5 comments about Chasing Daylight.

1. This book is a beautiful gift from a dying man to the living. It is a reminder that life is fragile and that what we think is of utmost importance often isn't. It is rare to get this close to the feelings of the CEO of a major company. Without being sappy, the author thoughtfully shares the daily chronicle of his life from the first inkling that something is awry through choices he faced and decisions he made in treament options and their side effects. For people in the business rat race, Gene lays out the business and process of saying his goodbyes, along with realistic insights on being sick and dying and how he chose to spend the diminishing hours of light in his otherwise charmed life. Like writing his own epitaph, Gene shares glimmers of what in the end were his proudest moments. In so doing, he shows us how to create more perfect moments while we are still living.



2. Eugene O'Kelly, 53, is the CEO of the KPMG. At the height of his professional career he is diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer and has 3 months to live. O'Kelly wrote a "clinical" book about how he chose to prepare to die and shares his experience of dying. There is very little grief and rage in this book - you don't read "why me?" passages here. On the other hand, you don't get in the mind of O'Kelly or his family as to his deteriorating physical or mental condition and the challenges this presented. O'Kelly takes a "cool" accountant's approach of dealing with death including closing out his relationship ledger with 1000 of his friends and acquaintances.
   
   One of the key messages in this book is the old adage of "living every moment as if it were your last." Here's one of the memorable passages from the book: "we were all able to focus on the here and now - the staggering natural beauty around us, the amazing things. I wanted to enjoy each meal, each walk, each talk - not the future that loomed over everything, a future in which I played no physical part."
   
   And another passage from O'Kelly's wife Corrine:
   
   "when you're living your everyday life with no sword (death) dangling over you, it's easy to get lost in your own orbit, as does everyone else. When you're living an extraordinary life, however, the way we all were for that incredibly long, incredible brief season from late May through early September, you come to understand awe. You come to understand strength, commitment, love, and most important, life in a way that humbles you. It was the last thing he could do for us. In plotting out his last days the way he did, he made a dreadful experience as positive as it could be for his daughters, his wife, our family, our friends, his firm."
   
   Gene & Corrine O'Kelly's shared lessons in life (and death) are as follows:
   
   1)Face Reality (see the big picture)
   2)Simplify (acceptance: consider all aspects of your experience)
   3)Live the moment (it centers you)
   4)Recognize perfection (notice where you are in any given moment)
   5)Achieving balance (ability to be centered wherever you are)
   
   This book is the wake-up call for a high flying business people who reach the mountain top of their professional at the expense of more important things in life.



3. This is the personal story of the author, CEO of one of the Big 3 accounting firms, one of the "relevant" people in our society, who was diagnosed as terminal with less than 6 months to live. The book covers his last few months and what he did to prepare for death, both spiritually and physically, with the last chapter written by his wife. The refreshing part of this book is that Eugene O'Kelly is such an unlikely candidate, even from his own perspective, for the spiritual journey he takes in his remaining time on the planet. No more living in the future; the future is now. He finds being in the present moment even harder than running a major corporation. His transformation leads him to learn to "let go", be in the present moment, and value the consciousness of his soul above his job and ego. He learned more in three months than most people learn in a lifetime. He viewed his terminal diagnosis as a "gift". His "gift" to us is this book.



4. How often we take for granted those in our lives... or more simply, that there will even be a tomorrow. This book is a reality check on our own mortality. I personally was captivated, enlightened, and saddened all at the same time and fortunately I walked away with at least two gems that will serve me well for the rest of my days... and hopefully, that's a lot of days!



5. This book defers from other similar memoirs mainly in terms of its lack of sentimentality. It is not completely cold but the way that the author describes the process he goes through, makes you understand why he had such success career wise. He had a smooth methodological way of approaching things that enabled him to probably more quickly come to terms with his condition and deal with the matters at hand.
   
   Who would I recommend this book to?
   
   I would recommend this book to anyone who is dealing with death. As I went through the book I was constantly reminded of the time I had to deal with a close friend's passing. Up to 6 months before, I probably had an inkling that she was going away soon but I refused to face it. This book in a sense shows a way of dealing with death that is beautiful.

5 comments about Pit Bull: Lessons from Wall Street's Champion Day Trader.

1. I had to give this book 5 stars. It is so entertaining at times I was laughing and other times introspective...just like the author.
   
   Buzzy Schwartz must be considered one of the greatest traders of our time and this book is more of an autobiography than a trading manual. He never divulges his trading methodology nor how he turned from being a mediocre break even trader to the star he became.
   
   He references various indicators he uses but with no explanations and curiously credits Terry Laundry's T theory for his turnaround because " it went back to who I was as a person ". The T Theory is then left to you to figure out (Which I can't).
   
   The best thing I can say about his methodology is that it is uniquely his. All of us need to find what best fits our trading style and apply it...there is no one size fits all in trading.
   
   Towards the end of the book it becomes very clear that Buzzy has become weary of the toll that trading has taken on his life ( he wound up in the hospital and almost died) yet still can't seem to get the trading bug out of his system ( he places a trade while in the doctors office).
   
   All in all one of my favorite books, not for its trading methods but for its entertainment value.



2. As other reviewers have noted, this is not a technical "how-to" type of book. However, it gives unique insight into the psychology of someone who has succeeded in a game where in the end, psychology more than anything else divides the winners from the losers, and the losers from their money.



3. I happened upon this book in a used bookstore, and bought it on a whim. All the way thru the book (read practically in one sitting), I kept thinking of how I was reading the story of Tony Soprano in his life as a day trader! Humerous, silly, engaging, challenging, stressful, vain, self-aggrandizing, amd more. I couldn't put it down, and I doubt you will want to either!



4. I was amazed at this guy. A lot of the practices he used then works now. Buzzy should be commended for putting his life story in such a vivid tale of success and almost death. I am thankful to have read this book. It has opened me up to another way of thinking and also validated a lot of the practices I do everyday. Buzzy, where is the sequel?



5. This book pretty much tells the story of a trader named Marty Schwartz. It describes how he got started trading and evolved into what Barron's called a master trader. There was a lot of "ego" to read about and I almost stopped reading but the story got better. Instead of spending the whole book telling me how smart he was, he started talking about some trades that didn't go so well too. I actually learned from him as he described his errors and how he recovered. It helped me reduce my "pig" factor when I day trade. There was some humor in the book too which kept it fun to read.
   
