In February 1952, a large northeaster swiftly swept across New England. The raging storm brought winds exceeding 70 knots and seas larger than 60 feet off Cape Cod. This was not a good time to be out on the water. The Fort Mercer and the Pendleton, two tankers from World War II were in the area. Both ships literally split in half, with crew alive on both  of the forward and aft sections.

A distress call went out and the Coast Guard responded with numerous cutters, aircraft, and two boats. Bernard Webber, a coxswain out of Chatham, MA, launched with 3 other crew on a 36 ft boat, and despite losing his compass when crossing the harbor bar, managed to find the stern of the Pendleton. In a dramatic rescue worthy of the upcoming movie (coming out this spring), his boat saved 33 sailors and safely returned to harbor. This truly is one of the most daring and heroic, not to mention largest, rescues in the history of the Coast Guard.

Webber’s stories, and the other dramatic rescues and actions that were taking during that violent storm, are chronicled in The Finest Hours by Michael Tougias and Casey Sherman. I will leave the details of the story for you to read, but there are a few things that stuck out for me in this book. First, these men risked their lives, in conditions that are rougher than anything I have ever seen at sea, and managed to come back with many of the sailors from the two tankers. They are heroes.

Second, the book is a glimpse into what life was like 60 years ago in the Service. There are plenty of history books about the Coast Guard in general, but few delve into what life was like and how the Coast Guard operated at the tactical level like this. For me, learning about those who have gone before and how they operated was pretty amazing. Many things have changed – but even more things have stayed the same. We still get underway on our ships and save lives and even use some of the same techniques that Webber and the others in this book attempted. One of the cutters that responded to the Fort Mercer, the Acushnet, was still in service until just a few years ago.

The book also shows respect for how mariners, both in the commercial fleet and in the Coast Guard, really knew their ships and the sea. Maneuvering a large vessel (or a small boat) alongside another ship is never easy, and can be extremely difficult in rough seas (much less 70 feet of swells and waves). Webber managed to get his boat close enough to load 33 people onboard from a Jacob’s ladder without damaging his boat alongside the larger vessel. The skipper of the Acushnet literally brought his ship under the arch of the aft section of the Fort Mercer so that sailors could jump onto his stern.

Finally – I learned what a foreflusher was. You should look it up.

Score: 10. These men were heroes and their story is a quick read. I hope the movie is equally good, and equally faithful to the truth.

The Martian is a nerd’s fantasy of actual, real, hard science imbedded in humor inside a good science fiction novel. Being a nerd, I felt the book was that good. I didn’t want to turn off my iphone – I just wanted to keep listening and find out what happened to Mark Watney and how he was finally going to get home.

For those of you who missed all the recent movie trailers, The Martian is the story of a mission to Mars. Six days into the mission, the group of astronauts is forced to evacuate their shelter. Through a tragic accident, one astronaut is left behind. Alone. On Mars. By himself. With extremely limited resources. That is a bad day. Think Robinson Crusoe, but without the food, air, nature, and our man Friday.

Fortunately, our author, Andy Weir, imbued our intrepid and resourceful astronaut, Mark Watney, with a rather pithy sense of humor. He keeps his (and our) spirits up as he narrates his daily logs. As he copes with numerous problems – everything from growing food, to making water, to developing methods of communications with Earth, to navigating around a giant dust storm – he explains the science in an enjoyable and slightly sarcastic way. Readers should be warned – this is deep science fiction, with a heavy emphasis on the technical and real science. But the humor and the human struggle make it fun. He even gets around to explaining international maritime law along the way – something that made the sailor in me smile.

On the other hand, the book definitely has a human touch to it as well. My favorite chapter was when Watney dictated letters to the astronauts that left him behind. These letters – with Watney obviously not knowing if he would live or die – show the close bonds that a small group of friends can develop when deployed together for an extensive period of time. Moments like this helped make the book flow. Its combination of technical accuracy and human struggle were spot on.

I did read the book in preparation for watching the recent Matt Damon movie. The movie was fun, but it definitely did not capture the full depth of the scientific rigor that Weir put into his writing. I much preferred the book. Score: 9.0.

I care deeply about the ocean, its wellbeing, and that of the creatures living in it. Having spent more than seven years of my life as a sailor at sea, I feel strongly about the need for healthy oceans. But I am no environmentalist. I am not an expert on marine life or ocean systems. This is why I decided to listen to Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins by Susan Casey. I was hoping I could learn a little bit more – I definitely did.

Casey opens the book with a story of swimming alone at night in a Hawaiian bay. A pod of dolphins join her, and she has an existential experience that leads her to research, study, and almost obsess over their world. Casey plunges head first into the world of dolphins and how humans interact with them. While she tries to avoid “falling down the rabbit hole, a place you can easily go with dolphins…[her] most enduring impression was how other-worldly the animals were.” Through most of the book, she is rather one-sided, coming down on the side of the dolphins and chastising mankind for mistreating them. But along the way, she definitely provides a plethora of evidence that they are highly evolved and extremely intelligent

For example, Casey visits a slew of marine parks similar to Seaworld and vividly describes how they both deceive the public by stating that dolphins (and their cousins, Orcas) enjoy being in captivity and how they mistreat the animals. She compares their containment in large pools to prison, and explains how the animals typically perform “a sequence of tricks – none of which [seem] to engage them even slightly, and all of which [seem], if you think about it, depressingly dumb.” She highlights numerous accidents that have taken place at parks, including the history of Tilikum, an Orca that has killed three people during his 33 years in captivity and was the subject of the documentary Blackfish (while there has never been a documented case of an Orca killing a person in the wild).

