalization of a tremendous number of American financial institutions and to the failure of Lehman Brothers.

On the Brink was widely reviewed when it appeared (The Economist, The Daily Beast, NYT, Huffington Post, and The Independent, just to mention Google's preferences). The reviews and their quality vary greatly. Some of them argue that Paulson is responsible of letting Lehman fail while nationalizing the other financial institutions, pushing the United States to the worst crisis in generations; others mention that Paulson was jumping from one fire to the other without looking at the big picture. The reality, as usual, probably lies in the middle. Paulson was, indeed, always in the rush and catching up with events, but he was also the person who took all the decisions. Though he probably doesn't realize it, Paulson's book shows clearly how he presented all the decisions regarding bail-outs as faits accomplis to his boss, the President of the United States, who had no choice but sign. This has been confirmed by former aides of the White House, most notably by Matt Latimer, speechwriter of George W. Bush. Remarkably, while Paulson praises Bush constantly, Latimer is clear on the disenchantment between the two characters, and between Treasury and the White House in general. I encourage those who have read Paulson's book to compare it with Latimer's article.

Most of the autobiographies and memoirs written by policymakers are a boring recollection of facts, a listing of praises (or lack thereof) to other policymakers, and a few juicy gossips. On the Brink is not the exception to this rule. Paulson's communication skills are poor, and his writing is straightforward as a result of his lack of style, not because of training of refinement (at the end, Paulson acknowledges that a team helped him polish the book).What makes interesting this book is the vertiginous speed at which facts evolved: banks and financial institutions were falling basically every other week, and one guy and his staff were in charge of fixing everything around the clock and tell the American people that things were going to be OK every Sunday morning.

The value of On the Brink is neither literary, nor factual: the financial crisis created an industry of books about the crisis which describe facts in a more vivid and entertaining way (also, remember, that some of the facts of the financial crisis were under investigation when Paulson published his book, so gossips and rumors are obviously absent).

If there is one reason to read On the Brink is to get a firsthand approach, as limited as it is in terms of communication skills, of the financial crisis. Shortly, this will be a great document for historians in 50 or even 20 years. For this generation, other books might have a greater added value.

Crossing the Line - Daniel Gordon

Crossing the Line is the third and final installment of Daniel Gordon's trilogy on North Korea. After gaining the confidence of the North Korean government with The Game of Their Lives (to be reviewed soon) and A State of Mind, Daniel Gordon requested permission to film a documentary about the four American soldiers who defected to North Korea in the early sixties. Only two of the four soldiers were still alive at that time: Joe Dresnok and Charles Jenkins, who hated each other for reasons that are explained in the film. Jenkins defected back to Japan while the movie was being filmed and spend 30 days in an American military prison after being judged by a military court. Dresnok decided to stay and spend the rest of his life in North Korea, so the movie focuses on him: his personal story as a member of America's Southern underclass (he came from a dysfunctional family, didn't finish high school, and his first wife cheated on him while he was in the army), his role as a movie star in North Korea, and his daily life as an elderly.

When I reviewed A State of Mind, the second movie of Gordon's trilogy, I said that it had become useless since the funerals of Kim Jong Il. The death of Kim Jong Il and the media show that the North Korean government presented to the World served only to reinforce preconceptions about the country: people who thought that the North Korean regime is composed of lunatics would carry on with that idea, while people who had admiration for the North Korean Communist Party (most notably, Mexico's Labor Party), would share the grief of the North Koreans who appeared on TV.

Crossing the Line, on the contrary, is a movie that transcends Kim Jong Il, or even North Korea. This is a movie about America's soldiers and the environment the grow in, but also about totalitarian regimes and their legitimacy. After watching this movie, you will spend a couple of hours trying to disentangle Dresnok's puzzle to no avail. Like all North Koreans, he was obviously brainwashed by the government (he admits having spent several years in "reeducation" after trying to ask political asylum in the Soviet Union's embassy), but the troubling thing is that he looks sincerely happy when he talks about his life in North Korea. His smile and his eyes don't betray him, as they do with people in other totalitarian regimes like China or Syria. Dresnok did well for himself in North Korea: his account of "The Arduous March", in which he acknowledges that the received his rations regularly while other people starved are meaningful, just like the scene when he appears drinking Jack Daniel's.