   So, this book isn't a how to book but it does indirectly give you some good advice to use in your trading. Its worth reading, I enjoyed it.

5 comments about Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction.

1. During my Graduate School days, I took a course on Economic history. It was there that I was introduced to Joseph Schumpeter and his History of Economic Analysis: With a New Introduction. My reaction to it remains the same today as it was then - a masterful piece of scholarship.
   
   Thomas McCraw delivers a biography worthy of his subject. Beautifully-paced and throughly-researched, Prophet of Innovation conveys the originality and excitement of Schumpeter's life.
   
   Schumpeter's thinking underwent three subtle shifts. His Pulitizer Prize winning biographer splits his treatment into three parts to correspond to those intellectual shifts. First, Schumpeter focused on capitalism's economics. Despite his subject's love for precision, McCraw spares the reader the math.
   
   Secondly, he discusses capitalism's social structures. Finally, in a tribute to the subject's most satisfying thoughts, McCraw details its historical record.
   
   Schumpeter's life was no less fascinating than his message. McCraw weaves the two into a story that captures Schumpeter's energy and creativity. Prophet of Innovation is a biography worthy of the 20th century's finest economic thinker.



2. If you want to learn about one of the great economists of our time before you delve into his work or you simply want to expand your knowledge of Schumpeter, this is certainly the book to read.



3. This is a solid biography of the brilliant economist Joseph Schumpeter. A first rate biography should present the life, times, and significance of its subject clearly. McCraw is excellent on the life, but only good on the times and significance. Schumpeter is a very interesting figure. He had a varied and sometimes turbulent personal life. He is clearly one of the most important figures in 20th century economics. His great theme, the functioning of capitalist economies, is a central issue. With the return of a high degree of globalization over the 3 decades and the great dynamism of the business world, Schumpeter's emphasis on entrepeunership and business innovation is increasingly salient. McCraw draws on an extensive repository of Schumpeter's personal papers to produce an excellent reconstruction of Schumpeter's personal life and career. His discussions of Schumpeter's major works are very good. This book is generally written well. Schumpeter emerges as a complex but impressive and largely sympathetic figure. McCraw shows Schumpeter to be an interesting combination of brilliant intellectual and public showman. This had considerable benefits. Schumpeter was distinguished not only by his considerable scholarly contributions but also by his impressive teaching. He was apparently a brilliant lecturer and superb mentor. A remarkable fraction of the leading figures of post-WWI American economics were his former students. McCraw also does a nice job of portraying the important role of Schumpeter's third wife, the impressive Elizabeth Boody, who was a substantial economic scholar in her own right and who completed Schumpeter's last great, and posthumously published, book.
   
   McGraw's account has, however, some limitations. Schumpeter was esssentially a career academic who lived a very intellectual life. While McCraw does well in discussing Schumpeter's work, he is not nearly as good on the intellectual background and other trends in economic thought. By the end of WWII, Schumpeter's work was being eclipsed by Keynesian economics. McCraw discusses this but not in enough detail to get a really good idea of the major issues. I get the sense that this was not just a question of Schumpeter versus Keynes but also that the direction of economics towards what is now macroeconomics was something that left Schumpeter somewhat isolated. Schumpeter himself may have inadvertantly encouraged this tendency. He was an advocate of the mathematization of economics, despite his own relatively non-mathematical work. But since the type of discontinuous phenomena in which he was most interested resisted mathematization, mathematical analysis developed to analyze more continuous phenomena in what I think became macroeconomics.
   
   I'm not sure that McCraw does well on other dimensions of Schumpeter's historical background. McGraw describes Schumpeter's work in terms that suggest clearly an analogy with evolutionary processes (analogies which McGraw uses at times). The pre-WWI central Europe of Schumpeter's youth was the great period of social Darwinism. Did this have an influence? Similarly, Schumpeter's rather romantic, almost Nietzschean view of entrepeuners also seems to fit in with the intellectual life of the Fin de Siecle Europe of his youth. I'm surprised also that McGraw doesn't make much of the connection between the Austrian Empire's relative backwardness and the drift towards protectionism in the pre-WWI years. Surely these had some influence, especially given Schumpeter's interest in the dynamism of capitalism.
   
   While McGraw is generally sympathetic to Schumpeter, he is hardly uncritical. He makes the good point that Schumpeter never really understood American democracy. At times, however, McGraw may be a bit too generous. Schumpeter's criticism of the German Social Democrats as preparing the way for an authoritarian society was unfair to the only consistently pro-democratic force in Germany. McGraw is also periodically inaccurate about general background. The signers of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, for example, would have been surprised to learn that the combat of WWI had little effect of national borders.



4. Moravian-born, Vienna-educated Professor Joseph Alois Schumpeter, who liked to say of his aspirations to be the world's greatest economist, horseman, and lover that only the second had given him problems, was a study in contrasts. He relished his fame as one of the interwar years' premier economic theorists yet modestly declined to mention his work in his Harvard classes or in his exhaustive book on the history of economic thought. (Citations to his work were inserted into that book by his wife after his death). An obsessively hard working, morose (indeed often depressed) writer in private, he affected a public image of carefree, cheerful ebullience. A notoriously easy grader to his students, he often gave himself low marks in his diary. A one-time banker, he relied upon the women in his life to balance his checkbook. He chronicled the evolution of the auto industry but never learned to drive. He admired mathematics but failed to employ them in his work. A harsh critic of the static, steady-state equilibrium thinking of the neoclassical marginal utility/marginal productivity school, he nevertheless declared one of its founders, the French neoclassical equilibrium theorist Leon Walras, the greatest economist of all time.
   
   All his life Schumpeter championed capitalism yet was an expert on Marx, Marxist economics, and the entire socialist literature. A Marxist economist, Paul Sweezy, was among his closest Harvard friends. Schumpeter was a political conservative and anti-socialist who,notwithstanding, served as Finance Minister for a socialist government in post-World War I Austria. He lauded capitalism's superior performance while predicting the system's death from too much success. He preached creative destruction -- the incessant tearing down of old ways of doing things by the new -- as capitalism's inescapable iron law, yet was unprepared when his own work fell prey to it.
   