Casey spends a fair portion of the book visiting with environmentalists and scientists who are both studying and trying to help dolphins, and are proving just how smart these animals are. She reviews experiments which show that dolphins, unlike most animals in nature, can recognize themselves in a mirror and conceive of their own identity. She shows that they can identify their own body parts; realize TV is a representation of reality; remember a variety of movements, people, and ideas; and masterfully mimic their trainers. She also excoriates scientists such as John Lilly, who experimented with LSD, dolphins, and “interspecies mating.” But at the same time, she visits new age communities and gives credibility to their beliefs that “dolphins are not mere animals; they are beings from another dimension. Visitors from far away stars. Wise elders here to teach us vital lessons.” The communities seem to “see these animals not as a scientific challenge…but as one great big existential riddle.”

The book’s lack of objectivity is later exemplified when she severely criticizes the US Navy. She provides documentation and evidence that shows that mid and low frequency sonar, used by the Navy to detect enemy vessels underwater, damages underwater life and may be leading to mass strandings of dolphins and whales. But she absolutely seems to give more credence to the hippies who believe dolphins are from outer space and literally pray to these animals than to the US Navy and their bureaucratic processes and explanations. As someone who has experienced bureaucracy, and knows it is not all bad, and has worked alongside the Navy, this is frustrating. At the same time, her evidence of the damage undersea noise can wreck upon dolphins is fairly strong.

While I was listening to this book, I felt like Casey did get sucked down the rabbit hole she was trying to avoid. The book could have been strengthened with a little more perspective, questioning the movements that see dolphins as gods and spirit guides a little more and giving some sense of fairness to the government. But in the end, she realizes that “despite the vast difference between our two species, possibly the most startling thing about dolphins is how inexplicably they resemble us.”  This made me want to go swim with dolphins – but only in the ocean. I probably won’t be visiting a marine park anytime soon. Score: 6.5.

Side Note: This dolphin video is awesome. So is this one.  They are basically just like cat videos.

Salt. It pervades the entire world. It is the only rock we eat. It has served as currency, influenced trade, led to wars, and regularly helps us keep our roads free of ice. Homer called it “a divine substance.” It was often associated with fertility in the ancient world, with the roman word for a man in love being salax, which means in a salted stated, and is the origin of the word salacious. Supposedly, demons and evil spirits detest salt. In the book of Genesis, Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt when she looked back as the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed. Most importantly, salt is required for us to live: “an adult human being contains about 250 grams of salt, which would fill three or four salt shakers, but is constantly losing it through bodily functions. It is essential to replace this lost salt.” Mark Kurlansky, a writer who often examines our food – his most famous book is a biography of Cod – delves into this story in Salt: A World History.

Kurlansky tries to make this book an all-encompassing review of salt. He bounces from biology (why do mammals need salt) to extraction (where does salt come from) to history (how has salt influenced history and culture) to uses (what other types of salt exist beyond what is on our table and how do we use them) to how we eat salt (with a large selection of historical and modern recipes interspersed throughout the text). This leads to Kurlansky’s problem – how do you organize an all-encompassing book with such a range of diverse subjects. He seems to be trying to make the point that history itself is organized around the story of salt, but he never really addresses the counterarguments and the other causes of numerous historical events (such as when he claims one of the major reasons for the fall of the South during the civil war was the lack of salt production). He admirably tries to make the story flow, but to me, it really didn’t. I thoroughly enjoyed the historical tributes to salt and how it had played such a key role in history, but I was so bogged down by all the recipes along the way that I often wanted to put the book back on the shelf (I did actually read this one instead of listening to it on my iphone – it felt good to have a real book in my hands while I was recovering on the couch from a recent surgery).

The story starts with the ancient Chinese and progresses through to the use of salt domes to store the US Strategic Petroleum Reserves and how modern science assesses the amount of salt we should consume on a daily basis. Along the way, you learn that salting meat, and thus preserving it, was one of the major industries of the entire world until freezing food came along, and drove trade and commerce around the globe. My favorite historical chapter was on Gandhi, and how he used a famous ‘Salt March’ to protest the British rule of India in 1930. The British had a monopoly on salt manufacturing, and then taxed its sale heavily. Gandhi led a 240 mile march to the shorelines near the village of Dandi, where he boiled salty mud in seawater and produced his own salt. He them proclaimed “With this, I am shaking the foundations of the British Empire.” The march helped marshal Indian support against the British while also leading foreign governments, including America, to sympathize with the Indians.

I really wanted to enjoy this book. I love the smell of a salt spray in the air and the feel of salt on my face when near the coast or out to sea. You can tell that Kurlansky is enthusiastic about his subject and enjoyed his research travels around the work (he even mentions the Coast Guard when he visits the Bahamas), but the book just seems too disorganized and haphazard for me. Score: 4.0 (if it had been less, I probably would have set it aside along the way and never finished it).

During the financial crisis of 2007-08, the US stock market lost more than half of its value and unemployment in America roughly doubled, to more than 10%. This was, to put it mildly, a rough time. According to a class I took on American Economic Policy this past Spring, the primary causes of the crisis were a huge increase in leverage (ie. people and companies borrowing too much money) and an under-pricing of risk (with high risk assets, including houses, stocks, loans, real estate and bonds all being bid up in price in a search for returns). One of the most significant  parts – possibly the most significant part of this economic disaster was the eventual collapse in housing prices and how this spiraled outward into the financial system.

Michael Lewis, a former Wall Street bond trader, renowned financial journalist, and author of the seminal study of 1980’s finance, Liar’s Poker, captures the history of the housing disaster in his recent book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. Interestingly, he does not simply relate the facts and figures and causes of everything that happened – rather he explores the events that led up to the crisis through the frame of those that saw the bubble forming and found ways to bet against it. In short (pun intended), he profiles the folks who figured out that the housing market was built on a house of cards (again, pun intended), and then made boatloads (aka billions and billions) of money by betting that the housing market and the American economy would collapse.

