I came this close to missing my hands-down financial book of the year, Scott Nations’ A History of the United States in Five Crashes: Stock Market Meltdowns That Defined a Nation, on account of (a) the hyperbolic subtitle, (b) an early, unperceptive review I saw, (c) the fact that the book’s cover identifies the author as “a CNBC contributor,” which is no sort of credential to me, and (d) the seemingly dumb idea that the 2010 “Flash Crash”—which I’d always thought of as a glorified computer glitch—belonged on a par with the great crashes.
Thank goodness, I read it anyway, and discovered an incredibly rich mine of market history for the informed advisor. The five disasters covered in the book are the crashes of 1907, 1929, 1987, 2008 and the aforementioned 2010 event. In each of the first four, Mr. Nations identifies causal and contributing factors, making connections that even the most seasoned reader will find noteworthy and enlightening. His meticulous second-by-second report of the “Flash Crash,” and of the hubris that spawned it, is definitive. Indeed, it is alone worth the entire price of the book.
Mr. Nations is the author of two previous technical books for options traders. He is not a natural writer of narrative, and the book occasionally suffers from a dearth of good editing. But the breadth of his scholarship and the depth of his knowledge of modern markets are absolutely first class, and more than carry the book forward. Five Crashes will be an indispensable resource for advisors for years to come.
Two thousand seventeen also saw the publication of Ron Chernow’s long- and eagerly-awaited biography of Ulysses S. Grant. It takes its place with his Alexander Hamilton (inspiration, oddly enough, for the wildly popular musical), his George Washington, and his John D. Rockefeller pere et fils as one of the classic biographies of our time.
Grant has always been a massively misunderstood and underestimated figure, his Civil War triumphs too often written off as butchery, and his presidency—which did more than anyone’s except Lincoln’s to safeguard African-Americans—as a sinkhole of nepotism and corruption. The restoration of his reputation as a military genius and a principled (if too easily misled) chief executive began only about 15 years ago; it now reaches its apotheosis in Mr. Chernow’s magnificent biography, which is surely as close to definitive as any one-volume life will ever come.
Bankrupted near the end of his life by the Madoff of his day, and immediately thereafter stricken with throat cancer, Grant heroically set to work on his memoirs in the hope of rescuing his family’s finances. Dying in indescribable pain, he reeled off, over the course of a year, 336,000 lucid, unadorned words that comprise the greatest nonfiction American book of the 19th century and the greatest war memoir since Caesar’s. He died within days of finishing the manuscript. It has taken nearly another century and a half for him to find the biographer he always deserved.
Speaking of one-volume masterpieces: One of the many fascinating aspects of the great John Steele Gordon’s classic history of the American economy, An Empire of Wealth, is that there are so few others. (When and if there are, of course, none will compare to Gordon’s.) This year, however, came a somewhat different approach to the subject, Benjamin Waterhouse’s The Land of Enterprise: A Business History of the United States. Mr. Waterhouse, an academic at the University of North Carolina, places business at the center of our political, ideological and cultural development as a nation, rather than somewhere on its periphery. He offers a neat epigrammatic twist on Calvin Coolidge by asserting that “the chief business of American history is business,” and sets out that history in 234 spare, well-written (if occasionally dry) pages.
The Land of Enterprise could almost serve as a textbook for a two-semester introductory course, if business history were ever taught at the college level by grownups to grownups, which of course it never will be. Being the work of a mainstream academic, it is not without its mildly leftish biases, notably in its handling of the causes of the 2008-09 unpleasantness. But these are not obtrusive, and should not detract from the pleasure and genuine enlightenment the advisor will surely derive from reading it.