   The 1990s saw the publication of at least three biographies of this complex, paradoxical figure. Now comes Thomas McCraw's definitive and elegantly written study to top them all. Drawing upon Schumpeter's diary, correspondence, early drafts, and published works, McCraw, a Pulitzer Prize winning emeritus professor of Business History at Harvard, paints a vivid picture of Schumpeter's life and times, his loves and achievements. Readers will choose their favorite parts of the book. Most enlightening to this reviewer is McCraw's survey of Schumpeter's scholarly contributions. Ironically, McCraw writes that he is "not concerned with Schumpeter's economic thinking, narrowly construed," but with his "life and his compulsive drive to understand capitalism." But that is a false dichotomy because Schumpeter's theories cannot be divorced from his attempts to come to grips with capitalism: each guided and shaped the other. In any case, McCraw provides a perceptive and accurate account of Schumpeter's academic greatest hits and misses.
   
   Greatest Hits
   Hits include first and foremost the path breaking and seminal Theory of Economic Development, published in 1911 when Schumpeter, then 28, was in what he called his scholar's "sacred third decade" of peak creativity. Other hits followed including the subtle and provocative Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, and the mighty History of Economic Analysis, which Schumpeter worked on throughout the whole decade of the 1940s, and which was edited and published by his third wife, Elizabeth, four years after his death in 1950.
   
   Schumpeter pushed one idea all his life: that capitalism means growth and growth requires innovation. The book that put him on the map, The Theory of Economic Development, states for the first time his vision of capitalism as the economic system that delivers faster growth and higher living standards (especially of the middle and lower income classes) than any other system, albeit in a disruptive, jerky, anxiety-inducing fashion. Like a perpetual motion machine, capitalism generates its own momentum internally without the need of outside force. Even technological change, seen by some as an exogenous propellant, is treated by Schumpeter as a purely endogenous matter, the product of economically motivated human ingenuity.
   
   Breaking from received wisdom, Schumpeter replaces the static equilibrium analysis of his neoclassical marginalist predecessors and contemporaries with a dynamic disequilibrium theory of cyclical growth. His key building blocks are profits, entrepreneurs, bank credit creation, and innovation. Profits (supplemented perhaps with a desire to create a business dynasty) motivate entrepreneurs, who, financed by bank credit, innovate new goods, new technologies, and new methods of management and organization. These innovations fuel growth and generate cycles.
   
   Why cycles? Cycles arise with a backlog of pent-up potential innovations seeking to override the barriers of habit, custom, tradition, and entrenched positions blocking their realization. When the first successful entrepreneur overcomes the stubborn resistance of incumbent interests and eases the path for other entrepreneurs, the resulting bunching of innovations (not to be confused with mere inventions, which Schumpeter saw as occurring more or less continuously) boosts investment spending, which bids prices above costs and raises profit margins thereby triggering the upswing or prosperity phase of the cycle. The high profit margins then attract swarms of imitators and would-be competitors into the innovating industries. Output overexpands relative to the demand for it, prices fall to or below costs thus eliminating profit margins, and the downswing or recession phase begins. The recession continues, weeding out inefficient firms as it goes, until the economy absorbs the innovations and consolidates the attendant gains thus clearing the ground for a fresh burst of innovation.
   
   If the upswing has been accompanied with speculative excesses nonessential to innovation, the downswing may overshoot the new post-innovation equilibrium. Then the cycle enters its depression phase where the excesses are expunged and the economy returns via a recovery phase to equilibrium. Schumpeter stressed that the latter two phases and the phenomena that generate them are unnecessary for cyclical growth and could be prevented by properly designed policy. It's not speculative bubbles but rather the discontinuous clustering of innovations in time plus their diffusion across and assimilation into the economy that produces real cycles of prosperity and recession.
   
   Profits, entrepreneurs, bank credit, innovation - all are essential to the growth of per capita real income in Schumpeter's model. Remove any one and the growth process stops. Innovation, for instance, is abortive in the absence of bank credit creation necessary to effectuate it. Cash-strapped entrepreneurs cannot build their better mouse traps from thin air. They require real resource inputs and loans of newly created bank money to hire them away from alternative employments. In highlighting this observation, Schumpeter effectively abandoned the classical dichotomy notion that loan-created money is a mere sideshow, a neutral veil that together with metallic money determines the nominal, or absolute, price level while leaving real economic variables unaffected. Not so, said Schumpeter.For him, money and credit are integral to the process of real economic growth and so have real effects.
   
   Schumpeter's most popular hit was his 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. In it he coins the term "creative destruction" to denote capitalism's incessant killing off of the old by the new. The book contains his famous end-of-history prediction that capitalism's very successes, not its failures and contradictions as prophesied by Karl Marx, will produce social forces -- the routinization and depersonalization of innovation, the destruction of the image of the entrepreneur as romantic hero, the creation of a class of intellectuals hostile to capitalism -- which undermine the system and lead to its demise.
   
   If capitalism cannot survive, can one rely upon its successor, socialism, to deliver the goods and amenities of life efficiently and fairly? Yes, said Schumpeter, who proceeded to provide the supporting argument. Many readers took him at his word, but not McCraw. He sees Schumpeter's "defense" of socialism as a devastating satire that mocks the system instead of bolstering it. Schumpeter, in other words, comes not to praise socialism, but to bury it. In the end, Schumpeter's case for socialism rests on extremely abstract theoretical conditions unlikely to be realized in practice. All of which creates a problem: if Schumpeter sought to show that socialism was a practical impossibility, then why did he predict its ultimate triumph over capitalism? One wishes that the real Schumpeter would please stand up.
   
   As for democracy, Schumpeter viewed it as a political market in which politicians compete for the votes of the electorate just as producers compete for consumers' dollars in markets for goods and services. But Schumpeter, always skeptical of consumer rationality, believed that market power resides more with vote seekers than with the electorate, whose apathy, ignorance, and lack of foresight enable politicians to set the policy agenda and to manipulate voter preferences. Even so, he felt that capitalism, as long as it operates within a proper legal framework, is largely self-regulating and so requires little intervention. It thus constrains politicians' market power more than does socialism. McCraw fails to note that these ideas mark Schumpeter as a forerunner of the modern public choice school.
   
