Dear Readers,

All of us have been watching and reading the dizzying convulsions of the financial markets, particularly in the US, with a mixture of shock and awe. In the space of weeks, or even days, companies we thought we knew well have disappeared, been sold, merged or simply collapsed. The scale and speed of developments have left observers a little shell shocked, amidst a rising tide of concern. And by the looks of it, it has yet to run its course fully.

No one really knows how things will finally pan out; hopefully, new equilibriums will be reached, and calmer heads will prevail.

But developments such as recently witnessed do not simply materialise; they have a long gestation period, building strength and power. In the years to come, there will doubtless be an outpouring of articles, reports and books on who’s to blame for this sorry spectacle. In the meanwhile, for readers who might be interested, here are some titles that chronicle the development of the markets, and the powerful combinations of psychology and market forces that can trigger such seismic events.

A demon of our own design : markets, hedge funds, and the perils of financial innovation
by Richard Bookstaber
Hoboken, N.J. : John Wiley, c2007.
332.64524 BOO -[BIZ]

 The trillion dollar meltdown : easy money, high rollers, and the great credit crash
by Charles R. Morris.
New York : PublicAffairs, c2008.
332.04150973 MOR -[BIZ]

The black swan : the impact of the highly improbable
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
London : Allen Lane, 2007.
003.54 TAL

Bad money : reckless finance, failed politics, and the global crisis of American capitalism
by Kevin Phillips
New York : Viking, 2008.
330.973 PHI -[BIZ]

When genius failed : the rise and fall of Long-Term Capital Management
by Roger Lowenstein.
New York : Random House, c2000
332.6 LOW -[BIZ]
 

For location and availability of titles, please visit http://vistaweb.nlb.gov.sg.

Have you read these books? Do you have something else to recommend?
Post your comments, or send a longer book review to HBeditor@nlb.gov.sg

[HBeditor - 18 September 2008: If you don't already know, the latest issue of High Browse Print hit the (library) stands about a week ago. This latest issue covers the Singapore F1 Race that is happening next weekend. Just grab a copy when you're in a library. We'll be uploading the articles onto High Browse Online over the next few days.]

HIGH BROWSE . a quarterly booklist

July – September 2008

Featuring

DEAR READER . editorial
Drift by Lim Lee Ping

QUIRKY THEME . book reviews
Team Schumacher: The Men Who Painted F1 Red Again by Timothy Collins
Motor-racing’s Strangest Races by Geoff Tibballs
Jack Kerouac’s American Journey by Paul Maher, Jr.
The Getaway by Jim Thompson
The Getaway Man by Andrew Vachss
Crash by J. G. Ballard
Deadly Obsession by Phil Shirley
From A Buick 8 by Stephen King
Photo Finish by Matthew Reilly

The High Browse Team

Adult and Young People’s Services
Public Library Services
National Library Board

Photo Finish
Matthew Reilly
New York, N.Y. : Aladdin Paperbacks, 2007
Call No.: Y English REI

It’s a story with the usual suspects: teen prodigy, sabotage, a hero who will let nothing get in the way of him, and random parts about the pretty girl who sends hearts afire (and who of course is the hero’s friend).

It’s a cliché formula, but how it’s pieced together is what makes the difference.

Reilly’s strength is the thrills and spills in his stories, right from the beginning. Photo Finish is preceded by Crash Course and Full Throttle in the Hover Car Race series. It opens with a terrible car crash where the cars plunge into water. Our star hero, Jason, grabs his brother out of his car and ejects into the water, while above their heads, their cars explode. Imagine rockets and torpedoes!

The Hover Car Race concept itself is also attractive. These Hover Cars are like hybrids of cars and Stealth Fighters, and the race terrain is not your usual tarred roads, but landscapes of buildings and even ice bergs. Just imagine flying machines weaving in and out of narrow spaces between edifices, zooming at top-gun speed to race to the finish line.

Reilly has clearly thought out the mechanics of his Hover Car Race championships too, creating the kind of score-keeping that happens in real life sports like Formula One and soccer. The race is serious business too, and these teens even have an International Race School to attend.

In this third book Photo Finish, a mysterious coalition is using dirty tricks to hamper Jason’s advance, literally trying to bump him out of the races. The ‘incidents’ that happen are no coincidence, and neither are they small matters. Jason’s confidence is jolted, but he regains it by learning to race from the basics again.

Thrill-seekers will be drawn to this fast-paced coming-of-age novel. If you enjoyed the Wachowski brothers’ Speed Racer (2008), this will whet your thirst for adrenaline-pumping action as well.

From A Buick 8
Stephen King
New York: Scribner, c2002
Call No.: English KIN

This is a story about a storied, classic American car, and yet it is not. That’s because this is a Stephen King story, and all his stories contain elements of the surreal and the macabre, and this is no exception. The car in question here is a Buick Roadmaster, but unlike other car novels, during the twenty-odd span of years covered by the story the car hardly moves; it is towed into a police shed and there it stays.