The financial crisis was immensely complicated. Huge sums of money were flying around at lightning-fast speeds. Lewis does an admirable job of breaking down the complexity of how many of these trades work and slipping past the Wall Street jargon and acronyms so that, for the most part, a layman can follow the narrative and understand what happened. This is probably one of the best reasons to read the book – it really helped me grasp the housing crisis in a much more nuanced manner.*

Quick primer on what happened here (for a better and deeper understanding, reading the book will definitely help**): In the late 1990’s and the early 2000’s, housing prices skyrocketed and lending standards decreased (American housing prices jumped almost 125% from 1998 to 2006). People were able to buy homes with far less money down, or even to take a second loan out to cover their down-payments. Lending companies further decreased their lending standards and began to target potential home-buyers who typically did not have the credit history or income that made them eligible for a home loan – these loans are known as sub-prime loans (sub-prime lending rose from $30 billion/yr in the 1990’s to $625 billion/yr in 2005). At the same time, there was a massive amount of liquidity in the market that led to available money that could be lent out to buyers, especially as institutions reached for returns (this was potentially caused by both extremely low interest rates in the 2000’s and a large current account deficit). Basically, institutions had a lot of money that they wanted to invest in safe assets that gave out a good return. They were willing to invest in the American housing market. This drove mortgage lenders to make more and more loans.

The loans that were being made became increasingly complex. Lenders would create adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) that would have a low fixed initial rate for the first year or three, and then the interest rate on these loans would dramatically change to a standard index measure of interest (such as the FED Funds rate – the interest rate at which banks borrow from the Federal Reserve) plus a fixed margin set by the lender (because the initial rate was so low, after the adjustment period, the new combined rate from the index and the margin was often much larger). As the FED Funds rate rose during 2004 through 2006, the amounts mortgage borrowers had to pay each month rose dramatically. As Lewis puts it, “Even more shocking was that the terms of the loans were changing, in ways that increased the likelihood that they would go bad. Back in 1996, 65% of sub-prime loans had been fixed rate, meaning that typical subprime borrowers might be getting screwed, but at least they knew for sure how much they owed each month until they paid off the loan. By 2005, 75% of loans were some form of floating rate.” Furthermore, buyers of sub-prime ARMs often did not understand that their rates would sky rocket, and had no way to pay off the new interest levels due to their low incomes. Lewis cites a multitude of cases as examples, such as the Mexican immigrant who picked strawberries as a day laborer, and received a $750,000 loan with just $15,000 in annual income.

Some people were able to buy multiple properties, such as the Las Vegas adult entertainer that Lewis interviews, who owned five different investment properties. The people were betting on the property values to rise and being able to sell them off before the ARMs came into effect, thus making profits along the way. This worked out really well, so long as the property could be sold while the buyer was still paying the initial low rate and not after he started paying the much higher rate of the index plus the margin. (Side note: I remember a few of my friends in the military in the 2000’s, moving into a new location, buying houses, and selling them two or three years later when they moved on to a new duty station. Many of my friends made huge profits – if they timed the market right. But if they didn’t sell before the crisis hit – well, many of them are still paying off those homes). The combination of people buying more investment properties, an increase in lending to sub-prime borrowers, and low interest rates all drove the rise in housing prices.

Investment banks (like Goldman Sachs) would then buy up a slew of mortgages from lenders. What they were really buying “was a claim on the cash flows from a pool of thousands of individual home mortgages.” These mortgages would be bundled together and then sliced up and sold as mortgage backed securities (MBSs). A buyer of an MBS would then receive interest on this bond – a little tiny piece of the amount that hundreds or thousands of homeowners would be paying to the holders of their mortgages. As long as they considered these MBSs safe assets and places to store their money, numerous companies, banks, and other institutions would buy them up and use them to hold excess liquidity while earning a decent return along the way. The MBS market grew rapidly – by 2005, of the $625 billion of sub-prime loans made, $507 billion were packaged and sold as MBSs.

However, sub-prime owners had mortgages that were far riskier to own than regular prime home owners. So investment banks would ‘tranche’ out the sub-prime MBSs. These sub-prime MBSs had very low credit ratings due to their high risk, and thus companies did not want to buy them as a place to store their extra liquidity. Imagine you have an MBS made up of 100 sub-prime loans. If you can rank these loans by riskiness, you can then re-divide the pile into new a new type of MBS, based upon which loans are riskiest. The new MBS is now called a Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO) – but it is simply a repackaged pools of assets (in this case mortgages, but CDOs can be made on other assets), with various tranches based upon differing risk levels. You can then sell off this CDO in chunks based upon risk. So you divide the CDO into five tranches, and sell each tranche as a bond with a different rate of return.*** You tell the institutional buyers that the bottom tranche (the worst of the new CDO) will pay far higher returns because it contains the first 20 loans that will go bad. But the next four tranches of the CDO will pay far lower returns as they are safer, because you feel there is a very low risk that more than 20 out of the 100 original sub-prime loans will default.

This is exactly how investment banks divided up CDOs into various tranches of risk, and then sent them to rating agencies, such as Moody’s or Standard & Poor’s. The Rating Agencies would obviously give the bottom tranche of the CDO a low rating, but eagerly gave much higher ratings to the upper tranches, despite them containing sub-prime mortgages that were likely to default. And they did default. Companies who had purchased the upper tranches based upon their safe ratings (often AAA ratings) saw them as an easy and safe way to store money, and also earn a better return than other safe investments. But they were not safe. Despite the inherent diversification of the CDO tranches (they might contain mortgages from all over America), they were still correlated in that a downward turn in the economy would cause many, many subprime borrowers to default. It was an “illusion of security.”

The illusion eventually shattered. As housing prices stopped rising, home buyers could no longer sell their houses for a profit and ended up being stuck with huge bills and rising interest rates. They often had to default. Companies that had bought CDO tranches, thinking they were safe, where dumbstruck when they realized their investment dollars were disappearing as home buyers across the country defaulted. But no one really seemed to know how exposed they were to the risk, because institutions were not exactly sure what was in their CDOs, leading to massive panic on Wall Street and huge fire-sales and other dramatic economic swings. The entire system seemed to fall apart as giant behemoths like Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, and others collapsed.