   The last hit in the Schumpeter canon is his History of Economic Analysis, whose title expresses his contention that the rise of analytic techniques in economics is part of the economic growth process and must be studied as such. The History, in terms of its scholarship, breadth of coverage, richness of content, originality of interpretation, and wealth of resurrected valuable ideas, ranks with Jacob Viner's 1937 book Studies in the Theory of International Trade as the finest history of thought ever written. Scholars still mine it for ideas today. Among other things, it provides sparkling accounts of the quantity theory, the gold standard, Say's Law, the development of production and utility functions, and much more.
   
   Greatest Misses
   Apart from an unfinished book on money, Schumpeter's misses include his massive, two volume Business Cycles (1939), which he wrote entirely by himself with no research assistance. Seven years in the making, it emerged stillborn from the press. McCraw, however, values the book for its historical narrative of the vicissitudes of firms in five industries and three countries. But Schumpeter's contemporaries saw only the book's prolixity, discursiveness, and lack of focus. Most of all, they rejected its contrived, mechanistic analytical schema composed of three superimposed cycles -- the 50-year Kondratieffs, 9-year Juglars, and 4-year Kitchins, all named for their discoverers -- into which Schumpeter forced his data. As if these flaws weren't enough to sink Business Cycles, it had the bad luck, and bad timing, to appear when J. M. Keynes' celebrated General Theory was sweeping the field. Everybody talked about Keynes' book, few about Schumpeter's.
   
   Schumpeter and Keynes
   Schumpeter fumed when Keynes and Keynesian economics upstaged him in the 1930s and 1940s. Economists preferred Keynes's theory to Schumpeter's because it seemed to offer a better explanation of and remedy for the Great Depression, because it possessed greater policy relevance, and because it was more amenable to the mathematical modeling, econometric testing, and national income accounting techniques just beginning to come into vogue in the 30s.
   
   Schumpeter should have foreseen this state of affairs. It was consistent with his doctrine of creative destruction in which new theories, like new goods and new technologies, displace the old in a never ending sequence. Here Keynes was the innovator whose analysis of capitalism rested on such novel concepts as the multiplier, marginal propensity to consume, marginal efficiency of capital, and liquidity preference function. Taken together, these Keynesian innovations were bound, according to the creative destruction doctrine, to have supplanted Schumpeter's old-fashioned theory.
   
   Instead of accepting this outcome, Schumpeter reacted exactly as he had described entrenched interests doing when threatened by an innovation that disrupts their accustomed status quo: he put up stubborn resistance. His resistance, however, was motivated not so much by simple self interest, or desire to protect his own theory, as by his scientific judgment that Keynesian economics was fundamentally unsound.
   
   Schumpeter accused Keynes of assessing capitalism on the basis of a short-run, depression-oriented model when only a long-run growth-oriented one would do. He scorned Keynes's claim that capitalistic economies tend to be perpetually underemployed and in need of massive government deficit spending to shore them up. He attacked the "secular stagnation" notion that capitalists face vanishing investment opportunities and slowing rates of technological progress when the opposite is true. He rejected the contention that income must be redistributed from the rich (who save too much) to the poor (who cannot afford to save) in order to boost consumption spending and aggregate demand. Nonsense, said Schumpeter. The insatiability of human wants ensures that income, regardless of who receives it, will be spent in one way or another.
   
   McCraw does a fine job discussing Schumpeter's criticisms, all of which were valid, penetrating, and correct. He fails, however, to note that Schumpeter essentially attacked the wrong target. For it was not so much Keynes as his British and American disciples -- people like Joan Robinson; R. F. Kahn; Abba Lerner; Schumpeter's Harvard colleague Alvin Hansen; and others -- who were largely responsible for the doctrines, especially their extreme versions, that Schumpeter countered. But McCraw rightly points out that Schumpeter slipped when he opined that the Keynesian-style permanently mixed economy, or public sector-private sector partnership, was unsustainable and could not last. The private sector, Schumpeter reasoned, would become addicted to government expenditure stimulus and demand ever-increasing amounts. In this way, the public sector would expand relative to the private one and the economy would gravitate to socialism. Time has proved Schumpeter wrong. Private and public sectors have coexisted in a fairly stable ratio in most developed countries for the past sixty years.
   
   Controversial Issues
   Schumpeter held politically unpopular opinions in the 1930s when New Deal activism and populist anti-business sentiments were on the rise. He opposed President Roosevelt's New Deal reforms on the grounds that they hampered entrepreneurship and growth. For the same reason, he opposed Keynesian macro demand-management policies designed to tame the trade cycle. In his view, because growth is inherently cyclical, one flattens the cycle at the cost of eliminating growth. Other controversial opinions, all corollaries of his work on innovation and creative destruction, flowed from his pen.
   
   Of income inequality he wrote that the gap between rich and poor is a prerequisite to and a relatively harmless byproduct of growth in a capitalistic system. The rich are necessary since it is they and not the poor who save and invest in the innovation-embodied capital formation that lifts the living standards of all. Moreover, high incomes provide both incentive and reward for the entrepreneurs who propel growth. No one need fear that an unequal distribution will condemn them to poverty. The Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto's notion of the "circulation of the elites" assures that. The ceaseless rise and fall of entrepreneurs into and out of the top income bracket means that it will be occupied over time by different people, many of them drawn from the ranks of the poor. The poor replace the rich and the rich the poor in never ending sequence.
   
   In assuming a high degree of mobility across income groups, Schumpeter may have overlooked an education barrier. He failed to acknowledge that a superior education, increasingly a prerequisite to entrepreneurship and wealth in today's high tech world, is more affordable by the rich, enabling them and their offspring to stay on top.
   
   Monopolistic firms and monopolistic profits hardly worried Schumpeter. He thought that monopolies, unless protected by government, are short lived, inherently self-destroying, and require no anti-trust legislation. Their high profits attract the very rivals and producers of substitute products that undercut them. For the same reason, he regarded anti-trust laws aimed at breaking up large, non-monopolistic firms as ill-advised. Not only are big firms often more efficient than small ones, but their research and development departments house teams of specialists functioning collectively -- and routinely -- as an entrepreneur who creates innovations that drive growth. Indeed, the very existence of R&D departments indicates that big firms realize they must continually innovate to stay alive.
   
