Books 02 (Nov 08 - Nov 09)

Re: Books (Nov 08 - Oct 09)

Postby millionairemind » Thu Oct 22, 2009 1:50 pm

Just wrapped up on the book The Crap Old Days by Wayne Williams.

Its a hilarious book that pokes fun of all the things from the 60s to the 80s we remember so fondly of. The author is very cynical and sarcastically funny.

Here's a short para from "The Six Million Dollar Man"
The success of TSMDM led to stakes of merchandising and an inevitable spin off. After a skydiving accident, Jaime Sommers (Steve Austin's gf) received 2 new legs, a new arm and a new ear to become Bionic Woman. Give that she was quite flat chested it's surprising that the people rebuildng her didn't take the opportunity to bolster her frame with some bionic breast implants. They'd have looked superb bouncing in slow-mo when she went running. And after the series ended she could have nabbed a led role in Baywatch. :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :mrgreen: :mrgreen: :mrgreen: :mrgreen:

Available from NLB :D

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The Crap Old Days
by Wayne Williams Darren Allan

Outline
Do you have fond memories of Knight Rider, Etch-a-Sketch or Raleigh Choppers? You wouldn't be alone. Books, broadcasters and newspapers have fed us a constant diet of why the good old days were so fabulous. They've made a warm, thick treacle of the past which we've bathed in for too long. This book finally pulls the plug on all that. "The Crap Old Days" is a savagely funny recollection of how things really were: Tiny Tears was a washout, the Flying Pickets fouled the airwaves and Subbuteo was just flicking daft!
Contents
Books, broadcasters and newspapers have fed us with a diet of why the good old days were so great, but The Crap Old Days remembers things as they really were: Tiny Tears was a washout, Rambo was rubbish and Weebles may not have wobbled, but they fell down when it came to doing anything interesting or useful! The Crap Old Days de-bunks the myth of how great everything used to be - apparently.; Contents include:; 3D Movies; 3-2-1; Action Man; Atari VCS; Big Glasses; British Beer; Bros; Brut; Cabbage Patch Kids; CB Radio; Charley Says...; Raleigh Chopper; The Clangers; Dirty Dancing; Dr Seuss; Eldorado; Etch-a-sketch; Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle; Frankie Goes to Hollywood; Going For Gold; Green Shield Stamps; Raleigh Grifter; He-Man; Impulse; Ketchips; Kia-Ora; Knight Rider; The Krankies; Legwarmers; Magic 8 Ball; Metal Mickey; Mittens on a String; Monkey; Naked Lady Pens; Nena; Operation; Panini Stickers; Red Phone Boxes; Reliant Robin; Rod Hull and Emu; Roland Rat; Rubik's Cube; Scalextric; Shoulder Pads; Sinclair C5; Slinky; Smurfs; Snoods; Sodastream; Space Dust; Space Hopper; Spot the Ball; Stock, Aitken & Waterman; Stylophone; Subbuteo; ThunderCats; Trivial Pursuit; UB40; Vesta Curries; Wash & Go; Weebles; White socks; Why Don't You?; The Word; Yahtzee; ZX81; and more!
"If a speculator is correct half of the time, he is hitting a good average. Even being right 3 or 4 times out of 10 should yield a person a fortune if he has the sense to cut his losses quickly on the ventures where he has been wrong" - Bernard Baruch

Disclaimer - The author may at times own some of the stocks mentioned in this forum. All discussions are NOT to be construed as buy/sell recommendations. Readers are advised to do their own research and analysis.
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Re: Books (Nov 08 - Oct 09)

Postby winston » Sat Oct 24, 2009 8:11 am

The University on Your Shelf by Alexander Green

A few months ago, a couple in our Florida neighborhood invited my wife and I over to tour their newly re-decorated home.

Wine glasses in hand, we wandered from room to room as our hosts showed us the latest colors and fabrics, new lighting and furniture, flooring, wallpaper, cabinets, counters and window treatments.

The house was beautiful. Yet something was missing.

As we were leaving it finally dawned on me. There weren't any books!

Books do more than decorate a room. They make it inviting. They give it personality. A home without books is like a body without a soul.

Books are friends, comforters and counselors, repositories of wisdom, sources of ideas. A good collection of books is a university in itself.

If I visit a home without them, I feel cheated.

Why? Because I can spend three minutes looking at your bookshelves and learn more about your taste and interests than I could in a half-dozen leisurely dinner conversations.