Until the very last moment, it wasn’t Rob O’Neill who should have come face to face with Osama bin Laden on that third floor landing in Abbottabad, and killed him. But the SEAL ahead of him on the stairs threw himself onto two screaming women who had appeared above them, for fear that they had suicide vests. This vivid moment—of instinctive, selfless heroism in support of the team and the mission—illuminates Mr. O’Neill’s intensely readable memoir, The Operator. But it isn’t so much the bin Laden or Captain Phillips missions that will stay with the reader as it is the long and harrowing account of the nightmare that is SEAL training, and how that whole experience comes down to one intensely personal issue—not “ringing the bell,” not quitting. The Operator is a great American document, to be read by all Americans.
Although its subject was the most important figure in sports in the last third of the 20th century, Jonathan Eig’s new biography of Muhammad Ali certainly oughtn’t to be dismissed as a sports biography, any more than was Mr. Eig’s excellent account of Jackie Robinson’s first season with the Brooklyn Dodgers. The book is certainly meticulous—and occasionally quite lyrical—concerning Ali’s incomparable achievements (and later disasters) in the ring. But it is his stands on civil rights and the Vietnam War—in which he refused to serve because of the dictates of his adopted religion—which elevate him to levels of tragedy and transcendence.
If Ali was in the end a terribly flawed human being, and if he allowed himself to be destroyed by the brutal sport that he once dominated, it is the intensity and courage of his convictions we remember—that, and the greatness of his art. All these disparate elements are captured in Jonathan Eig’s Ali. (Treat yourself, as well, to one of the most riveting sports documentaries of all time, When We Were Kings, about the Ali-Foreman Rumble in the Jungle.)
Every year of my life seems to bring forth at least one genuinely great book about World War II, even as we have begun to mark its 75th anniversaries (this year, perhaps most notably, the Doolittle Raid and the Battle of Midway). In 2017 my choice is Implacable Foes: War in the Pacific 1944-1945 by the scholars Waldo Heinrichs and Marc Gallicchio.
The final year of the Pacific campaign is often highly compressed in military history books. But, although America was at the zenith of its military power in that year, it was a time of horrifically mounting casualties on island after island—leading up to the ultimate invasion of the Japanese home islands. Especially after VE Day, American war weariness and the impulse to bring the boys home sapped the political will to see the war through to unconditional surrender.
If it did nothing else, this great book would serve to dispel the myth that Japan was on the brink of surrender, and would have done anything but fight to the death had atomic weapons not finally ended the war. Moreover, the authors make clear that even the direst estimates of American combat casualties in an invasion were too low. They describe in detail how the enemy knew exactly where we were coming ashore on the island of Kyushu, and had almost twice as many soldiers on the island as American intelligence assumed he would. Implacable Foes is an important contribution to our understanding of the war’s terminal phase.
For you or the Baker Street Irregular whom you love this Christmas: the Mysterious Press here in New York has published a massive cultural history of the Sherlock Holmes character from his first appearance in 1887 to the wildly post-modern Benedict Cumberbatch/Martin Freeman television episodes of today. But wait, there’s more: Mattias Bostrom’s From Holmes to Sherlock: The Story of the Men and Women Who Created an Icon is translated from the Swedish—such is the universality of love for Holmes and Watson. And what a brilliant translation (by one Michael Gallagher) it is! Conan Doyle’s building of the character has never been better told, and the peregrinations of the copyrights down through the years form virtually a novel in itself.
Moreover, the stories of all the great actors who’ve essayed Holmes on the stage, movies and TV are endlessly fascinating in their own right. My introduction was the Ronald Howard half-hour TV series, which launched in the U.S. around my 11th birthday in 1954. I took one look at “The Red-Headed League” and I’ve been a goner ever since. (And don’t neglect, this holiday season, to sit down with the family and watch the Holmes comedy Without a Clue starring Michael Caine and Ben Kingsley. It’s a howl: Conan Doyle’s last surviving daughter loved it, as will you.)
© 2017 Nick Murray. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Nick reviews current books, articles and research findings in his monthly newsletter, Nick Murray Interactive. His latest book is Around the Year with Nick Murray.