   Schumpeter's politically unpopular opinions continued into the wartime years of the 1940s. He distrusted Roosevelt, suspecting him of trying to establish a dictatorship. And he had mixed emotions about the Axis nations, Germany and Japan. He despised their military establishments, leaders, and advisors. But he admired the people and cultures of the two countries and feared that the United States would impose punitive reprisals at war's end. Most of all, he saw the United States' wartime ally, the Soviet Union, as its chief long-term foe, and thought that it would need Germany and Japan to serve as buffers against the communist nation. These views found little sympathy among Schumpeter's friends and associates in the ultra-patriotic environment of the early 1940s, a circumstance that caused him much unhappiness.
   
   Schumpeter Today
   The new improves upon and kills off the old. True enough. But what's new and what's old may lie in the eye of the beholder. Today's cutting-edge theorist and mathematical modeler may regard Schumpeter's analysis as older than old, a pre-Keynesian, pre-monetarist, pre-new classical/rational expectations relic. Accordingly, Schumpeter's name is stricken from required reading lists in many top graduate economic programs where theory is king. To businessmen, journalists, and historians seeking not abstract theory but rather practical understanding of global capitalism, however, his work is as fresh and insightful as the day he penned it. Journalists speak of a renaissance of Schumpeterian economics and of a reversal of his relative ranking with Keynes. Although McCraw does not say so, Schumpeter undoubtedly would be pleased, but hardly surprised, by the revival of his work. It fits his description of the zigzag path of doctrinal history in which sound economic ideas get lost or forgotten only to be rediscovered and restored to their proper place.
   
   A Complaint
   A great book deserves a great index, or at the very least an adequate one. McCraw's book has neither. Lacking comprehensiveness and precision, the index creates problems for readers searching for particular items in the text. It is inexcusable that the index fails to cover the 188 pages of endnotes containing valuable scholarly information and constituting a fourth of the book. One can fault the publisher, not the author, for this oversight. Luckily, it does little to mar McCraw's outstanding text. Elizabeth Schumpeter wrote that her husband "loved to read biographies." It's a sure bet that he would have enjoyed this one.
   
   ---Thomas M. Humphrey, reviewed for the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond's Region Focus magazine, Fall 2007.



5. I thought this to be a very dynamic book that is loaded with ideas that spring from an intellect that is honest. This is a quality that is all too rare in our times. His thought process as described by McCraw seems to me to be the envy of anyone that strives to get to the bottom or truth of something. Schumpeter is brutally honest with himself and that also is a very rare thing indeed! I'm not sure just what "truth" is but think he has come as close to it as any man can.
   
   
   Brad Angell

5 comments about An American Hedge Fund: How I Made $2 Million as a Stock Operator & Created a Hedge Fund.

1. Tim's book was an unexpectedly pleasurable read. Boy makes good, the "great American dream". Refreshing in the telling (and I must say, I agree with other reviewers, it does remind me of Reminiscences of a Stock Operator), it highlights the incredible euphoria and gut wrenching lows of penny stock trading. While not a trading manual, his downfall trade of Cygnus paints a quintessential story of a newer trader's education and downfall by letting emotions/ego take over and ignore the market facts. The fact is, the market doesn't care what you think. Get over it.
   
   Tim's book is also a great read for its take behind the hedge fund curtain and market manipulation. When you finish this book you should know that the odds are stacked against you at all times, particularly as a small investor. Penny stocking is a risky business. Tim's book is the appetizer. Buy his DVD for the whole enchilada.



2. Tim's business model is simple - brutal honesty. His book, An American Hedge Fund, is just that, brutally honest. The finance industry is filled with corruption, manipulation, and arrogance of the highest degree. Tim's brutally honest story about his trading experiences (both good and bad), illustrates his character and supports his business model.
   
   An American Hedge Fund gives its readers the opportunity to ride Tim's stock-market-roller-coaster-ride where he takes $12,000 and turns into $2,000,000. That by itself is both inspiring and motivational, but the book adds another dimension which I found to be even more stimulating; Tim's introspective journey. The psychology behind trading stocks is truly fascinating and first-hand experience can be truly humbling. The life lessons Tim learns from trading stocks, which he openly shares in his book, apply to all areas of life, which the reader will either identify with or learn from.
   
   For someone who has never traded a stock in his life (me!), this book peaked my interest to learn the stock market. An American Hedge Fund will not teach you how to trade stocks or reveal secrets on how to become a millionaire. What An American Hedge Fund does give you is an honest story of how one person, Timothy Sykes, was able to defy the odds and achieve the American Dream.
   
   I've read An American Hedge Fund twice and I highly recommend this book if you have any interest in the stock market or if you're looking for an easy read that's entertaining and honest. An American Hedge Fund brings a spiritual enlightenment to finance, which is really cool.
   
   I`ve also ordered Tim's DVD (Pennystocking)and frequent his blog at [...]. I would recommend both as well. Tim's DVD is educational and his blog is honest. The short-selling strategy will only make a strong trader better and help a novice trader become successful in the markets.



3. I did enjoy reading "An American Hedge Fund" since the author is well-known in the daytrader community for turning $12K into $1.65 million when he was still in college and the story of how he did it is certainly worth the read. Timothy Sykes comes across more like a normal daytrader, as opposed to a true Wall Street insider. This makes him easier to identify with. However, this also does make the book a little less interesting since much of it just describes various penny-stock trades he did and his rationale behind them, which gets repetitive after a while. When I picked up the book, I was hoping either for material that would help improve my own trading technique, or maybe just an interesting story, but the book comes up a little short on both fronts.



4. This book is awesome!!!! You will probably finish this book very quickly, because this book is very interesting and enticing.
   
   Tim has taught me so much in this book! Tim cuts the "bullship", and teaches you lessons you will never forget. I am only 15 and recently begun playing the stock market, and thanks to this book I have avoided many beginner mistakes.
   
   This book is truly amazing, I would recommend buying it for anyone even if they're not into finance! Tim has truly inspired me and he will inspire you too!
   
   -Liam



5. Where to begin? All of the other people that have reviewed this book and given it a 1-star rating are spot on. Like everyone said, he got lucky during the dotcom bubble and doesn't know how to make money any more. I love the fact that he's obsessed with selling short while he has his hedge fund - then the arrogant prick has the audacity to blame industry regulations for this failures as a hedge fund manager. The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over again and expecting something different - according to this definition, Sykes is definitely insane. I'm sorry, but if you can't make money with $2 million USD, how is having $10 million USD going to improve your trading?
   