Your personal library (ahem) speaks volumes.

At a glance, your guests know whether your interests run toward classics or bestsellers, history or politics (or both), literary fiction or travel, fly-fishing or golf, art or engine repair.

A wildly eclectic mish-mash says a lot about you, too.

And forget the secret ballot. Your political views are right there in plain view. It doesn't matter whether you've had the chance to read your Chomsky or Hayek selections yet. The mere intent is evidence enough.

Your core beliefs also sit on your bookshelf. The family Bible says one thing, the entire "Left Behind" series another. Titles by C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton reflect a subtle theology; Karen Armstrong or the Dalai Lama, a cosmopolitan view.

Of course, not everyone who loves books has them on display. Some, for instance, grow tired of carting them from one address to the next. This leads to tough choices. (Robert B. Parker can be safely jettisoned. P.G. Wodehouse? Never.)

Others have given up reading for cable. Fortunately, I grew up in an era when watching television wasn't terribly appealing. Transmission and reception were equally bad.

And while my childhood home was thick with books, today my parents use the library almost exclusively. The few books they buy are either immediately passed on (if they're good) or unceremoniously tossed out (if they're not).

Then there is my friend Jimmy who insists he's done with paper and cloth. He's hooked on his new Kindle.

It's a neat gadget, but there's something about the tactile experience of handling a book that I'll never give up. Who really wants to curl up in front of the fire with an electronic reader?

We all know the value and pleasures of reading. But a personal library affords endless opportunities for something equally important: rereading.

My uncle, Edgar F. Puryear, Jr., is a military historian who has spent a lifetime studying character and leadership. After interviewing more than 150 four- and five-star generals over a 40-year period, he concludes that the greatest leaders, without exception, were avid readers.

In his new book, Marine Corps Generalship - an excellent read itself - he quotes a radio broadcast by Yale University professor William Lyon Phelps in 1933:

"The habit of reading is one of the greatest resources of mankind; and we enjoy reading books that belong to us much more than if they are borrowed. A borrowed book is like a guest in the house; it must be treated with punctiliousness, with a certain considerate formality. You must see that it sustains no damage; it must not suffer while under your roof. You cannot leave it carelessly, you cannot mark it, you cannot turn down the pages, and you cannot use it familiarly. And then, someday, although this is seldom done, you really ought to return it.

But your own books belong to you; you treat them with that familiar intimacy that annihilates formality. Books are for use, not for show; you should own no book that you are afraid to mark up or afraid to place on the table, wide open and face down. A good reason for marking favorite passages in books is that this practice enables you to remember easily the significant sayings, to refer to them quickly, and then in later years, it is like visiting a forest where you once blazed a trail. You have the pleasure of going over the old ground, and recalling both the intellectual scenery and your old earlier self.

Everyone should begin collecting a private library in youth; the instinct of private property, which is fundamental in human beings, can here be cultivated with every advantage and no evils. One should have one's own bookshelves, which should not have doors, glass windows, or keys; they should be free and accessible to the hand as well as the eye.

The best of mural decorations is books; they are more varied in color and appearance than any wallpaper, they are more attractive in design, and they have the prime advantage of being separate personalities, so that if you sit alone in the room in the firelight, you are surrounded with intimate friends. The knowledge that they are in plain view is both stimulating and refreshing. You do not have to read them all.

There are, of course, no friends like living, breathing, corporeal men and women; my devotion to reading has never made me a recluse. How could it? Books are of the people, by the people, for the people. Literature is the immortal part of history; it is the best and most enduring part of personality. But books friends have this advantage over living friends, you can enjoy the most truly aristocratic society in the world whenever you want it.

The great dead are beyond our physical reach, and the great living are usually almost as inaccessible: as for our personal friends and acquaintances, we cannot always see them. Perchance they are asleep, or away on a journey. But in a private library, you can at any moment converse with Socrates or Shakespeare or Carlyle or Dumas or Dickens or Shaw or Barrie or Galsworthy.

And there is no doubt that in these books you see these men at their best. They wrote for you. They "laid themselves out," they did their ultimate best to entertain you, to make a favorable impression. You are as necessary to them as an audience to an actor, only instead of seeing them masked, you look into their inmost heart of hearts."

Today, we swim in a sea of media information. We are surrounded by data, by trivia. Where is wisdom to be found?