Throughout the book, Lewis explains that “the problem was the system of incentives that channeled the greed” of Wall Street bankers and investors. Lenders were incentivized to lend to everyone, but not to worry about if borrowers could pay them back because they would sell off the mortgage. Raters were incentivized to rate as many CDOs as possible as safe (with a AAA rating) because they were paid by the bond sellers to rate them, and they wanted the CDOs to be considered safe. Investment banks were incentivized to bundle together as many mortgages as possible and create incredibly complicated instruments with them – because they collected large fees at every step of the process and the more complicated the instrument, the larger the fee.

Lewis dryly notes that “the catastrophe was foreseeable, yet only a handful noticed.” By setting his book through the eyes of those that did see the disaster coming – who realized that the entire housing market seemed to be based upon a simple “bet that home prices would never fall,” he adds a human element and personality to this complicated story. He tells the stories of David Eisman who realized there were big problems in the sub-prime market in the mid-1990s; Michael Burry, who came to grips with his own Asperger’s syndrome by reading sub-prime contracts and seeing the market holes through his glass eye; and Charlie Ledley with Cornwall Capital, who seems to just fall into the trade of a lifetime by happenstance. All three men were able to buy Credit Default Swaps (CDSs) – basically insurance on a CDO. If the CDO went belly up, the owners of the CDS would get paid. But they were not buying insurance on their own property; instead they were buying insurance on something they knew would collapse. Lewis compares it to buying fire insurance on a house that you do not own, that is already on fire.

There is a lot more complication in explaining how the housing crisis took place and how a few people made a ton of money off of it. Lewis even seems to realize this difficulty in his conclusion, when he writes that the crisis is “hard to explain. How do you explain to an innocent citizen of the free world the importance of a credit default swap on the AA tranche of a subprime backed collateralized debt obligation?” But this review is already approaching 2000 words, so I am going to try and stop here and leave further explanation to Wikipedia and a strong endorsement of this and other books.

The Big Short is a good book about an important topic – about how one of the greatest financial disasters in history was caused, how our system allowed it to happen, and how only a few saw it coming. Lewis really does break it down into plain English in a way that most of us can understand. I wish he had more thoroughly analyzed how the government responded to the crisis and new innovative ways to fix the market and prevent future disasters, but the book was written as the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was still being drafted, and it really does not delve into how to create potential solutions. Overall – definitely worth a read. Score: 8.0.****

* An even better and more comprehensive book I read that really helped me understand the great recession (ie. the financial crisis of 07/08 and the ensuing recession) was After the Music Stopped by Alan Blinder, a Princeton economic professor.

** I apologize for the over-generalization and simplification – and if I get any of the nuance here wrong.

*** I love this diagram the IMF put together on how a subprime mortgage system works.

**** Also I apologize for not writing anything for almost 2.5 months. I moved to a new job and have been getting adjusted to the Washington DC area, and life has kept me rather busy.

When I think of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, I remember, rather fondly, the 1995 one-hit-wonder song by Deep Blue Something. It brings back a nostalgic wave of high school friends and good memories. A few years ago, while scrolling through Netflix, I came upon the 1961 movie the song refers to, with Audrey Hepburn and a young George Peppard (for me, Peppard will always be Hannibal Smith from the A-team). I think I made it through half of the movie before falling asleep on the couch and never picking it back up. But earlier this year, Audible.com had a book sale, and there was Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a short novella by Truman Capote. I never even knew the movie was based on a book, but based on the strength of my nostalgia for the song, I bought it.

The story follows a writer who lives in the same building as, and then falls in love with Holly Golightly, a glamorous phony, who “isn’t a real phony because she believes she’s a real phony.” Holly is a former country-girl who ran away from home, ran away from Hollywood, and knows that it is tacky to wear diamonds before the age of 40. When I picture her in my mind, based on the books exquisite descriptions, she really does seem to look like a young Audrey Hepburn. She survives by befriending various men and having them pay her bills; she seems to attract people with a sense of inner charm and reality. But all she really wants is to simply find a home, a place “where [she] and things belong together…a real life place that [makes her] feel like Tiffany’s.” She has a cat living with her, but refuses to take ownership of the cat or give it a name – because they just “took up by the river one day” and they simply don’t seem to belong together.

The funny thing about Holly is that she sees herself for who she is. In that sense, she is completely genuine. She knows exactly how she comes across to others – she even warns them to stay away, telling her bartender:

“Never love a wild thing Mr. Bell….You can’t give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they’re strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That’s how you end up Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You’ll end up looking at the sky.”

After a variety of travails set in, she does run to the woods (well, the jungles of Brazil). On the way to the airport to flee the country, she tosses out the cat, ready to go find her own Tiffany’s. But then she realizes she and the cat are the same – that they did belong to each other. She hops out of the limo and runs back for him, but the cat has disappeared. And finally, her aura, her shell, her sense of self breaks down and she becomes real.

When I finished the book, I sighed, smiled, and felt content. The cat does find a home in the end. Maybe Holly did too. Maybe we all can one day. Score – 9.0. Nostalgia and one-hit-wonders. I should make time to finish the movie.

In April 2010, methane gas within the drilling riser of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig rose up the drilling riser, ignited, exploded, and engulfed the platform. Eleven of the 126 crew members onboard died in the ensuing chaos. The drilling rig sank two days later. Over the next 87 days, 4.9 million barrels of oil gushed from the ocean floor into the Gulf of Mexico.

Carl Safina, a university professor and “professional environmentalist and conservationist” spent much of the summer visiting the Gulf coast and learning about the spill and the people it affected. He chronicled his thoughts in A Sea in Flames: The Deepwater Horizon Oil Blowout, published just a year after the spill took place. I also spent much of the summer of 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico. The Coast Guard deployed me to the command post in Houma, Louisiana to help coordinate local government relations for two months. I read this book because I wanted to learn more about the oil spill – I wanted to understand how the public saw and experienced the disaster. This is exactly what Safina provides.

