I received a copy of this novel from the author, David Lentz.
As stories about the protests that began as "Occupy Wall Street" co...moreI received a copy of this novel from the author, David Lentz.
As stories about the protests that began as "Occupy Wall Street" continue to spin out in the news, moving further afield in the U.S. and even going global, it's clear that many people see stockbrokers and other money managers as key players in our current economic woes. For the Beauty of the Earth, narrated by young hedge-fund manager Bruce Warrick, offers a timely and cautionary tale about the seductive power and potential for abuse among those who manage billions of dollars in stock equity. Indeed, Warrick's experience in the world of high-finance and free markets seems designed to fit the darkest suspicious of the Occupy movement.
Throughout the narrative, Warrick's skills as a financial wizard are either hampered or enhanced by his narcolepsy (a disorder that has him falling asleep at the most inconvenient times), depending on the given viewpoint. The narrative itself has a vague, dreamy character in keeping with Warrick's frequent narcoleptic episodes and lucid dreaming. These episodes are so debilitating, in fact, that readers may come to suspect that his boss, Hastings, dissembles when he describes Warrick as an investing genius, having hired him to act primarily as a figurehead.
The pivotal moment comes when Warrick challenges the enigmatic Keynes Society who dictates his trading choices. Despite this burst of rebellion, Warrick finds himself a pawn in a series of events orchestrated to take advantage of his continual loss of consciousness and his desire to expose the power brokers. Although these events have all the makings of a fast-paced thriller, Lentz chooses to have Warrick (and the reader) learn much of the truth secondhand. Like the Occupy protesters, readers looking for a tidy resolution to corrupt financial institutions will be left with Warrick's solution instead: to consider how to live life to the fullest with those gifts that they've been given, to cherish every moment, and to appreciate the beauty of the earth.(less)
I'm not sure what I thought I was picking up when I requested Laura Blumenfeld's book Revenge from the library. If I'd considered more carefully, I mi...moreI'm not sure what I thought I was picking up when I requested Laura Blumenfeld's book Revenge from the library. If I'd considered more carefully, I might have thought that Ms. Blumenfeld would define revenge and then show how it's practiced across cultures before sharing numerous stories from various countries and from across history.
That's not exactly what Revenge is about, although it does include some objective discussion of what revenge is and how some people undertake it.
Revenge is Blumenfeld's memoir based on her father's shooting during her freshman year of college. Her father, a rabbi, had been visiting Jerusalem's Western Wall when a young Palestinian student randomly chose to shoot him. As a journalist later working for The Washington Post, Blumenfeld's background and experience allowed her to explore her own feelings and pursue her own motives under the guise of writing about revenge. (Actually, it's unclear to me whether her book was intended from its inception to be a memoir based on her need for revenge or whether her pursuit of the personal during her research caused her to turn what had been intended as something more objective into a memoir.)
What results is a highly readable story in which Blumenfeld manages to portray herself as naive and irrational, yet sympathetic. (I marveled at her skill in doing so because throughout I was also aware of her talent and intelligence as a writer.) Even though I sympathized with her patient and long-suffering husband, Baruch, I nevertheless wanted Blumenfeld to find a way to get past her desire for some kind of recognition or restitution for her father.
Throughout the year that she researched her book, Blumenfeld daydreamed about meeting the man who shot her father ("the shooter" is how she refers to him) and shaking him to make him respond to her anger and frustration about the event. To make him see her father and herself as people who matter. Yet she also wanted to reconcile her visceral urge with her more rational sense of justice, the need for due process, and the fair application of law. Her quest to understand her own drive for revenge drives her story.
I found the end of her tale rather satisfying, especially the lead-up to the climactic moment when she meets the shooter. In many ways, I found Blumenfeld's quest admirable and thought-provoking. What would I do if someone had shot my father, unprovoked, and for ideological reasons that didn't involve him? What would you do?
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