In books.

Author Seth Lerer observes, "We live not with books themselves but with our memories of books: the bits and pieces we recall, the pages we dogear; the lines we highlight."

Reading parallels life. It readies us for it. There simply isn't time to learn everything the hard way.

Whether you're seeking the practical, the spiritual, the theoretical or the aesthetic, great books - with their mysterious enticements and timeless wisdom - are always there.

And, just occasionally, so are curious guests.

Source: Spiritual Wealth
It's all about "how much you made when you were right" & "how little you lost when you were wrong"
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Re: Books (Nov 08 - Oct 09)

Postby millionairemind » Sat Oct 31, 2009 9:50 pm

Finished up on HOW TO SMELL A RAT: The Five Signs of Financial Fraud by Ken Fisher.

This book was written this year after both Madoff and Stanford got caught. Not a bad book by Ken. Its pretty short (around 200pages) by his standard and offers pretty good advice on red flags to watch out for when you hand over your money to financial firms or funds.

With this knowledge, you can learn to spot red flags, such as:

* Advisers with direct access to investors' funds
* Firms with numbers that seem "too good to be true"
* Managers with fees that are too low—Madoff didn't charge any fees, he just charged for trading!

There should be a premium for integrity. Asking the right questions and performing the due dilligence goes a long way toward finding a firm that can help insulate you from financial fraud.

The book is available from NLB. Currently reading Richard Branson's new book Business Stripped Bare: Adventures of a Global Entrepreneur. Will post if its any good.
"If a speculator is correct half of the time, he is hitting a good average. Even being right 3 or 4 times out of 10 should yield a person a fortune if he has the sense to cut his losses quickly on the ventures where he has been wrong" - Bernard Baruch

Disclaimer - The author may at times own some of the stocks mentioned in this forum. All discussions are NOT to be construed as buy/sell recommendations. Readers are advised to do their own research and analysis.
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Re: Books (Nov 08 - Oct 09)

Postby kennynah » Sat Oct 31, 2009 10:16 pm

MM : you champion in this reading arena... very widely read...very good habit...

how i wish i could bring myself to read less 老夫子。。猛龙过江-李小龙。。snoopy。。 and more serious readings...wahahahaha....

thanks for sharing the details... at least if i wana start some beneficial reading, i will browse through this thread for ideas...
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Re: Books (Nov 08 - Nov 09)

Postby Poles » Mon Nov 09, 2009 3:08 pm

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 70_pf.html
Author of 'Life and Death in Shanghai' dies at 94

By Patricia Sullivan
Tuesday, November 3, 2009 9:14 PM

Nien Cheng, 94, whose memoir "Life and Death in Shanghai" was widely praised as one of the most riveting accounts of the Cultural Revolution, died Nov. 2 of cardiovascular and renal disease at her home in Washington.

At a time when China's Communist leader Mao Zedong was trying to purge political rivals and reassert his authority, Mrs. Cheng, the wealthy widow of an oil company executive, was one of untold numbers of professionals who were evicted from their homes by the Red Guard. She was arrested in August 1966 and falsely accused of being a spy.

Mrs. Cheng endured 6 1/2 years of solitary confinement and torture in prison, refusing to confess or bow to the will of her interrogators. Upon her release, she discovered that her only child was dead, purportedly of suicide, but actually beaten to death by Red Guards.

In simple, exquisite detail, Mrs. Cheng's 1987 book describes the maddeningly circular reasoning of those caught up in the revolution. Her interrogations were contests of will, with Mrs. Cheng refusing to confess or responding with quotes from Mao's "Little Red Book."

Her captors responded with beatings. So tightly handcuffed that she feared losing her hands and confined in a frigid cell too small for her to lie down, Mrs. Cheng lost her teeth, caught pneumonia and had hemorrhages. She defused the misery by laughing at her accusers.

"Far from depressing, it is almost exhilarating to witness her mind do battle," Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in the New York Times review of her book. "Even in English, the keenness of her thought and expression is such that it constitutes some form of martial art, enabling her time and again to absorb the force of her interrogators' logic and turn it to her own advantage."

Readers were mesmerized by the story, pushing the book to the top of the bestseller list. The timing was right; totalitarianism and communism were under attack worldwide. During a visit to Germany, President Ronald Reagan urged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down" the Berlin Wall as the Cold War began to show signs of thawing.