The book is divided into 3 different sections. It starts with a detailed play-by-play of the chain of errors that led to the blowout on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. Numerous elements in the safety scheme failed – and had just one succeeded or been caught, it is likely the explosion could have been prevented. Audio alarms were shut off before incident because they tended to go off far too often. No one was watching flow meter readings for a critical 15 minute period leading up to the explosion, when abnormal flow rates were present. Misinterpretations of negative pressure tests, replacement of heavy drilling fluid with seawater, spacers being improperly aligned – I do not fully understand the engineering behind these items (though Safina does an admirable job explaining much in ways the layman can understand). This chain of errors led up to the incident, and could have been broken anywhere along the way. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Safina places the blame squarely on a push for speed and a desire to rapidly get the job done, without enough attention paid to safety.

The second section of the book, by far the longest, details Safina’s travels through the Gulf region. He visits with fishermen who can’t fish, store owners with few buyers, restaurants with no seafood to sell, empty hotels, and more. He criticizes the response effort, let by Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen (Safina continually refers to him as the “Thadmiral”). He denigrates BP and their corporate culture. He excoriates lawmakers for reducing regulatory budgets and “[slashing] those annoying safety regs.” Eleven people died, and millions of lives were affected by the oil spill. Safina admirably puts a human face on these people. He tries to provide a voice for the affected wildlife and the oceans.

However, Safina’s writing comes off as one sided. He rarely tries to understand the response efforts made by the government or the oil industry. Some of the strongest parts of the book are when he does look deeper and push past rhetoric. For example, he examines some of the more zany conspiracy theories, such as the loop current pushing oil to the shores of Ireland, the threat of global crop failure in 2011, the looming menace of tsunamis in the Gulf, or the use of nuclear weapons to close the well-head, and states:

“I’m really angry about the recklessness that caused this, and the inanity of the response; I am deeply distressed about the potential damage to wildlife and habitats – but I find myself becoming uncomfortable with all the catastrophizing…Many scientists – and as a scientist it hurts to say this – are being a little shrill. Cool heads are not prevailing.”

Along the way, Safina covers the history of oil spills in America and the world, and how laws, regulations, and response technologies have evolved. This history is worthwhile, and shows how large disasters like this can lead to strong, positive legislation. The 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill led to the creation of Earth Day and paved the way for the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, and more. The Exxon Valdez oil spill directly resulted in the passage of the Oil Pollution Act of 1990.

The third section of the book details a cup of coffee Safina had with ADM Allen and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Administrator Dr. Jane Lubchenco, two government officials he has spent two hundred pages repudiating. During this conversation, Safina is surprised to find both officials revealing, transparent, and caring, and begins to realize that his “summer-long simmering mental caricature of [Allen] was off base.” Safina admirably puts aside many of his assumptions as listens to the other side of the story. For example, ADM Allen explains that he restricted air space over the well-head not because of a desire to limit media access, but because there were eight near collisions in the air early on during the response. Their conversation is wide ranging, and both Allen and Lubchenco admit that the work is not done, and that mistakes were made along the way. But by the end of the book, Safina shows that they are both competent and strong leaders.

Safina ends the book by discussing what, in his mind, is a far greater disaster. He states:

“the worst environmental disaster in history isn’t the oil that got away. The real catastrophe is the oil we don’t spill…It’s the oil we burn, the coal we burn, the gas we burn…That spill is changing the atmosphere, changing the world’s climate, altering the heat balance of the whole planet, destroying the world’s polar system, killing the wildlife of icy seas, killing the tropic’s coral reefs, raising the level of the sea, turning the oceans acidic, and dissolving shellfish.”

He paints a bleak and grim picture, and excoriates all of us for not doing more and pushing harder to stem the tide of global warming. I wish he had explained the science behind this clarion call in a deeper manner, but his passion is evident and his desire for change is obviously strong.

A note on style: Safina writes much of the book in a disparate, almost stream-of-consciousness way. He jumps from one small incident or visit to an unrelated interview to a discussion of regulatory history, almost in a haphazard manner. This made following the narrative difficult, but at the same time, I think it also helped show the chaos that Safina and many people in the Gulf states felt that summer.

Score: 6.5 – I left with a much stronger feeling of empathy for the people of the Gulf and better understanding of the region’s environment, but I wish Safina had been a little more rounded for the sake of other readers.

I just finished an opus. After writing that sentence, I had to look up what an opus actually is – I definitely used the word incorrectly. An opus is a musical composition or set of compositions usually numbered in the order of issue. It is not a very long novel that defines an author’s life or work, which is what I thought – that would be a magnum opus. Thus I just finished a magnum opus – I briskly whisked right thru 41 hours and 20 minutes of listening to Once an Eagle (lots of taking the dog out and walking to school helped). This novel defined the writing career of Anton Myrer, a marine corps solider who served during World War II, and was a #1 New York Times bestseller. More importantly, it has been required reading at many of the military academies ever since it is was published in 1968. It is even on the Admiral Paul Zukunft’s (the current Coast Guard Commandant) recommended reading list.

Once an Eagle is not a book of nuance or subtlety. It is stark and blunt with its message of what is needed from a successful military officer. The two main characters, with all their foils and flaws, are both rather one-dimensional. The story begins with a young man, Sam Damon, our hero, walking his teenage girlfriend home in the 1910’s deep in rural Nebraska and reveling in stories about civil war service and other horrors in war. Damon decides to make something of his life and join the military. After talking his way into a Westpoint appointment, but being deferred a year, he enlists because he refuses to wait. Over the next 817 pages (I also checked the book out from the library to help write this review), Damon hikes, crawls, and fights through the deserts of the 1916 Mexican Expedition (to hunt down Pancho Villa), the trenches of World War I, the guerilla warfare of China in the 1930’s, the swamps of the Pacific Island campaign during World War II, and the rainforests of Vietnam.