The great thing about this film is that it doesn't provide a clear answer to the primary question any person interested in this movie would like to answer: why did Dresnok (or Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki, if you start considering civilians) defect? In the case of Dresnok, the answer has to do, I guess, with the desire to escape from a sad reality; in other cases, ideology plays the most important part, and so on. 

Last but not least, Gordon deserves praise for presenting the opinions of the South and North Korean and Japanese governments, and the American army in an balanced way fashion. Doing so guaranteed not only the survival of the film, but also enables the viewer to form his own opinion about Dresnok. The multiplicity of views also makes the movie look like a regular drama. This is one of the best documentaries I've seen in my life. The story could be made a Hollywood movie, but no studio would put money in a movie likely to be pointed out as North Korean propaganda.

You can start watching Crossing the Line for free in Youtube, here:

The Mortal Storm - Frank Borzage

During the Cold War, it was easy for movie studios to produce movies bashing the USSR or China: their movies were forbidden there anyway, so any viewers in those countries were seen as potential consumers. During the years of McCarthyism, producing an anti-Communist film also represented not being in the black list and having government subsidies. A similar logic applies today with movies praising the heroism of American soldiers or anything that presents Iranians or Middle-Eastern Muslims like a bunch of fanatics: by producing movies like the Iron Man saga, or Charlie Wilson's War, Hollywood studios aren't taking a stance, but making profits and creating fertile soil for prospect markets -because, of course, the Middle East eventually become a region full of American-style democracy where everybody will love Hollywood movies.

Hollywood is not very good at going against mainstream political opinions. Back in the 1930s, once political persecution and concentration camps became common in Germany, Hollywood remained silent. Germany was the second largest market for American movies in the World, so too much money was at stake. Also, political repression affected only communists, or so thought people back in the day. Charles Chaplin was one of the first persons to take a clear stance against Nazism with The Great Dictator (which he produced with his money, by the way), but the only studio that took an official position against Hitler before anti-Nazism was profitable was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer with The Mortal Storm. This is a movie worth watching, if nothing else because it shows that corporations can do the right thing for moral reasons rather than for accounting profits (here is the IRS' list of authorized charities, in case you got to this post by mistake). 

This is a movie about a family breaking apart after Hitler's raise to power. The family is composed by Professor Roth, a "non-Aryan", his Junker wife, the two sons of her previous marriage, and the two children of the couple: Freya (played by Margaret Sullavan), and a boy. The two sons and Freya's fiancé join the Nazi Party after Hindenburg appoints Hitler as Chancellor, changing the dynamics of the family. A once calm and nice German town next to the Alps suddenly becomes enthralled with Nazism and its promise to restore Germany's greatness, which is funny when you think that modern Germans claim that "nobody knew" what was really going on in the concentration camps. 

This is an anti-Nazi propaganda film and has no intention to show anything close to objectivity. With the exception of Professor Roth, his wife, and Freya, Germans are shown as relentless machines of destruction, a view that is somewhat vindicated today (2012) given the attitude of average Germans towards their Greek fellows. In the movie, Germans are shown beating a Jewish elder man en masse, burning books, boycotting science classes, and willing to shoot their beloved ones for the sake of the Führer. As it happens, all of this turned out to be true, but in the 1930s only the communists and the Jewish established in the United States said it.

The end is probably the most interesting part of the movie. (SPOILER FOLLOWS) There is a non-written rule in Hollywood that endings must be happy. The obvious Hollywood-style end of the movie is that the family to move to The Land of The Free and The Home of The Brave. Alas, Professor Roth dies in a concentration camp, Freya is shot under the orders of his fiancé, and the two Nazi brothers have a shivering dialogue. One can only guess to what extent MGM was against Nazism that it was willing to break the convention and having a sad (and therefore more impacting) end.

