The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: By Michael Chabon - A Review

"Houdini meets Two-Guys-in-a-Garret" could be a suitable subtitle for this novel which follows the heyday of the comic book industry in America.

Joe Kavalier is the tortured escape artist, a brilliant cartoon illustrator, who has studied magic and Houdini in his native Czechoslovakia, and who escapes to New York via a circuitous route in a coffin carrying the Prague Golem. Sam Clay is his New Yorker cousin who also worships Houdini and writes fantastic scripts and pulp novels. Put these two together and they come up with a series of comic books that rival the established superheroes of the day: Superman, Captain America, Batman et al.

Kavalier impotently fights the Nazis through his superheroes and dreams of helping his family escape the concentration camps to America, while Clay is trying hard to cover up his latent homosexuality. Both are trapped in metaphoric coffins, while their alter-ego hero, The Escapist, with his Hitler-bashing escapades, becomes a hit and makes them rich in the New World, and makes their unscrupulous bosses even richer.

The theme of entrapment and escape runs through the novel: Kavalier's escape from Prague, his enslavement in an observation station in the Antarctic in the company of dead crew and dogs, his later forced hiding inside the Empire State Building as he feverishly works on his new line of comic books, his desire to escape again by jumping off the said building. Clay too has his share entrapment: his sexual orientation, the marriage he falls into out of duty and as an escape from homosexuality, the dead-end jobs at various publishing houses after the magic of Kavalier & Clay has run out, the public inquisition into his sexual preferences for creating his superheroes with young male wards (even Batman and Robin are not spared here). In the end, the love of a good woman and her son conquers all, our two heroes find their niche, and there is a hint of the triumphant reincarnation of Kavalier & Clay.

I liked several aspects of this novel: the snippy and witty dialogue, the creativity of the young artists locked in a garret coming up with amazing storyboards, their self-deprecating humour, "I didn't know they were making detectives out of Jews," the footnotes in various sections which read like factoids and lend a sense reality to this work of fiction. There are bold extensions into the real world as well, when the legal wrangling of real-life competitors in the comic book industry is brought into the mix, and when the author comments on the personal grooming of Gala Dali or observes that Orson Welles smells like Dolores Del Rio - I guess one is allowed to take license with dead people!

What I did not like was the elaborate set-ups, the stories within stories that are "told" by a rather didactic and pompous omniscient narrator to bring us up to speed on what had taken place during a time gap. The prose is clunky and littered with heavy doses of information on the history and mechanics of the comic book industry. Much of this could have been cut out to create a tighter novel. The author himself sums up this vilified art form (which has re-emerged as the more dignified "graphic novel today) as "the inspirations and lucubrations of five hundred aging boys dreaming as hard as they could for fifteen years, transfiguring their insecurities and delusions, their wishes and their doubts, their public educations and their sexual perversions, into something that only the most purblind of societies would have denied the status of art" - need he have said more?

Excesses and digressions notwithstanding, I liked the story. This is story-telling at its peak; and in the end, great novelists are great story tellers.

Shane Joseph is the author of three novels and a collection of short stories. His work After the Flood won the best futuristic/fantasy novel award at the Canadian Christian Writing Awards in 2010. His short fiction has appeared in international literary journals and anthologies. His latest novel The Ulysses Man has just been released. For details see http://www.shanejoseph.com/

Book Summary - That Used to Be Us - By Thomas L Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum

Thomas Friedman is a NY Times bestselling author. He wrote The World is Flat and Hot, Flat and Crowded which are excellent books. This book is a must read for anybody who cares about our country. It outlines the problems and discusses the methods for getting us back on track as a world leading innovative nation.

Why is this important to me? I ask this question as if I am sitting in your shoes. This book in my humble opinion is a must read. The lackadaisical nature of the masses along with the political gridlock is paralyzing the nation and that affects all of us. It makes no sense for China to have better rail systems than us, and Singapore having better airports than us. And we just learned that China now has the fastest supercomputer on Earth - that used to be us. President Obama - 11/3/2010 Thomas and Michael outline the significant problems and some of the positive energy that still existing in the U.S. For the sake of time, I will summarize each of the 5 parts. The big four challenges we face in the U.S. are: how to adapt to Globalization, how to adjust to the IT revolution, how to cope with huge budget deficits because of growing government and how to manage in a world of rising energy demands and climate change.