Even as a private, Damon is a leader and a man of the people. He slowly rises to the rank of Lieutenant General – not on the back of strong staff work or hitting the right career buttons along the way, but by being the absolute best combat officer possible. He is a tough but fair leader – he constantly puts himself in harm’s way and leads by example. During forced marches he walks right along with the men and helps them with their loads. When men won’t fight or follow orders he backs them into a corner and faces them down, sometimes with fists, sometimes with persuasion, sometimes with a velvet bribery, and sometimes with peer pressure. As soldiers hide in foxholes, Damon races to the front line and leads every charge. He is a master of his craft – he knows how to fight better than any other man in the novel. He even pops his head up in one foxhole and tells a private how to unfreeze his rifle – by peeing on it. But more important than leading through his personal example, courage, skill, and luck, Damon stands up for his troops at every possible turn, often in ways that hurt his career. He finds time for the “personal touch,” even in the heat of battle. He defends a soldier being court-martialed because he believes it is the right thing to do, even though it “alienate[s] those in power without accomplishing anything commensurate.” He fights the omnipresent Army bureaucratic system for supplies, staff, training, and down time. He learns to “read, think, and disagree with everything” in order to ensure his soldiers are treated well, knowing that if he fights for them, they will fight for him. In short, Damon is the type of officer that soldiers and sailors love and will follow, and that we should all strive to emulate.

Damon’s polar opposite and eventual nemesis is Courtney Massengale. Massengale represents Myrer’s view of everything we are not supposed to do as officers. He is sycophantic and works his way ahead by positioning himself in the best staff tours. He uses his political connections to gain advantage in the officer corps at every twist and turn. He eschews combat and, when he finally does gain a combat command, he sacrifices troops and lives in able to gain personal fame. When he finds out about the atomic bombing of Japan, and how the war will soon end, he curses the “filthy, vicious scientists” because they have taken away his chance for glory. He knows how to play the game and check the boxes, and does so with aplomb – always using and casting aside others in the process of raising himself up. But other characters point out that Massengale isn’t all bad – he refuses to “let sentiment or personal feelings get in his way,” and always keeping his focus on winning his primary objective and advancing to the next goal. And there is a lot to be learned from staff tours – their experiences can teach you to think strategically and help you become a successful senior officer. The problem is that sometimes his objectives are not the right, or the righteous, ones.

Beyond a contrasting of leadership, Myrer also focuses extensively on two other key aspects of military life: life at home and life at war. Life at home for members of the military is hard. Soldiers and sailors are constantly rotating between deployments and training and spouses often have to take a backseat. This is difficult for many couples – for both spouses and members. Members need to head out to the battlefield and the sea, and their spouses try to support them, but what they really want is “their men, safe at home, sweaty, carefree, and singing in the shower.” Military bases try to use morale events – formal dances, get-togethers, social happenings – to provide an atmosphere of support, but it is still a struggle. This is a struggle I have felt in my own life – one where I have not always succeeded. Damon is not a perfect man – he and his wife Tommy bicker, fight, cope, and try to work as a team, but they often fail as well. But they do find the virtue “simply in having been together, in having struggled through the arduous years, neglected, unvalued, sharing the hopes and wonders of parenthood” and military life together. There is an element of sexism in the book and its depiction of women, but I think this is a reflection of the times it was written in and the era it describes. More than anything else, the portions of the book focusing on life at home rang true because they so accurately paint the emotional free-for-all that is a military marriage. I even laughed at the description of soldiers talking shop at a social function in front of their wives, who quickly became exasperated for being left out of the conversation – because it happens so much in real life.

At the same time, Myrer shows the absolute horror of war – its pain, its monotonous boredom, and its cruelty. His descriptions are clear – “war is seat of confusion, ignorance, and cross-purpose.” It can be next to impossible to accomplish your mission and immensely sad and ominous when you are being defeated and seeing your friends die horribly. Myrer shows there is “nothing glorious about killing one’s fellow man, or being killed by him, or passing many, many days in hatred and misery and fear.” But sadly, for the soldiers, the war never seems to end – “each conflict [Damon had] struggled so arduously to end had lead only to another, and another.” Instead, Myrer encourages the idea of bottling up and taking the war back to those that started it – to the “eminent statesmen…the senate floor, the executive offices of Du Pont de Nemours, Boeing and Ford and Firestone [and] the trading posts on Wall Street” (he has a special hatred for business leaders who profit during war throughout the novel) forcing them to experience the smells, the sights, and the sounds of carnage – and thereby persuading them away from ever leading the nation to war to begin with.

Whether describing the fancy dances, the formal uniforms, the voice inflections (which are translated with superb accents in the audiobook), or a million other things, Myrer accurately depicts life during the first half of the 20^th century. I enjoyed the descriptions, and having lived off base for most of my time in the military, it even made me wonder if I was missing something by not living amongst other sailors and attending all the official events. I learned a lot from this book – yes, the book set up straw men and made the choices for the characters to be clear and stark to demonstrate their ethical inclinations. There was an obvious black and white dichotomy of how officers should lead their troops. I think most of us fall somewhere in between Damon and Massengale. Not all of us are as strong as Damon. And we do need to be able to learn to navigate and work within the bureaucracy. However, it is far more important that we learn to serve the soldiers and sailors on our teams, in our units, and onboard our ships. By competently serving them, they will reflect the example and hopefully put their best feet forward and serve as best they can. Thus while we are all somewhere between Damon and Massengale, the hope is that we fall far more onto the Damon exemplar of leadership. Score: 8.0.