   More than anything, I'm angry. I normally find that I can rely on Amazon's ratings for a book, but this one was a HUGE let down. I can't believe I wasted valuable time and money on this garbage.

5 comments about My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance.

1. My life as a Quant is a truly reference guide for Serious Market Analists and Quant prospectors.



2. This is a book by one of the first people to move from Physics to Finance at a time when few physicists thought about it as a career option. It starts off around in grad school where Derman captures the elation of a new grad student at an ivy-league school working with Nobel prize winners and at the same time being intimidated at the standards that one has to meet to be accepted in that club.
   
   The postdoctoral chapters are a bit of a drag seemingly matching his life at the time. Finally, he describes his movement first to AT&T and then to Wall Street. The differences between working in academia and industry are well described.
   
   People who are looking for details on quantitative models and the like will be disappointed. While some models are described in seeming detail, the coverage of that side of things is superficial. It is a much better description of the journey from Physics to Finance and the emotional side of going over to a financial world which values everything by money from a academic world which at least seemingly, looks down on money.



3. 
   For someone interested in becoming a quant, this is a great book to read. I highly recommended it to you, as I did to many of my friends and students.



4. Very (very) shallow on technical content. Bizarre and boring anecdotes about the politics of the big investment banks. Detailed stories about uninteresting aspects of the author's life. I kept looking for some real beef, but gave up at some point.



5. I enjoyed this book very much. It's like a memoir, but focuses on his professional life. He talks about his training in physics, and how hard it is to get satisfactory (to him) employment. He switched to being a quantitative analyst on Wall Street. He talks a lot about what that really means, how the quants fit into the structure of Wall Street, and he even gets into some of the technical detail (I would have liked a bit more of that). It's well written and fun.

5 comments about Bowerman and the Men of Oregon: The Story of Oregon's Legendary Coach and Nike's Cofounder.

1. Even though I am a big track and field fan, and I even went to the NCAA National T & F Championship meet at Oregon in 1962, I never realized how big an influence Bill Bowerman was on his athletes and on the whole state of Oregon.
   
   This well-researched volume gives the reader a true understanding of Bowerman-the-man, his roots and his impact on Oregon society. It was a wonderful read and an inspiring personal journey.



2. Bowerman was one of the best XC and Track coaches in the Nation. His story is captured in this books and tells remarkable tales of his life that will live in distance runners hearts for years to come. This is a must get book and is much better than any other book even Running with the Buffalos. Dont pass this book up!!!



3. This is one of the first biographies that I could not put down. Bowerman was so much more than a running coach. This is a must read for any runner.



4. This is an invaluable read for anyone involved with coaching. The first chapters on Bowerman's ancestors also offer some insights into Oregon life in the small towns in the late 1800's early 1900's. Finally, the book is well written and easy to read. All around a worthwhile experience!



5. I knew that Bowerman coached Pre and had an influence on Nike and the jogging boom of the 70s, but Moore's biography fills in all the gaps from Medford to Mexico City. Bowerman's life reads like a case-closing defense of the Great Man theory of history, at least for track & field. His accomplishments are truly remarkable and well-rendered by Moore.

5 comments about Extraordinary Circumstances: The Journey of a Corporate Whistleblower.

1. Not a bad book, I enjoyed reading it. Sometimes she could go off on tangents and her language was at times over-simple, but her point of view and experiences were interesting to read about. Was good to read from an insider's perspective, specifically a "whistleblower's" (although she doesn't like the term), rather than what the media or directors of the company put out.



2. Cynthia Cooper is right on the mark. Being a former WorldCom Manager myself, she does a good job setting the scene for those who didn't live through it. Even if you haven't worked in telecom, you will find this interesting as to how a mega-corporation could have risen so high and fallen so low. You may wonder at times if the personalities could have possibly been that eccentric--trust me they were and then some! Great READ.



3. This book tells the story of WorldCom's rise and fail from both a human and business perspective. Cynthia does a great job capturing her emotional journey to rise to the top of WorldCom's internal audit, while at the same time explaining the events that led to her teams discovery of one of the nations largest frauds. The second half of the book is a real page turner, not unlike another famous author from Mississippi. I especially appreciate her ability to capture the human side of the story. It is easy to dismiss Bernie Ebbers and Scott Sullivan as greedy corporate titans, but the story seems to go deeper. She also captures the conflict felt by the lower-level employees who were co-opted into the fraud. Finally, she provide insight into the emotions of a whistle-blower confronted with such a significant ethical challenge.



4. COMPELLING ACCOUNT OF UNCONTROLLED GROWTH AND GREED, AND HOW A DOWN HOME GIRL WITH EXCEPTIONAL UP-BRINGING FOUND HERSELF IN A SITUATION THAT WENT AGAINST ALL HER STANDARDS.
   A VERY EASY READ.



5. Cynthia Cooper was a true corporate whistleblower. She became famous, not by choice, but because of the WorldCom financial statement fraud valued at $11 billion. She was the Vice President of Internal Audit at WorldCom, a position that was not easily obtained. She almost single-handedly created the internal audit department at WorldCom, and her book Extraordinary Circumstances: The Journey of a Corporate Whistleblower details the struggle to get management to take internal audit seriously.
   
   Things started going wrong at WorldCom very early. The company went on an acquisition spree, and the merging of many small companies, managers, and accounting systems was a disaster waiting to happen. Cynthia says that WorldCom was much better at acquiring companies than integrating them, and that is clear.
   
   From an accounting perspective, it was next to impossible to create a properly controlled system. There were too many small systems being pieced together, and it was easy for numbers and authorizations to get lost in the shuffle. This struggle is well-documented by Cynthia, who no doubt painstakingly researched the various acquisitions in order to give such a complete history.
   
   At times the book seems to get a little off-topic as Cynthia goes through each player's background briefly. Honestly, that information isn't really relevant to the story and, while it was probably intended to make these characters relatable human beings, it really just serves to make the book longer than necessary. It prolongs the process of getting to the real heart of the story.
   
   I was drawn into the parts detailing the background of Bernie Ebbers and his early entrepreneurial ventures. I don't think Cynthia came right out and said that Ebbers wasn't equipped to run WorldCom, but that's exactly how it appears when you're done reading.
   