1. The Diagnosis - If you see something, say something. Humans have a unique way of adapting to the environment. Unfortunately, we adapt to bad things and start to accept them as normal. The authors profile a story where it has taken over 6 months to fix two escalators with 21 steps on each in the New York Subway station. The politics, red tape and bureaucracy have basically killed the project. Yet in China, they can build a world class convention center in 32 weeks. The scary part of all of this is that - "People have gotten used to it." Pretty soon we get numb to really stupid things and start accepting the red tape provided by people who get paid regardless. This is a very scary habit to fall into because the gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world is widening and we are falling farther behind. The infrastructure of the country is falling apart. A personal example - our building is located in Southfield Michigan and we pay $50K a year in property taxes. The street in front of our building will destroy the front end of your car if you go faster than 20 miles per hour because the road is so screwed up.

2. The Education Challenge - This is no secret. We are funding education with investment dollars and it is not effective. We can fist fight all day on who is responsible but the point is that the family has to take a proactive approach to education or kids will die on the vine. The key learning requirements are critical thinking, collaboration and effective oral and written communication. There is another major problem in that kids need to be accountable and work ethic has to be established at a young age. The Chinese and Indians out work us in aggregate. They are pushed by their parents to succeed. Success in the U.S. has basically made the country lazy. This is similar to a championship boxer who is no longer hungry and does not work hard to stay champion. The authors point out a quote from a business man saying he is in the business of killing jobs. He is absolutely correct. Basically we have to innovate and automate routine tasks. This means that software and intellectual property will take the place of mundane work. This is continuing to happen and why critical thinking, problem solving and sharp skills are required from our education system. According to Wikipedia, the U.S. rank 17th in the world for education yet the budget is over $900 Billion annually. The execution and oversight to this spending is broken.

3. The War on Math and Science - Arithmetic is not an opinion - Italian Proverb. The war on Math is simple - nobody in Government can add. We are borrowing money from China to go to war with Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. Our deficient spending is just that and the investment is non-existent. In the 1960's president Kennedy created a goal to be on the Moon in 10 years. What is the goal today? To provide for people and make sure they don't have to work but still get their checks? Also, how could we let our banks leverage our future with derivatives and nobody in management have an idea of what happened? Worse than that, these executive got paid hundreds of millions of dollars collectively while accepting bailouts. This is War on Math and common sense. Like we stated earlier, Americans have gotten Used to it. The war on physics has to do with climate change and energy. The growth of energy demand and our lack of real investment in alternatives need to change. Lobbyists and special interest groups prevent this.

4. Political Failure - I am not going to blame Democrats or Republicans. I will blame both for the grid lock and selfish nature of polls, money and re-election. Our government in the last three years has gone into special session to make sure that the "Economy" does not self-destruct. Think about this for a minute. President Obama had to raise the debt ceiling otherwise the effects on the economy would have been Catastrophic. Those are his words. Is anybody listening? I guess we are just "used to it."

5. Rediscovering America - The good news is that for every problem yields great opportunity to solve it. Embracing the problems and hitting them head on is the cornerstone of our history. The small business man who transforms the world from his garage - that all happens here. This needs to be nurtured and the problems need to be fixed from the bottom up. Waiting for big brother to fix our issues is the kiss of death. Don't let Dumb and Dumber dictate your future. This is how our political system is working and we are going to get run over by other nations if we don't take responsibility for ourselves. I will stop preaching. This is a good book and will open your eyes to the problems. Remember that news today is not news but opinion. Bill Maher and Rush Limbaugh are paid for ratings. I hope you have found this short summary useful. The key to any new idea is to work it into your daily routine until it becomes habit. Habits form in as little as 21 days. One thing you can take away from this book is the U.S needs leaders. This is still the greatest country in the world because we are free. This means we need to become leaders and lead from the bottom up. We need to take responsibility for continuous learning and innovation.

