Books in June
Terry Pratchett Va-t-en guerre (Jingo)
Bought: June 2008. Read: June 2009
Terry Pratchett Le dernier continent(The Last Continent)
Bought: June 2008. Read: June 2009
Terry Pratchett Carpe Jugulum(Carpe Jugulum)
Bought: May 2009. Read: June 2009
Jim Butcher Proven Guilty
Bought: April 2007. Re-read: June 2009
Jim Butcher White Night
Bought: March 2008. Re-read: June 2009
Michael Chabon La solution finale (The Final Solution)
Bought: May 2009. Read: June 2009
Michael Chabon Les mystères de Pittsburgh (The Mysteries of Pittsburgh)
Bought: May 2009. Read: June 2009
Anne Wiazemsky Hymnes à l'amour
Bought: November 2008. Read: June 2009
Condijts J., Gerard P. & Thomas P-H. La chute de la maison Fortis
Fortis was once, before the financial crisis, the first bank of Belgium. (Think three times Belgium GDP; one third of the population was a client and it employed someone in almost every family). The crisis started at the worst possible moment for the bank; with two partners, it had just bought another bank, which was almost as big as Fortis--an operation that had taken all its resources.
The book tells the story of its fall; the management and communication mistakes, the government's attempts at saving the bank, the negotiations with other countries...
Someone said that this book read like a thriller, and it does.
You can feel the tension, even months after the fact--I remember how everyone was watching as the government went through endless nights of negotiations with other countries, other banks, so that Fortis wouldn't go bankrupt--which would have threatened the country's economy itself, especially since another big bank--the one that lends money to almost every public organization--was having problems too.
I won't pretend I understood all the technicalities. I barely understand how my credit card works, so high finance is (and will probably remain) beyond me but the authors did a good job of explaining what had happened and why and how.
It also managed to remain relatively neutral, never launching an attack against the bank's management or the government (which fell over this, though in an indirect way).
Said government was bitterly and still is criticized over this, but I've always thought (and this book comforted me in that idea) that they did the best they could. No one had ever faced such a situation, no one had ever had to save a systemic bank, and back then, we were all watching the markets crumble and wondering what was next. Even the central banks, even high-level economists, didn't have clear answers.
Very good, frightening book, that leaves me pondering their (and our) arrogance and thirst for money...
Bought: April 2009. Read: June 2009
Rudolph Hoess Le commandant d'Auschwitz parle
The auto-biography of the commandant of Auschwitz, written during and just after his trial in Poland.
It's the most revolting thing I have ever read--I think it might actually have been better if he had been a sadist, someone who took pleasure in killing people. But he wasn't--he says several times in the book that he took no pleasure in inflicting pain on others, and I can believe it. It's almost worse; he didn't care, because he had been told not to care. He didn't feel moved when a mother begged him to save her children or when a small kid went into the gas chamber still carrying a toy because he was just doing his job.
He was a petty, little man, obviously uneducated, clearly lying at several points in the book, and above all, a bureaucrat, preoccupied by his career, focused on doing his job to the best of his abilities, no matter what that job was.
To him (and, certainly, many others), Order was everything. Under other circumstances, he would certainly have been the most boring person you could imagine--but WWII and Hitler gave him the means to become one of the worst criminals humanity had ever known.
The pages where he explains how difficult it was to build a concentration camp from scratch, with no help from the people under his orders (unable to follow direction) or from his hierarchy, asking, demanding the reader's admiration and sympathy for his work, left me speechless.
And the worst of it is, at the end, it's clear that he never understood. He had been told that the old ideas on which he had built his career and his life were wrong and he had to change them, so he says several times that he knows now that what he did was wrong, but I never once felt like he actually meant it. (Which was probably to be expected, considering the effects of propaganda on the population and even more on the SS).
That's an awful book in every way, but also a necessary one. Too many people claim that there were never gas chambers in the camps, that it was all an invention from people who wanted pity and attention. Well, this is the confession of one of the people who built these chambers and was still, at the time of his death, proud of his work. Hoess lies at many times in the book trying to minimize what he knew of the situation, trying to pretend that a big fuss was created about very little, but he doesn't deny what was done in Auschwitz and the other camps.
Bought: May 2009. Read: June 2009