   Where this book is so good is in detailing the fraud and how it happened. I don't think most consumers know how and where WorldCom's fraud started: all in the "line costs." You don't need an accounting background to understand the details of the fraud once Cynthia explains how things went down. Earnings were too low and management was, quite simply, looking for a place to reduce expenses.
   
   When management realized they were paying too much for capacity that they weren't selling to customers, it became clear. Take some of those "line costs" and capitalize them, which essentially amounts to moving them off the profit and loss statement (decreasing expenses and increasing profits) and onto the balance sheet (increasing assets).
   
   WorldCom moved those line costs into something that the executives called "prepaid capacity." The company's financials instantly looked better, and CFO Scott Sullivan found that this was an easy way to rehabilitate the financial statements each quarter. Wall Street wanted lots of growth, and that's exactly what the executives delivered by the time the fraudulent accounting entries were completed.
   
   Yet the process of uncovering this fraud, as Cynthia and her team would soon find out, was grueling. Their investigation into the accounting shenanigans was long because the accounting entries behind this manipulation of the financial statements were complex. Hundreds of entries were made to a variety of accounts in order to confuse anyone who might later look at them. And the investigation was hard because management didn't want Cynthia and her people looking into the entries, for obvious reasons.
   
   After the fraud became clear to Cynthia and her team, there was a long fight over whether something should or could be done about it. Scott Sullivan was determined to find an accounting rule to justify the fraudulent accounting entries. It is no surprise that there is not an accounting rule that backs up what was done, because it wasn't done with the accounting rules in mind. It was done with only Wall Street in mind.
   
   And WorldCom's audit committee wasn't completely behind the internal auditors' investigation or results. The audit committee should be the independent group of individuals to whom an employee can voice concerns and be taken seriously. Yet Cynthia didn't seem to be given as much consideration as she should have been, and she relates this struggle nicely in the book.
   
   The story of the investigation comes to life through Cynthia's words. I found myself drawn into the story, and I could feel myself sitting there as the internal auditors were going through entry after entry, always watching their backs because the executives didn't want them investigating.
   
   Lots of clichés and heartwarming stories of family interactions are woven into the book. Again, these things aren't really all that relevant to the story and merely provided a distraction from the business at hand: the collapse of WorldCom.
   
   These minor criticisms don't take away from the book as a whole. It is a detailed account of what happened, and digs much deeper into the WorldCom fraud than I ever expected. The detail behind how the fraud occurred is told in a fascinating manner, and I found myself able to picture WorldCom executives sitting around and comparing the company's financial results to the expectations of Wall Street ... and making fraudulent accounting entries to meet those expectations.
   
   Congratulations, Cynthia, on a successful first book. And many thanks for being willing to stand up for the truth and fight to expose the WorldCom fraud.

5 comments about Jack: Straight from the Gut.

1. It's hard to separate the man from the book. The book itself is little more than an account of where he went and what he did, with the rare nanosecond of self-doubt always followed by self-vindication and congratulation. He could have had his diary published and gotten much the same results.
   
   However, what he did to GE and its employees is loathsome. The unbridled avarice and lack of concern for anything but the bottom line injured thousands and likely killed hundreds. I am astounded that people hold him up as a paragon of the modern businessman.
   
   Jack Welch, Robert Allen of AT&T, Lou Gerstner of IBM are only a handful of the hundreds of greed-driven, ego-ridden businessmen who more than exemplify Gordon Gecko's motto that "Greed is good." God have mercy on their souls.



2. Jack Welch's life has been about excellence, winning....and having fun. His autobiography, "Jack: Straight From the Gut", tells how he rose from small town roots to become CEO of General Electric, arguably the greatest corporation in America and the world at the end of the 20th Century. During his life's journey, Welch accomplished more than most ever dream of. He earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering by the age of 25. During his 20 year tenure as head of GE, company revenues soared from $27 billion in 1981 to $130 billion in 2001. GE's annual growth rate averaged 18.9 percent during this period, and its stock rose a staggering 3,098 percent.
   
   Without any formal management training, Welch worked his way up from "process development specialist" in 1960 to CEO of GE in 1981. His management secret? Welch attributes his success in life and business to living the lessons his mother drilled into him during his youth. She taught him early that he had better face the facts of any tough situation if he was to succeed: "Don't kid yourself. It is the way it is." she would tell him repeatedly. "Grace Welch taught me the value of competition, just as she taught me the pleasure of winning and the need to take defeat in stride,"... "If I have any leadership style, a way of getting the best out of people, I owe it to her," Welch writes.
   
   And getting the best out of people, himself included, is what Jack Welch did best. He was such a great manager largely because he focused on bringing out the best in his employees, making GE into a "people factory". He knew that a business cannot afford to be soft-hearted when it comes to grading and rewarding, or punishing, employees based upon their performance. He knew that the value of a business is primarily the talents, skills, and knowledge of its people. Under Jack Welch, GE changed from bureaucracy to meritocracy - focused on grading its people, rewarding the best, encouraging the middle, and getting rid of the rest. As he writes: "Performance management has been part of everyone's life from the first grade. It starts in grade school with advanced placement. Differentiation applies to football teams, cheerleading squads, and honor societies....There's differentiation for all of us in our first 20 years. Why should it stop in the workplace, where most of our waking hours are spent?"
   
   Welch characterized the traits that made him successful and that he sought in others as "The Four E's": 1. Energy of personality, 2. the Enthusiasm to communicate that energy to others, 3. the Edge to make tough decisions, and 4. the Execution to see those decisions implemented. The Four E's were connected by the "Big P: Passion". Welch's integrity to this vision of employee excellence is seen repeatedly in the book when he promotes unrecognized and unrewarded employees because he saw the four E's and big P in them, where others did not. Most of these individuals went on to become successful upper managers at GE and even CEO's of other large corporations.
   
   Whether being blasted in the media as "Neutron Jack" for laying off thousands of employees while building a state-of-the-art management training center, or executing the buyout of other companies, such as RCA with its NBC network, or implementing a system to share best practices among GE companies world-wide (a concept he termed "boundaryless"), Welch dove into each project with seemingly inexhaustible passion and zeal. He brought the same dedication to implementing each company-wide program he initiated: Globalization, Growing Services, Six Sigma, and E-business. Welch loves what he created at GE. The company definitely became his baby - and he was the heart and soul of GE during his time as CEO.
   