Joe Mosed invites you to subscribe to http://www.successprogress.com/ to receive free video book summaries. Our vision at Success Progress is to provide relevant & meaningful content to our user community. To view the video summary of this article please visit http://www.youtube.com/successprogress

(c) Copyright - Joe Mosed / Success Progress All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Book Summary: Boomerang - The Meltdown Tour - Written by Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis is a very popular author with writings including - The Big Short, Liars Poker and the Blind Side. Boomerang is a review of the sovereign debt crisis. This is a global problem that 90% of Americans are clueless about. This problem and the U.S. debt have the ability to be as fatal to our society as a third world war. Our government is trying to kick the can farther down the road so they don't have to deal with it. Boomerang will open your eyes to the issue from a few of the PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain) perspective.

Why is this important to me? In this summary, I don't have to ask this question because the sovereign debt crisis affects everyone and it is everybody's problem. Unfortunately, herd mentality invites the slaughter. I recommend you get educated on this and start protecting yourself.

1. Doom / Gloom - I am not a doom and gloom world ending person but logic dictates that the debts accrued by the US and the European Union cannot be sustained. The question is - what happens when the defaults start. You really need to get educated and start protecting yourself

2. Savers are losers - Robert Kiyosaki from Rich Dad Poor Dad always states that savers are losers. He does not mean this as a derogatory statement. What he is referring to is that $1 dollar today is the equivalent to 4 cents in 1913. This means that the dollar has lost 96% of its value. So if you keep your savings in dollars then you are losing money due to inflation. In 2008, 100 year old institutions were sold in a weekend (Merrill Lynch). Money and currency are two different things and it makes sense to protect yourself so that you do not have counter party risk. What this means is that if your money is in the bank and there is a bank run then you have counter party risk. If you own real money like Gold or Silver then there is no counter party risk.

Michael Lewis travels the world and investigates the sovereign debt crisis by talking and seeing the effects first hand. The book is a good story; I only wish it was fiction.

Kyle Bass is the investor who shorted the big banks and predicted Fannie Mae would go bankrupt. He made millions of dollars by shorting the mortgage industry. When asked what the average person should do to protect themselves from the potential financial carnage, he says buy Guns and Gold. This is a scary prophecy from a guy who got it right once.

Look around and listen to the politicians. President Obama in August raised the debt ceiling right in the last hour to AVOID CATESTROPHIC consequences to our economy. Those words are powerful but I guess the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills is more important. The U.S. masses are sleeping while this is going on. Remember that the first thing Hitler did with his population is take away the guns before WWII. The bankers and Wall Street are taking away the value of our currency and nothing is being done to fix it. There have been countless domino effects happening right in front of us and the only politician who remotely understands it is Ron Paul. Unfortunately he will not be elected, but if he was, he would fix it.

The fixes involved will be painful. Greece for example WILL DEFAULT because you cannot change a whole culture of people overnight. The GREEKS do not pay taxes. They are required too but it is culturally acceptable to not pay your taxes and there are no consequences if you don't. In America, we were paying an average sales person $32 million per year to trade garbage securities. Most of these traders would starve if they sold technology solutions yet they made millions of dollars while leveraging our future and country. The mortgage bubble and derivatives can be blamed on less than 100 people. A select few created these leveraged instruments and we are still caught in the middle of bailout talks.

Question - if you are drowning, does it make sense to throw more water on you? If not, then why is the only solution to our debt problem, more debt? This picture sums it up. What the U.S. proposes is to increase spending and hope the economy grows. The current solution looks like this - you make $43,000 per year and have $78,000 in credit card debt thus the logical answer is to open another credit card to pay for the credit card debt. We are borrowing money from China so we can fight in Afghanistan and Libya. - Unbelievable!!!

I hope you have found this short summary useful. The key to any new idea is to work it into your daily routine until it becomes habit. Habits form in as little as 21 days. One thing you can take away from this book is to get educated. A lot of people are going to be hurt by this debt problem and I hope you are not one of them.

Joe Mosed invites you to subscribe to http://www.successprogress.com/ to receive free video book summaries. Our vision at Success Progress is to provide relevant & meaningful content to our user community. To view the video summary of this article please visit http://www.youtube.com/successprogress

(c) Copyright - Joe Mosed / Success Progress All Rights Reserved Worldwide.