From its mysterious first appearance there is something strange about the car – it looks like a Buick, but some details, such as the chrome grille, and the steering wheel, are very wrong or just plain odd. It does not scratch; it does not rust; and it seems to control the temperature of the shed in which it is stored. And then there are the fireworks…

The State Troopers, in particular Troop D, of Pennsylvania find themselves the reluctant baby-sitters of this strange car. And thus our unwitting troopers spend the next 20 years alternately fascinated and terrified by this mysterious guest. If you think of the automobile as an instrument that takes us from here to there, then that is what the Buick does, but in a manner that is equal parts mystery and horror. There is also the tantalizing question of what exactly is over there, on the other side, waiting for us.

Stephen King again demonstrates how adroitly he can tap into the American psyche, especially their fascination with the classic Detroit ‘muscle cars’ of America’s golden automobile era. Americans have long associated those cars with rock and roll, the open road, freedom, and now, in King’s hands, a creepy suspense.

As a postscript, King wrote that the novel was in a way a tribute to the State Police, an acknowledgment of the work they do and the price they pay to do it well. One thing’s for sure – if I were a State Trooper and I had to look after a car like that, I think a raise is surely in order.

Deadly Obsessions
Phil Shirley
London: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2000
Call No.: English 796.72 SHI–[REC]

Maybe Hemingway said it best, when he said that ‘there are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering, all the rest are merely games’. Arguably no other sport has quite sparked as much interest and fascination as motor racing. The combination of speed, action and adrenalin is too explosive to be ignored, and racecar drivers are looked upon as heroes of today.

But heroes do fall, and this book discusses agonising details of horrific accidents that betide racecar drivers. Famous incidents on the track, which led to the deaths of race legends such as Aryton Senna and Tazio Nuvolari, are recounted in the author’s journalistic style. A common thread seems to bind these doomed drivers together in the days leading up to their deaths; each of them felt a sense of foreboding days before their final races, but chose to ignore such emotions that are deemed weak in an industry that prides itself on being fearless. What drives F1 drivers to get behind the wheels of their immensely powerful machines, that go at speeds in excess of 200mph while negotiating twists and bends that would unnerve even the bravest of souls? Author Phil Shirley takes it upon himself to search for the motivation that powers these drivers.

Through in-depth interviews with some of racings’ greats, as well as detailed analysis of various accidents, Shirley lures us into the glorious world of motor racing in a way that is at once both intimate and painful. It quickly becomes obvious that racing is as much a competition on the track as it is between a man’s mind and his own mortality. Racecar drivers cannot seem to escape from the inexplicable truth that Death will pay them or their friends a visit at some point in their careers should they tempt him often enough.

But it is a little known fact that most drivers, if not all, believe in God and this could just be the very reason why they manage to keep calm and preserve their sanity.

As racing legend Mario Andretti famously quipped, ‘Only a fool would risk his life for a living and not have some faith in God.’

Crash
J. G. Ballard
London: Vintage, 1995
Call No.: English BAL

James Graham Ballard’s Crash is, in short, simply not for the weak. An acute sense of flatness lies paradoxically at the heart of this novel, if there is a heart to begin with. Despite what its title suggests, and this review being a tie-in with the Formula 1 race in Singapore, Crash resists being your typical crash and burn. In fact, in Crash, a head-on collision is possibly quite a soothing balm.

Not that there is no violence here. It is just overshadowed by the highly stylised world of a technological landscape, one which takes centrestage in this novel. An ‘immense motion structure’ of a motorway acts as the ordering force, in which everything else realigns in deference. Residing in the backdrop are characters obsessively dreaming of the ultimate, but always necessarily deferred ‘autogeddon’.

Of course, not all the characters start off like that; they just end up that way. James Ballard, our narrator, after having met with a car crash, befriends Vaughan, and is thus initiated into that seductive world of a new perverse sexuality. But this is still a scratch at the surface. The clinical detached language narrating the erotic conjures up an aggressively sexualised world that is devoid of desire. Characters believe that the singularity of their own death, their individual fatal car-crash, will finally release them from the tedium of simulations, therefore freeing them for their real destinations.

To where? You ask. Nowhere, I guess. Crash begins with a real event, Vaughan’s death, but it is glossed over quickly. The bulk of the novel is a meditation on the endless simulation, the tireless rehearsals. It has no room for the real.

Yet, this flatness digs deep, judging by the reception it has received. J.G. Ballard wrote Crash in 1973. The idea of Crash was however, conceived three years before, at an art show put up by the author. He reveals recently that it was a psychological test in disguise, intended to prove the strong unconscious relation between sexuality and the car crash. The subsequent public outrage was the catalyst for the birth of this novel.

Notably, the author admits that he intentionally gave the narrator his own name, claiming to accept all that is entailed with it. This act is highly suspect when you have a novel that flaunts its own distinct moral flatness.

Lauded by Baudrillard as the ‘first great novel of the universe of simulation’, he posits that Crash is fascinating as no form of value judgment can be passed, and that basically, no moral gaze can touch it. He pushes it further, claiming that Crash is “beyond its own author”, hence rejecting Ballard’s introduction where Crash is presented as a cautionary warning.

Crash certainly lives up to all the controversy. Ballard has calibrated a hauntingly atmospheric piece, at times repulsive, and at times something more; the profound sense of calm that presides over everything, transcends perhaps even the perverse.

Read Crash and make what you will of it.