Her book "exalts the triumph of the human spirit over mindless inhumanity," author Stanley Karnow wrote in The Washington Post. "Thus her narrative deserves to rank with the foremost prison diaries of our time."

After she was released from prison, Mrs. Cheng found herself still under suspicion. She was forced to share her home with other families and was wrenched from a comfortable life into the grinding poverty of the masses.

By 1980, she had managed to leave China for Canada. Three years later she moved to Washington, using money her husband had left her in overseas bank accounts. In 1987, she was a guest at a White House state dinner, where she chatted with the president. Her book was excerpted at length in Time magazine. She became a U.S. citizen in 1988.

"There were many Chinese who fought back and many who suffered much more. Some of them have never recovered," she said. "But my privilege has been to write about it, and that's only been possible because I could leave."

Mrs. Cheng was born Jan. 28, 1915, in Beijing, the daughter of a naval vice minister who belonged to a wealthy family of land owners. In 1935 she went to study at the London School of Economics, where she met her future husband, Kang-chi Cheng.

The couple returned to China before 1940, and Mr. Cheng joined the ministry of foreign affairs for the Kuomintang, the ruling party at the time. The couple were sent to Australia to establish an embassy and then were transferred to the ministry in Shanghai until Communists came to power in 1949.

With the approval of the government, Mrs. Cheng's husband became general manager of Shell Oil in Shanghai. He died of cancer in 1957, and she joined the oil company as an adviser. Her daughter, Meiping, was an aspiring actress. The Communist regime left professionals like her alone until 1966, when Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution.

Increasingly concerned about the Red Guards parading down her street, she wasn't surprised when "suddenly the doorbell began to ring incessantly. At the same time, there was a furious pounding of many fists on my front gate, accompanied by hysterical voices shouting slogans," she wrote.

The 30 to 40 high school-age students were let in. They ransacked her home, insulted her and derided her defense of ancient Chinese porcelain cups they were smashing. A month later, she was taken to a meeting at which she was denounced and held in a detention center for political prisoners.

After her years in custody, she was told March 27, 1973, that she was being released because of an "improvement in her way of thinking and an attitude of repentance." She refused to accept that statement and vowed to remain in detention until prison officials officially declared her innocent and published an apology in Shanghai and Beijing.

"The No. 1 Detention House isn't an old people's home. You can't stay here all your life," the interrogator told her. "I have never seen a prisoner refusing to leave the detention house before. You must be out of your mind."

Mrs. Cheng was forced out of the prison and learned about the death of her daughter. It took a long time, but she eventually realized that her captors were trying force her to confess to being a spy so that they could indict Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier, as the chief of a foreign espionage network. Zhou Enlai had permitted Shell to function in China.

Mrs. Cheng had two sisters in Southern California when she immigrated; they have died. She leaves no immediate survivors, and friends said she never got over the death of her daughter. They said Mrs. Cheng blamed herself for not forcing the young woman to leave China as conditions worsened.

After arriving in Washington, Mrs. Cheng lectured about China and took classes at American University's Institute for Learning in Retirement. She was an elegant dresser and practiced tai chi, and she became a popular speaker in China. When China took over the government of Hong Kong, she appeared in print and on TV news shows to warn the overly optimistic about the history of Chinese government.

She made what was supposed to be a private visit to Hong Kong in 1990. When she agreed to sign copies of her book, readers lined up by the hundreds at the small basement bookstore sponsoring the event, clutching black-market English versions or surreptitious Chinese translations.

Tour guides denied the existence of the No. 1 Detention House, but when a visitor gave her tour guide a copy of the book, he drove her by the building.
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Re: Books (Nov 08 - Nov 09)

Postby kennynah » Mon Nov 09, 2009 6:02 pm

so...when was the last time you browsed one of these ? 8-)

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Re: Books (Nov 08 - Nov 09)

Postby memphisb » Mon Nov 09, 2009 8:48 pm

kennynah wrote:so...when was the last time you browsed one of these ? 8-)

Image



I rem i had read this particular issue u posted. 3 of them going to picnic on their tricycle, meet ghost, meet pretty woman and all sorts of funny stories. No wonder my english failed badly during my schooling days! :lol:
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Re: Books (Nov 08 - Nov 09)

Postby kennynah » Mon Nov 09, 2009 8:54 pm

memphisb : li gong si mi ? :lol: :lol:
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Re: Books (Nov 08 - Nov 09)

Postby millionairemind » Fri Nov 13, 2009 1:46 pm

Wrapped up on two books this morning - IN FED WE TRUST: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic by David Wessel and Business Stripped Bare: Adventures of a Global Entrepreneur by Richard Branson.