The trailer of The Mortal Storm is here:

American Capitalism - John Kenneth Galbraith

Galbraith basically repeated the same ideas over and over through his academic career, and also as a novelist. American Capitalism is one of John Kenneth Galbraith's first books, and consequently, is not among the best ones. Galbraith would deploy his ideas fully in The New Industrial State, which is actually a very long volume. So, if you need to get a grasp of Galbraith's ideas, American Capitalism is a decent substitute. (actually, quite honestly, the best thing to get a grasp of anyone's ideas is Wikipedia; here is the entry on Galbraith)

The only interesting thing about American Capitalism is the concept of countervailing power, which basically refers to the idea of concentrating buyers or suppliers to counteract the market power of their counterparties (here is a more complete explanation by Christopher M. Snyder from Dartmouth). Countervailing power is an interesting concept from the point of view of competition policy. Galbraith argues that modern markets can never be perfectly competitive, so the solution to monopolies doesn't lie in anti-trust regulations, but in creating  and enforcing all kinds of monopolies so that they check and balance each other. This is a terrible idea. In the end, the people who would end up paying the costs of this scheme are the least organized ones: the customers.

I've reviewed some books by Galbraith over the last months, and I've had enough of him, at least for the medium term. I don't think that reading Galbraith has any value today other than for the economic historian. Galbraith's thoughts have become the creed of the Democratic Party, and his arguments are repeated by people like Krugman in ways that make more sense for the current generation. But The Nation thinks that reading Galbraith is one of the best things you can do with your time. Here's  their review of Galbraith's works.

The Affluent Society - John Kenneth Galbraith

He will never accept it, but Paul Krugmans ideas are far from being original. He stole his entire arguments on taxation and public services from John Kenneth Galbraith, one of the few American intellectuals in the twentieth century who has had the balls to advocate openly for the establishment of socialism in the United States. In fact, Krugman loathes Galbraith on the basis that he is not academic enough. (which is actually one of Galbraiths virtue: the idea that economics should depend on torturing data, most of which is unreliable anyway, is simply stupid)

Having said that, and precisely because Krugman has adapted Galbraiths arguments to the 21st century, The Affluent Society is valuable only as an economic theory relic. The Affluent Society makes the case for a sales tax as a means to finance more public goods (specifically, education, environment, and infrastructure). Whether Galbraith refers to a sales tax à la USA or a VAT à la Europe is not clear (the difference between the two is not insignificant, as can be seen here).

Sanctuary - William Faulkner

Sanctuary is probably one of the most underestimated novels by William Faulkner. This is partly explained by the fact that Faulkner himself considered it a potboiler. Sanctuary also contains one of the first explicit rape descriptions in American literature, which was widely criticized at the time. Having said that, the rape is nothing compared with what you can see in hardcore porn movies in the web. Technology has pushed our tolerance for violence and sadism in ways that were unthinkable less than a century ago.

The book also has a very depressing end, which does not bode well with American optimism -although, to be fair, America was a very depressing place in 1931, when Sanctuary was written. The Great Depression produced a tremendous amount of sad and depressing literature, of which The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck is probably the ultimate example. Considering that the comparisons between the current economic situation and the Great Depression are rampant, there is reason to expect a revival in depressing art, or even a revival of the American writers of the 1930s. Google's n-gram indicates that the Faulkner's days of glory are behind and are far from coming back:



I really liked Sanctuary, and I would recommend it for the following reasons:

You can see that the attitude towards women is starting to change. The women of the novel start questioning (only among themselves) the scale of values and the way relations with men are carried. This obsession with the new role of women and their sexuality would be a recurrent them after World War II. I'm thinking about Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's

This is one of the last books where you can see the term nigger. There is also an anti-Jewish rant by a Senator. Both things are unthinkable today. *

From a technical perspective, it is interesting to see that the main character (Temple) is more of an object than a person. Temple's dialogues are innocuous and superficial, and she doesn't appear in more than half of the book, but the entire plot spins around her.

I don't wanna close this post without recommending this blog, which also has a pretty decent commentary on Sanctuary from a literary and psychological perspective.

*Now that I think about it, Sanctuary shows how society has become more open to explicit sexual violence but more politically correct in terms of ethnic references.