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November Reviews
Dec. 4th, 2016 12:08 pmHey,
Cripes, I've been falling behind on this.
So I christened the month Non-fiction November and that's been pretty much all I read this month. So let's talk about them.
First up is: What to Do When I Get Stupid by Lewis Mandell. This is a book focusing on retirement finances. Basically, Mandell's argument is that our cognitive abilities are going to start slipping when we get older and that opens us up to making bad financial decisions and/or getting swindled by crooks. Therefore, we should try and figure out a good way to protect our retirement savings mostly from ourselves.
His basic recommendations are two-fold -- a fully paid-off, age-in-place home and the use of annuities to provide a steady income stream that can't easily be undone. An annuity is essentially a pension. You give the annuity company a large lump sum and it starts paying out monthly returns. When you die, the company gets to keep the rest of the money. Obviously some of this depends on your family history, but I have some fairly long-lived family members so it's not too much of a stretch to think that I might need something like that. The big upside here is that once you buy the annuity, that large lump some of retirement cash is, effectively, gone. You can't be swindled out of that money, you spent it. You could still get scammed on the income stream, but the prize won't be as big and Mandell even includes some suggestions for how you can enlist the aid of others to track your mental acuity and raise a flag if necessary.
I liked the book, it was well laid-out and Mandell describes how annuities work and the kinds you want and the kinds you want to avoid. My only complaint is that this advice is most useful just as you're about to retire. When you call in that 401(k) or whatever and have a huge some of money, you'll want to channel it into annuities. What I was hoping for was more advice on things to do now in the 40s-60s so that retirement fund is as large as possible (get a higher-paying job, don't spend any money, I know, I know). Still, I think there's a lot of good advice here and well worth looking into. Especially if you have loved ones approaching retirement.
Next up: Roll Call to Destiny: The Soldier's Eye View of Civil War Battles by Brent Nosworthy. Yup, my slide into Civil War buff-ism continues apace. Here, Mr. Nosworthy looks at the technology and tactics of the Civil War and marries it to first-hand accounts of various battles to show how all of it evolved during the course of the conflict. By way of example: it's true that by the Civil War many units started receiving rifled muskets and given their increased range and accuracy, you'd expect increased casualties. Indeed, there was a line of thought that suggested warfare would move towards more of a fire-team situation like you see in modern warfare vs. the old standard of massed firing lines. The catch is that the early rifles were pretty fidgety and to get that increased accuracy and range you had to be well trained and you lost a lot of time. In the dense terrain of Civil War battlefields, an enemy was likely to appear on the run at very close range so mostly the untrained recruits just fired as fast as you could -- which brings you back to massed lines of volley fire. What this meant is that casualties from weapons fire was often surprisingly low during the Civil War.
So the book tries to show how theory and practice met in the crucible of war and in the process you get some great stories from battles both large and small. The other thing that really stands out when you read the book is just how blind field commanders were. You had no communications other than messengers on foot or horseback. You couldn't get a sense of how the battle was going unless you had a high vantage point to overlook the field. A great number of battles could have gone the other way had one of half a dozen small things happened -- a message arriving in time, an accurate assessment of enemy strength or position, or even knowing where friendly units were. It also underscored how miserable soldering was at that time. Lots of night marches in freezing weather get mentioned.
I enjoyed it but clearly it's a specialist subject.
Next, I finished up: The Uskoks of Senj by Catherine Wendy Bracewell. The Uskoks were sort of an ad hoc anti-Ottoman force retained by the Holy Roman Empire. Using banditry and piracy, the Uskoks fanned out along the Adriatic and into the Balkans and stuck it to the Turk...and the Venetians who traded with the Ottomans and who's agreements with them made the Venetians responsible for the Uskok's actions.
This particular book appears to be one of those academic papers repurposed for publication. The Uskoks are an interesting group of people, they (or their fictional analogs) appeared in Children of Sea and Sky which I rather enjoyed. While this book offers quite a lot of factual detail regarding the Uskoks and where they came from and how they evolved over time, there was a lot missing here. There were major raids and military actions that get a clinical or abbreviated description. I was expecting a bit more of "this is what a typical raid looked like" or "here's the story of one of the bandit chiefs" but it was a bit more anodyne than that. Not a disappointment, but a very dry read.
Finally, I just finished up The Earth is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West by Peter Cozzens. The book covers the period from late 1860's to the mid 1880's when western expansion pretty much drove the Native Americans onto reservations. It's a sad and fascinating book and quite relevant given the protests at Standing Rock. What's especially heart-breaking is that there are plenty of people, many of them military officers, who are fully cognizant of the various injustices heaped upon the Native Americans who really try to improve things and they constantly get steam-rolled by corrupt government officials and/or business concerns. Divisions between and within Native American tribes meant that even those who tried to work with the government in good faith often got lumped in with "bad actors" and suffered for the atrocities of others.
The book is well-illustrated with maps showing the various campaigns. It ends just a tad abruptly, I think it could've used a bit of an epilogue but overall, it was an interesting, if somewhat depressing read.