IN FED WE TRUST

Here's a review from Financial Times if you are interested. The author is the editor of the Wall Street Journal and hence was able to piece together a very comprehensive guide to the panic of 2008. He profiles the rise of Ben Bernanke to the top job and how he dealt with the panic of 2008. He has interesting anecdotes that suggested that Sheila Bair was "arm twisted" by the FED and Treasury to offer blanket guarantees on deposits during the great panic.

The author also covered the academic paper that Bernanke authored on The Great Depression, which subsequently became his basis for fighting the great panic. Its a pretty interesting book with detailed inside information on the INs and OUTs of the great Panic.

Hidden Content:
In Fed We Trust
Review by Edward Luce
Published: August 29 2009 02:23 | Last updated: August 29 2009 02:23
In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic
By David Wessel
Crown Business $26.99, 336 pages

A few months ago Gao Xiqing, president of the powerful China Investment Corporation, quipped that when China looked at the United States nowadays it saw “socialism with American characteristics”. He was only half-joking.

In the space of the last year, the US government has taken over most of its domestic car industry, pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into its banking system, assumed the operations of huge tracts of the formerly private credit markets and entered into a new era of trillion-dollar fiscal deficits.

And all without even the hint of a blush. Even more noteworthy from a Chinese perspective, much of this unprecedented expansion in the US government’s role has been conceived and executed by an institution staffed by unelected officials that finds no mention in the US constitution.

Welcome to the Federal Reserve, arguably the most powerful body in Washington and the unofficial “fourth branch of government”, in the view of David Wessel, author of In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic.

Were you to select just one figure from Washington for a job swap in Beijing, then Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Fed, would probably make the cultural adjustment better than most. From a relatively poor background in South Carolina, Bernanke won a scholarship to Harvard and quickly settled into a career as an academic economist.

Bernanke, 55, only moved to Washington in 2002 when George W Bush plucked him from a comfortable tenure at Princeton to join the board of the Fed. Although a Republican, Bernanke could hardly be more different to Alan Greenspan, his much-celebrated predecessor.

Whereas Greenspan was a creature of the markets and a natural political animal, Bernanke is a classic technocrat with few of the showy social, or indeed linguistic, skills that won Greenspan such legendary status during his heyday. Yet history may look more kindly on Bernanke.

As Wessel’s book makes clear, Bernanke is a pragmatist. In what is otherwise a well-sourced and tightly paced account of how the Fed arguably staved off a second Great Depression, Wessel’s book has one annoying tic. Every few pages or so, he repeats the italicised mantra, Whatever it takes, to underline whatever eye-popping precedent Bernanke has just broken. It is an irritating trope – but hard to dispute.

With the exception of the fateful decision last September to allow Lehman Brothers to go bankrupt, which has since been taken as the unofficial starting date of the meltdown, at every stage the reticent Fed chairman has taken big risks, usually at the edge of the rulebook, to stave off the threat of another Depression.

Posterity has a way of making the past look inevitable. When the new man was made chairman in 2006, it took some by surprise. Today Bernanke’s selection looks an obvious decision – as does his unusually early renomination to another four-year term by Barack Obama earlier this week. As the leading scholar on the original Great Depression and its causes, Bernanke’s skill-set seems entirely appropriate for our times.

“Many of FDR’s [Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s] policies did not work as intended,” Bernanke said in 1999 about the president who led the US out of the Great Depression. “But in the end FDR deserves great credit for having the courage to abandon failed paradigms and do what needed to be done.” A few years later, Bernanke was to describe his own controversial actions as “aggressive surgery for aggressive cancer”.

Wessel’s account, longlisted for 2009’s FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year, focuses on the so-called “Four Musketeers” who orchestrated the Fed’s emergency responses to the series of ever-escalating hammer blows, starting with the collapse of Bear Stearns, the cowboy investment bank, in spring 2008.

Led by Bernanke, the group comprised Tim Geithner, the boyish chairman of the New York Fed, now Treasury secretary; Donald Kohn, the lifelong Fed staffer who serves as Bernanke’s deputy; and Kevin Warsh, the youngest Fed governor, and by far the wealthiest (Warsh, 39, married Jane Lauder, an heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics fortune).

