pro libertate net

Hinting once or twice at things still to come to increase the suspense of one’s narrative can be a good move. The reader becomes engrossed in the story and feels slightly ahead of the protagonists. Continuously hinting at things still to come becomes very fast an annoying quirk. Chris Kuzneski has this quirk and Sign of the Cross suffers to some extend under it.

Otherwise it’s a good religious themed thriller. The heroes are quite likeable and not too serious. Indeed, I felt a bit reminded of Clive Cussler’s work. The protagonists still need some depth – though it is only the second novel in a series that I suspect to get rather voluminous…

Dual (or multiple) interwoven time lines seem pretty popular in current successful novels. The Sanctuary, for instance, connects one story plot playing in the early 1700 with one in the early 2000. Raymond Khoury mixes quite a bit of action – shoot outs, kidnappings, hot pursuits – a string of coincidences with an appealing scientific motive. Though the general level of violence and the number of shady characters is rather high the novel also brings up an interesting mix of moral attitudes and scientific ethics.

How far should you go, how far can you go to achieve your goal? Here, questionable scientific experiments, torture, and murder are obviously accepted means to reach the end. On top of that, even the goal is “ethically challenged.” Should one strive to find the cure for death, to prolong one’s life beyond the normal expectations? And, should you share that knowledge?

For this novel does not tell the “usual” quest for a religious artifact or a secret that could shatter the foundations of the Church, it does tell the quest for a vaccine to cure the disease of aging. And prolongevity – doubling, tripling the healthy human life expectancy – raises some serious social and moral questions.

These questions are far more interesting than the novel itself that only cursorily is concerned with them.

Still, The Sanctuary is quite entertaining – even though Khoury’s first novel The Last Templar was a bit more enjoyable and enthralling.

Niall Ferguson’s The Ascent of Money was aptly timed; with the financial turmoil of 2007 that we still feel and need to surmount it was bound to attract some interest. It helps, of course, to have a acompanying tv documentary.

The book is, however, not as aptly titled. “The ascent and decline of private and public debt financing” would describe the book’s content more appropriately. Though this would be less appealing to the paying costumer, wouldn’t it?

In spite of the book’s subtitle “A Financial History of the World” the book is rather slim; just about 260 pages excluding the endnotes and index. Not what you would expect from an endeavor with such a title. Yet, it does not state that the (his)story told is comprehensive. It is not. Ferguson focuses on a few historical turning points, a few historical figures in our financial past. He offers some glimpses in what was going on and why. His focus is, however, not on money – the thing we nowadays call certain printed papers – it is on debts and debt financing of private and public ventures, on risk taking and risk takers. Interesting nonetheless. Yet, I really would have loved to read something that was more focusing on the history on money: From pebbles, to coins, to printed papers, to plastic cards.

Apart from that, The Ascent of Money is quite an entertaining and instructive little book. Ferguson does not stick strictly to the timeline to advance his narrative, he rather organizes his material around some themes that follow a logical sequence. The writing is clear; my only animus are the endnotes; I would prefer footnotes that are so much easier to find…

Clive Cussler’s Tronjan Odyssey marks a small break in his successful Dirk Pitt series. After the introduction of Dirk Pitt’s offspring in the last novel it is time for retirement from the adventurous escapades of Pitt senior’s former life. Thus, there are two interwoven plot lines installing Pitt junior as his father’s successor in future installments of the series. Neither Pitt is on a personal vendetta, rescue missions and intelligence gathering are the central elements of this novel.

This time Cussler is going a bit farther out on a limp than usual, hinging his background plot on a rather obscure theory of the location of Troy advanced by a lay historian, Iman Wilkens (Where Troy Once Stood).

Nevertheless, entertaining as ever.

Recent years have seen a massive surge in popular economics books for the uninitiated masses. The list ranges from books advocating standard economics and its applications to everyday phenomena – like Landsburg‘s The Armchair Economist, Cowen’s Discover Your Inner Economist, and Harford’s The Undercover Economist – to books that tell of unexpected links of standard economics and real world behavior, e.g. Levitt & Dubner’s Freakonomics, to books that present a blend of economics and psychology, questioning the standard economics’ focus on flawed assumptions on human behavior, stressing the schism between neo-classical normative (standard) economics and positive (behavioral) economics – like Ariely’s Predictably Irrational and Thaler & Sunsteins’s Nudge.

The Brafman brother’s Sway belongs to the last category. In contrast to Ariely et al. they do not present there own original research as they are not active researchers in the field of behavioral economics. Thus they follow the current standard recipe of success of other popular economics books authors, they tell a lot of more or less connected anecdotes illustrating behavior that is not conforming to standard economic theory or an intuitive definition of rational behavior.

Sway has two main topics. About two third of the book is dedicated to the sunk cost fallacy, even if the Brafmans use different labels, most notably commitment (to a lost cause). In brief, due to being loss averse people tend to commit to behavior and opinions that are not in their best interest or rational since they already invested some resources and do not want to loose their initial investment. The remaining third is then about the interdependency of social norms and preferences and explicit incentives, the crowding out of intrinsic motivation by extrinsic incentives.

All in all, Sway is rather well written, entertaining and instructive. Indeed, once you start reading you will want to go on. Given the that Sway is just under 200 pages it may well serve as a nice teaser to the field of behavioral economics and other books and maybe academic programs that can provide more depth.

Pratchett’s Discworld novel number five – Sourcery – features again Rincewind and (my favorite) Death, together with his three fellow horseriders of the Apocralypse, the apocryphal apocalypse.

The story is nice and everything. It’s just apt to kill some time on a train trip. The most remarkable thing about this novel, however, is Pratchett’s extensive use of footnotes. There are 25 footnotes in total. There were some footnotes in his earlier novels, too. Yet, here he really establishes the footnote in his work as a literary device that provides a departure from the main narrative, tells a different story altogether, and provides meta-commentaries on the plot – a comic relief from an already comic novel.