   As an autobiography, Jack Straight from the Gut, is a pleasure to read. Welch's A-type, straight talking personality comes through, with the help of co-author John A. Byrne, in a natural, down-to-earth writing style. Jack Welch's rise from small town Irish immigrant roots to chairman of General Electric is one of the most engaging and inspiring business tales you will ever read. Welch is a late Twentieth Century version of Andrew Carnegie: rising to fame and fortune from a humble background. His life is a confirmation of the American virtues of free enterprise system, with its focus on the values of hard work, integrity, ambition and excellence. Jack Welch is a real life Ayn Rand business hero. Like Howard Roark or John Galt, he struggled across his career, and despite numerous set-backs, he ultimately rose up to create a life of great achievements. Welch sought excellence in himself and those around him. As a result, he drove GE, its thousands of employees, and the American economy to unprecedented levels of productivity and prosperity.



3. Jack Who? People who are in college at this moment might not know the name. Does that really matter? No!
   
   This book is about Jack Welch and his amazing story up the ladder of corporate America. It teaches us about guts, hard work and true dedication. It actually reads like 'Once upon a time in America' featuring Robert de Niro.
   
   As Jack begins his journey with childhood memories, it shows how anyone can achieve great things and have an amazing career. It features hard work and some luck, but most of all the book shows there are no shortcuts. As so many books tell you how you can get that promotion as fast as possible, this story shows no 'dot-com millionaire' or 'america's next top model'. These are all longshots.
   
   If you value a career and are ready to learn from someone who's been there and done that, grab your copy. When you want to succeed in business, it'll take more than just a fancy website... it'll take a lot of guts.



4. It's very interesting, entertaining and fun to read the autobiography of Jack Welch, the CEO icon of the 80's and 90's. He's very direct, honest and detailed on his professional life while touching sometimes on his personal one. He explains how hard work, wit and a mix of luck made him the man he has become. It's full of General Electric episodes - the good and the bad - which makes it a very compelling read. I highly recommend it.



5. I've met Jack Welch in Pasadena few weeks after the book came out. Jack Welch just confirmed his keen intellect," tough" guy fame but he discussed with passion about Six Sigma, one of initiatives he championed together with globalization and e-business. This book though is not the textbook on Welch Style of Management but is a good inside in some of his thinking and approaches. This book is for those who want to listen to what he wants to say.

3 comments about Sneaker Wars: The Enemy Brothers Who Founded Adidas and Puma and the Family Feud That Forever Changed the Business of Sport.

1. Between the pages of this book lie the family saga of two brothers who ended up being torn apart due to war, personality and family. There is not really a happy ending although there is reconciliation among the posterity. Developing a better shoe and running a company are not necessarily the same thing as the players find out in this biography of two major shoe giant companies: Adidas and Puma. Although the book was good, it felt tedious and drawn out in place. I'm sure the author was trying to make sure that all the major players were included but maybe some of them should have been left out in the editing process. This was an interesting read into the world of sports and the attire accompanying the players and teams. Look for everyone from the soccer great Pele' to David Beckham and Joe Montana. I did appreciate the thoroughness that the author devoted to this work.



2. the book was in great condition and I am enjoying reading it! Thank you so much!



3. Most fascinating account of a family and the business that they started in a small community that reached such great heights. Especially interesting to me, because of a few day's visit to the German town of Herzogenaurach and nearby Army Base in Bavaria, several years ago.

5 comments about Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed.

1. You can't put this book down ... one of those ones that you end up reading until 3am.
   You can see by the way this book was written i.e. logical, pragmatic, practical, humourous ... what the inhabitants of the skunkworks are really like, and why the organisation was/is so effective.
   Thoroughly recommend this book to anyone.



2. Why can't Hollywood make a movie out of this? Wait, I take it back. They'd probably turn the Rich and Kelly relationship into an affair, and throw in some cliche ridiculousness about how white, rich guys are evil.
   
   That being said, WHAT A GREAT BOOK! This is wonderful tale of how a group of men with wonderful leadership did what it took to be the best while ignoring all the bureaucratic roadblocks. They really show what it takes to be on the cutting edge. On time, below budget, and meeting specifications. Some do their best to imitate the Skunk Works model, but few understand the philosophy of this men: rational egoism.



3. If you like information on this subject (jets, stealth, SR71)then this book is for you. I couldn't put this book down because I was facinated by the content, engrossed by the narrative, and just totally sucked in. Formerly Top Secret projects and happenings are revealed in such a entertaining and non technical way, that anyone can understand and enjoy this entire book. Also, this book has great insights into innovation and business management. I really think this is the best book I've ever read, and I'm buying a copy for my boss.



4. This book is very much of its time, and has to be regarded as such. I was forced to read this for work by an over zealous client. I gritted my teeth to the end. Yes, on one level it is fascinating as a piece of history. Even I quite enjoyed the history of the U2 and Blackbird, which I vaguely remember from newspapers in my youth. But as a chronicle of social mores, it made my toes curl. Unfortunately, as a female of mid years clinging to the corporate ladder, I still remember when the kind of casual misogeny portrayed here was the norm not the exception. Can't say I miss 'the good 'ol days' one bit. The interchangeable wives and sophomoric giggling over the pin ups?
   
   It isn't even very well written.
   
   I have to read 'Patton on Leadership' next. Time to look for a new job maybe?



5. This book is based as an (auto)biography of Ben Rich the boss of the legendary Lockheed "Skunkworks". It is a lot more than that however with an overview of secret 'black-ops' of the cold war period. The development of the U2 and SR-71 as well as an in depth introduction to the F117 Stealth fighter make this a must have book for the technophile. But it is more than that, there are great snippets from 'other voices' such as engineers, pilots and even the military have their say about the Skunk works and in particular its enigmatic founder Clarence "Kelly" Johnson.
   
   This book does not have a lot of personal details about Ben Rich but concentrates on the three main aircraft that the Skunk works are famous for and allows an insight to military-private sector relationships that is hard to find in other books.
   
   My only criticism is the end chapter on how to make things better for the industry which seems a little 'tacked on' to try and give the book a point and this could have been done throughout the previous chapters in a better constructed manner.
   
   Apart from that it is a good book and due to the co-authorship of Leo Janos (who co-wrote the Chuck Yaeger autobiography) it is very readable and an interesting addition to military history of the cold war.