I read (I actually read – didn’t listen to this one on my iphone) Words that Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear with a feeling of something looming over my shoulder. Frank Luntz, the author, is a “language architect and public opinion guru” who helped the Republican Party develop the Contract with America and secure a majority in the US House of Representatives in 1994.  The thesis of the book is that the content of your speech does not matter nearly as much as how you deliver it and what words you use to describe that content – these are what determine what people will hear from you.  There are countless examples throughout the book of how business and political leaders use the right words to help sway popular opinion: using ‘death tax’ instead of ‘estate tax’ to repeal the tax, using ‘energy exploration’ instead of ‘drilling for oil’ to promote increased drilling, using ‘gaming’ instead of ‘gambling’ to promote Las Vegas casinos, using ‘spirits’ instead of ‘liquor’ to increase sales of hard alcohol, using ‘illegal immigrants’ instead of ‘undocumented workers’ (or the other way around depending on what you believe), and much more.  By phrasing ideas with the right terms, you can shape how people think of them.

This idea was looming over my shoulder the entire book. Is renaming something and framing it with a new perspective manipulation?  Are we, the general public, really not smart enough to see through this?  Shaping the words you speak into a context where the reader can understand them in the way you want does not seem to be explicit manipulation – it is simply convincing that listener to agree with you.  But some of the examples Luntz brings up throughout his book certainly feel rather manipulative.

Using words that work is not about flowery language or SAT/GRE vocabulary. Luntz calls it the “language of everyday utility, language that generates practical results.”  Language is simply the functional tool to reach out and teach in idea. Communication is inherently two sided.  I must say something, and then a listener must hear and understand it. But that listener comes with his own background, history, prejudices, and ideas.  If I can find a way to impact what matters to that listener with my words, while not stepping on any of his prejudices, I can help turn his opinion towards mine.  There are 10 rules that Luntz brings up to tailor a message to meet the general public’s perspective (ten because everyone can visualize a list of ten items and it gives you credibility – rules 3 and 8 below):

1. Use Small Words: Simplicity counts – it keeps you from being suspicious.
2. Use Short Sentences: Think of the effective advertising slogans you know (I Like Ike, They’re grrreeat!, Got Milk?).  They are short and to the point.
3. Credibility is as Important as Philosophy: People have to believe you before they will buy what you are saying – reputation matters.  “Good communication requires conviction and authenticity; being a walking dictionary is optional.”
4. Consistency Matters: Keep repeating your core message.
5. Novelty – Offer Something New: “Words that work often involve a new definition of an old idea.”  (to me, this seems to disagree a little bit with #4).
6. Sound and Texture Matter: How words roll together off the tongue is key – think of the staccato and memorable nature of Snap, Crackle and Pop or music that goes with famous slogans such as Intel Inside or McDonalds’ I’m lovin’ it.
7. Speak Aspirationally: You can appeal to the “most idealistic conception” of someone with uplifting language, such as President Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
8. Visualize: You want people to imagine what you are selling with your words – such as M&Ms’ Melts in your mouth, not in your hands.
9. Ask a Question: A question helps frame your argument, especially if you then go on to answer it.  Think of President Reagan asking “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”
10. Provide Context and Explain Relevance: You need to frame your argument – put it in context that the listener can understand.  And to do this, you need to understand your audience (thus the need for constant market research and polling from both companies and politicians).

Luntz goes on throughout the book with an endless supply of examples of how using the right words swayed either the public or a specific audience.  In the updated paperback edition I read, there is even a case study on President Obama’s 2008 campaign and how he effectively used rules 1, 2, and 7 (Yes we can and Change we can believe in are short, with small words, and very aspirational).  In other instances in the book, Luntz discusses cases where he failed, such as when he tried to help the Republican Party craft a message around Social Security Personalization instead of Social Security Privatization in the mid-2000s.  He also lays out clearly how he comes up with winning words: the relentless use of polls, focus groups, and other forms of market research.

My favorite chapter is when Luntz explains how to use effective word-smithing to get through some of life’s tough situations.  You should use flowers as a visual when you say I’m sorry to your wife (rule 8), use your imagination and a question to ask your boss for a raise (“Imagine if I hadn’t been there to work on project X?” – rule 9), provide a police officer a hassle free, apologetic, and honest experience when you are pulled over for speeding (rule 3), or make a waiter laugh with a good story describing why a table in a crowded restaurant is so important to you (rules 5 and 10).

That all being said, this book is really about being an effective communicator and getting your message across.  Parts of the book seem to be common sense, including some of the rules above (esp. #3) and the idea of knowing your audience and what their concerns are.  Luntz certainly follows many of his own rules – the book doesn’t use many hard words, flows well, and he repeats his central idea (It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear) verbatim every few pages (rules 1, 2, 4, and 6).  He also follows rules 7: it is clear that Luntz deplores negativity in politics and business speech.  Instead, he wants to help his clients promote and utilize uplifting and positive ideas and language. However, based upon the number of attack ads we constantly see during any campaign season, I am not sure Luntz’ declaration that “negativity doesn’t sell these days on either [political] side” is correct.

Maybe it was my bias against some of Luntz’s ideas – but I wasn’t totally sure how to feel about this book.  I learned more about how to be an effective communicator, but I also came away feeling that people can be manipulated by an effective communicator.  There are plenty of people in history who have used these techniques and tools for horrible causes – I wish the book had included a section on how to recognize and see through them. Score: 5.5.

I do not normally read memoirs or autobiographies. In fact, I don’t think I have ever read a political memoir. I have always suspected they are rather biased, set the author too positive of a light, and ignore shortcomings and the other side of issues. Thus, I was rather suspect when someone told me (actually ordered me) to read Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, Secretary Robert Gates’ memoir of his time as the Secretary of Defense (from the end of 2006 thru the middle of 2011). After finishing the book, I am glad to report that my suspicions were not confirmed – instead the book was an unfiltered view of how political appointees work together with the President and Congress to direct the massive bureaucracy of the Federal Government and lead the Defense Department.