In addition, it included Hank Paulson, George W Bush’s last Treasury secretary, whose progressively darkening under-eye circles served as a good barometer of the worsening state of the US economy. Paulson, who is now writing his own, reputedly compendious, account of the crisis, and who is described here as the nation’s “self-appointed chief investment banker”, is portrayed the least positively in the book.

In contrast, Geithner is depicted as a bright and pragmatic operator – another graduate of the whatever-it-takes school and an efficient lieutenant to Bernanke. Their approach, according to Wessel, is that “smart people solve crises one at a time and worry about dealing with the unintended consequences tomorrow”.

Might Wessel be too enamoured of his intrepid musketeers? Could tomorrow’s consequences be worse than anticipated? There are two reasons to be wary of Wessel’s conclusions. First, none of the musketeers saw the crisis coming. All of them, particularly Bernanke, were strongly supportive of Greenspan’s now controversial decision to keep US interest rates “too low for too long” following 9/11 (thus stoking the housing bubble). Likewise, of the Fed governors, only the late Ned Gramlich attempted to persuade Greenspan to exercise the Fed’s existing powers of regulation over the subprime mortgage industry. To no avail.

Second, the financial crisis is by no means over. In the space of a few months, the Fed’s balance sheet has more than tripled to almost $2,500bn – an extraordinary expansion that has almost certainly staved off deflation but at the risk of a return to what others, including the Chinese, fear may be a Great Inflation.

Finally, the political chickens have yet to come home to roost. As Wessel observes: “The more the Fed got involved in these politically charged bail-outs, the more it risked its prized independence in setting interest rates ... without fear of political interference.”

The Fed’s independence is under challenge on Capitol Hill. No one can discount the risk of a return to inflation. Until Bernanke has settled these two accounts, the jury should delay its verdict.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/707bec42-9362 ... abdc0.html


Business Stripped Bare: Adventures of a Global Entrepreneur

I have read his earlier book Losing My Virginity: The Autobiography and hence this was a natural follow up.

In this book, he touched on the people you hire for your business (hire for attitude, train for skills), the brand name, delivery, entrepreneurship and Leadership, Innovation and Social Responsibility. He also devoted a whole chapter on the mistakes he has made over his 30+ years in business.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I think it beats reading a whole year subscription of the Harvard Business Review. Rather than reading the writeups from a bunch of academics on business, its far better to read from a billionaire entrepreneur and learn from what he has done over 30+ years in business.

Both books are available from NLB.

Starting on Dear Undercover Economist, The Rough Guide to Happiness as well as What the Dog Saw And Other Adventures by Malcolm Gladwell. Will post if they are any good.
"If a speculator is correct half of the time, he is hitting a good average. Even being right 3 or 4 times out of 10 should yield a person a fortune if he has the sense to cut his losses quickly on the ventures where he has been wrong" - Bernard Baruch

Disclaimer - The author may at times own some of the stocks mentioned in this forum. All discussions are NOT to be construed as buy/sell recommendations. Readers are advised to do their own research and analysis.
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Re: Books (Nov 08 - Nov 09)

Postby millionairemind » Thu Nov 19, 2009 8:15 pm

Finished up on Dear Undercover Economist by Tim Harford. It's a collection of articles from his column in the FT, using economic theorems to explain daily enigmas. He uses layman terms to explain Prisoner's dilemma, Game Theory, rotten kid theorem etc... on the letters that comes in to FT asking him for his opinion, such as one of the following:

"Dear Economist,
My wedding anniversay is fast approaching. What should I get my wife to show her how much I love her?"

I have read 2 of his earlier works - The UnderCover Economist and The Logic of Life, both which were quite enjoyable.

Dear Undercover Economist is an OK read, nothing spectacular that will blow your mind away, unlike Freakonomics.

Incidentally, I am waiting to start on SuperFreakonomics which I am sure is going to be exciting :D

All these books are available from NLB.
"If a speculator is correct half of the time, he is hitting a good average. Even being right 3 or 4 times out of 10 should yield a person a fortune if he has the sense to cut his losses quickly on the ventures where he has been wrong" - Bernard Baruch

Disclaimer - The author may at times own some of the stocks mentioned in this forum. All discussions are NOT to be construed as buy/sell recommendations. Readers are advised to do their own research and analysis.
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