So that was non-fiction November
Tom
Cripes, I've been falling behind on this.
So I christened the month Non-fiction November and that's been pretty much all I read this month. So let's talk about them.
First up is: What to Do When I Get Stupid by Lewis Mandell. This is a book focusing on retirement finances. Basically, Mandell's argument is that our cognitive abilities are going to start slipping when we get older and that opens us up to making bad financial decisions and/or getting swindled by crooks. Therefore, we should try and figure out a good way to protect our retirement savings mostly from ourselves.
His basic recommendations are two-fold -- a fully paid-off, age-in-place home and the use of annuities to provide a steady income stream that can't easily be undone. An annuity is essentially a pension. You give the annuity company a large lump sum and it starts paying out monthly returns. When you die, the company gets to keep the rest of the money. Obviously some of this depends on your family history, but I have some fairly long-lived family members so it's not too much of a stretch to think that I might need something like that. The big upside here is that once you buy the annuity, that large lump some of retirement cash is, effectively, gone. You can't be swindled out of that money, you spent it. You could still get scammed on the income stream, but the prize won't be as big and Mandell even includes some suggestions for how you can enlist the aid of others to track your mental acuity and raise a flag if necessary.
I liked the book, it was well laid-out and Mandell describes how annuities work and the kinds you want and the kinds you want to avoid. My only complaint is that this advice is most useful just as you're about to retire. When you call in that 401(k) or whatever and have a huge some of money, you'll want to channel it into annuities. What I was hoping for was more advice on things to do now in the 40s-60s so that retirement fund is as large as possible (get a higher-paying job, don't spend any money, I know, I know). Still, I think there's a lot of good advice here and well worth looking into. Especially if you have loved ones approaching retirement.
Next up: Roll Call to Destiny: The Soldier's Eye View of Civil War Battles by Brent Nosworthy. Yup, my slide into Civil War buff-ism continues apace. Here, Mr. Nosworthy looks at the technology and tactics of the Civil War and marries it to first-hand accounts of various battles to show how all of it evolved during the course of the conflict. By way of example: it's true that by the Civil War many units started receiving rifled muskets and given their increased range and accuracy, you'd expect increased casualties. Indeed, there was a line of thought that suggested warfare would move towards more of a fire-team situation like you see in modern warfare vs. the old standard of massed firing lines. The catch is that the early rifles were pretty fidgety and to get that increased accuracy and range you had to be well trained and you lost a lot of time. In the dense terrain of Civil War battlefields, an enemy was likely to appear on the run at very close range so mostly the untrained recruits just fired as fast as you could -- which brings you back to massed lines of volley fire. What this meant is that casualties from weapons fire was often surprisingly low during the Civil War.
So the book tries to show how theory and practice met in the crucible of war and in the process you get some great stories from battles both large and small. The other thing that really stands out when you read the book is just how blind field commanders were. You had no communications other than messengers on foot or horseback. You couldn't get a sense of how the battle was going unless you had a high vantage point to overlook the field. A great number of battles could have gone the other way had one of half a dozen small things happened -- a message arriving in time, an accurate assessment of enemy strength or position, or even knowing where friendly units were. It also underscored how miserable soldering was at that time. Lots of night marches in freezing weather get mentioned.
I enjoyed it but clearly it's a specialist subject.
Next, I finished up: The Uskoks of Senj by Catherine Wendy Bracewell. The Uskoks were sort of an ad hoc anti-Ottoman force retained by the Holy Roman Empire. Using banditry and piracy, the Uskoks fanned out along the Adriatic and into the Balkans and stuck it to the Turk...and the Venetians who traded with the Ottomans and who's agreements with them made the Venetians responsible for the Uskok's actions.
This particular book appears to be one of those academic papers repurposed for publication. The Uskoks are an interesting group of people, they (or their fictional analogs) appeared in Children of Sea and Sky which I rather enjoyed. While this book offers quite a lot of factual detail regarding the Uskoks and where they came from and how they evolved over time, there was a lot missing here. There were major raids and military actions that get a clinical or abbreviated description. I was expecting a bit more of "this is what a typical raid looked like" or "here's the story of one of the bandit chiefs" but it was a bit more anodyne than that. Not a disappointment, but a very dry read.
Finally, I just finished up The Earth is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West by Peter Cozzens. The book covers the period from late 1860's to the mid 1880's when western expansion pretty much drove the Native Americans onto reservations. It's a sad and fascinating book and quite relevant given the protests at Standing Rock. What's especially heart-breaking is that there are plenty of people, many of them military officers, who are fully cognizant of the various injustices heaped upon the Native Americans who really try to improve things and they constantly get steam-rolled by corrupt government officials and/or business concerns. Divisions between and within Native American tribes meant that even those who tried to work with the government in good faith often got lumped in with "bad actors" and suffered for the atrocities of others.
The book is well-illustrated with maps showing the various campaigns. It ends just a tad abruptly, I think it could've used a bit of an epilogue but overall, it was an interesting, if somewhat depressing read.
So that was non-fiction November
Tom