Gates was a pre-eminent American leader in the national security arena. He previously served in numerous administrations, starting as an Air Force officer in 1967, moving into the intelligence world, working on the National Security Council, and eventually leading the CIA during the last two years of President H. W. Bush’s (Bush 41) administration. Throughout the book, he details how past decisions in other Administrations, often that he helped shape, were affecting current events. Interestingly, he even recounts how everyone on the Bush 41 team expected Saddam Hussein to be overthrown by the Iraqi military after the first Gulf War.

Secretary Gates took over the helm of Defense at a precipitous time, confronting a world with American’s engaged in two wars, a rising Russia, and a threatening Iran. At the same time, he found himself fighting a bureaucratic fight within the Defense Department to focus projects and spending on the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq rather than potential future conflicts. When he first took the job, Gates was “struck” by the “seeming detachment from the wars we were in and [the service chief’s] focus on future contingencies and stress on the force” rather than the “need for us to win in Iraq.” Throughout the book, he continually relates the battles within (and beyond) the Department to remain focused on the current operations rather than continuing with life-as-normal.

Gates worked out a deal with his Generals and Admirals. He would set strategy with other political appointees and Presidents Bush and Obama, and then do his best to let the military leaders figure out the tactics needed to succeed in the strategies. He constantly fought the White House and Congress to stay out of the weeds on tactics. While the soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the Defense Department were fighting and dying overseas, he fought the bureaucratic battles at home to ensure they were resourced and able to succeed.

Surprisingly, when President Obama won the Presidency in 2008, he asked Secretary Gates to stay on. Initially, the request was only for a year, but Gates details how Obama came to rely on his candor and advice, and kept pushing for him to stay longer. It was when Gates felt he had become too emotionally attached to the troops that he finally stepped down.

The value of this book is the insight it gives into how decisions are made at the highest levels of government. On issue after issue, from the Iraq and Afghanistan surges, to relations with Iran, to the crisis in Libya and the Arab Spring, Gates details how both the Bush and Obama administrations’ national security teams worked together (or didn’t work together) to reach a solution. At the same time, they were constantly dealing with Congress, our international allies, the media (with numerous leaks throughout almost every discussion), and most importantly, the American people. Gates was often the voice for realism, pushing for restraint while trying to keep the focus on Iraq and Afghanistan.

His vision of how Presidents make key decisions is eye-opening. For example, Gates states that during his 45 years in government, he could only recall three times when a “president risked reputation, public esteem, credibility, political ruin, and the judgment of history on a single decision he believed was the right thing for our country: Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon, George H. W. Bush’s assent to the 1992 budget deal, and George W. Bush’s decision to surge in Iraq” (though he does specifically mention later that President Obama risked his entire presidency on the Osama Bin Laden raid). Gates was not afraid to push back on both Presidents for what he believed, pushing President Bush to stop Israel from attacking a secret nuclear reactor in Syria in 2007 (President Bush decided not to try to talk Israel out of the attack and the Israel destroyed the facility) or pushing President Obama to not intervene in Libya in 2011. But when he disagreed, he did so privately in the White House and then explicitly supported the Presidents’ decisions in public.

Gates also details how government leaders work with foreign governments, such as President, and later Prime Minister, Putin in Russia. My favorite anecdote was when he met with the President of Kyrgyzstan in 2007 and was basically extorted for additional aid in order to continue the use of an airfield for supplying Afghanistan. Gates then went on to celebrate when the President was overthrown for running a corrupt regime in 2010.

So what did I learn from this book? A lot.

1. Senior leaders must find ways to work together. Gates did this again and again, calling upon other leaders and finding comprise, especially with Secretaries Rice and Clinton.
2. Senior government leaders must have a strategy and a plan for working with Congress. Gates kept Congress in the loop on key decisions, starred them down when needed, and worked with them to both cut the Defense budget and find a way to succeed (Gates goes much further than this in his book, calling Congress a variety of names and discussing how it was “always enjoyable to listen to three former Senators – Obama, Biden, and Clinton – trash-talking Congress”).
3. Leaders must remain focused on the ‘vital national interests’ of America. This is a term that came up a considerable amount in a national security class I took last semester. Gates continually refers to the term, and tries to stay focused and spend his time on those vital interests rather than the less-than-vital concerns.
4. Leaders must also remain focused on those they lead. There is a reason that Gates’ was known as the ‘soldier’s secretary.’ He fought to get soldiers the protection they needed in the form of the MRAP. He fought to get solders additional weapons and body armor when needed. He fought for those he was leading.
5. “Never miss a good chance to shut up.” Nothing more needs to be said.
6. Don’t judge people without knowing them. Secretary Gates initially had mixed feelings regarding Secretary Clinton, but when she joined the Obama team, he found her “smart, idealistic but pragmatic, tough-minded, indefatigable, funny, a very valuable colleague, and a superb representative of the United States.” He goes on to kick himself for judging someone just by what he knew from the media.
7. Civil-Military relations are important. Military leaders must be able to translate their experience and ideas into something senior civilians and politicians can grasp. In addition, they need to be careful with their words in the press. This was a significant issue that led to the resignations of two of Gates’ senior general officers (Admiral Fallon and General McChrystal). Senior civilian leaders must be clear about what they expect the military to accomplish for them. Both sides must find ways to work together and to understand each other.
8. Humility must be real. Don’t be afraid to admit your mistakes or weaknesses as a leader – just make sure you address them.
9. Finally – war is horrible and uncontrollable. America should only look to military engagement as a last resort – but we must be willing to use force when needed. Gates partially quotes Winston Churchill on the subject; I found the full quote on the internet and think it fits perfectly:

“Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.”

I really enjoyed this book. At times, there was an element of ‘I went here, did this, met with this person, said this, and then went here, did this, met with another person’ and so on. But it was easy to get past that. Secretary Gates provides a window into how we made some of the most important decisions of the past decade, and how we did what needed to be done in Iraq and Afghanistan. Score: 8.5