In Short Nonfiction

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday November 1, 2008

Reviews by Bruce Elder

THE NEW PARADIGM FOR FINANCIAL MARKETS

By George Soros

Scribe, 176pp, $27.95

It is a comment on the global financial crisis that some months ago, when he was writing this book, George Soros offered a detailed analysis and accurately predicted what was going to happen.

Soros argues that the crisis started with a series of collapses and credit problems in August last year. He traces this back to the "bursting of the internet bubble in late 2000", which, combined with 9/11, led to US interest rates dropping to 1 per cent. This, in turn, led to unprecedented lending or, as Soros puts it, "when money is free, the rational lender will keep on lending until there is no one else to lend to".

This led to crazy home building in the US, people borrowed yet more and banks repackaged and sold their riskiest loans and mortgages.

However, this fascinating book is not just an analysis of the current situation. Soros's central argument - and this is an explanation for the layman - is that economists believe human beings behave logically and rationally when all the evidence shows that, in economic terms, humans do not behave rationally or logically.

A PURE DROP

By Jeff Apter

Omnibus Press, 256pp,

$49.95 (hb)

In the annals of stupid and unnecessary deaths, there are few to compare with that of Jeff Buckley. This hugely talented and widely acclaimed young singer-songwriter was very special. When he first toured Australia in August, 1995, the Herald reviewed his concert saying it was "a performance which, through sheer dint of his emotional commitment and on-stage charisma, establishes him as one of the most significant and innovative performers to have emerged in the past five years".

Two years later, aged 30, he went swimming in Wolf River near Memphis and drowned, a talented musician whose life was cut short. So it makes perfect sense that Jeff Apter, one-time music editor of Australian Rolling Stone, should write this solid, workmanlike biography recording in great detail not only the life of Buckley but also that of his father, Tim Buckley, a late-1960s singer-songwriter.

This is a book for anyone who wants to know everything about young Buckley. Apter has done his research.

DEMOCRACY

By Paul Ginsborg

Profile Books, 166pp, $32.95

Paul Ginsborg's premise is that liberal democracy, now the dominant ideology of the Western world, is not working and is not nearly as perfect as its boosters claim it is. His argument is compelling. Voters dislike politicians. Where voting is not compulsory hardly anyone bothers to turn up. In the 2004 European Union elections less than 40 per cent of voters turned out in the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden and Britain. Elections in the US have become obscenely expensive.

Most importantly, a hierarchical system where voters hand over their power to influence events to representatives who are professional politicians is not democracy but a kind of oligarchy.

This is a beautifully argued book full of insights into the democratic process. Ginsborg argues that the early 1905 soviets in Russia were truly democratic. He points out that by 1915 Lenin was endorsing a legalised gerrymander where 125,000 peasants equalled 25,000 urban dwellers. It is a system strangely echoed in Joh Bjelke-Petersen's Queensland.

PICK OF THE WEEK

RECOLLECTIONS OF MR MANOLY LASCARIS

By Vrasidas Karalis

Brandl & Schlesinger, 178pp, $26.95

If Patrick White really was the psychological monster of popular depiction (rude, cutting, playing favourites, scathing, sarcastic) then his long-time partner, Manoly Lascaris, should be first in line for a sainthood. Certainly, in the popular imagination Lascaris was always the figure in the shadows.

White strode the stage as an activist, a novelist and a Nobel laureate. Behind him, like a good and faithful "housekeeper", was Lascaris, never casting a shadow when the light of fame shone so brightly on his partner.

Yet, in this book written by White's Greek translator (who, for many years after White's death, visited Lascaris on a monthly basis) we find a fascinating and complex man who believed he was directly descended from the emperors of Byzantium. Lascaris openly admitted he "was always tempted by loneliness towards megalomania! On the other hand I must never forget my classical education and the need to see life through fragile eyes." He was a passionate defender of White's genius.

In these conversations, most of which were in Greek, Lascaris is revealed as a widely read intellectual, a sharp and provocative critic, a man who at times is aloof, arrogant, overtly snobbish and who always felt he was superior to those around him.

A quiet man who observed "Sydney is the metropolis of solitude", he described his own life as "a life of sheltered insignificance" and saw himself as "powerless" and "weak and irresolute". Of his relationship with White he says: "I was his frustration and his inspiration, his confusion and his serenity; his character and his nothingness. I lost myself as he was trying to discover me."

This modest book offers an insight into a relationship that fascinated literary Australia. In this intimate collection of Socratic-like conversations, Lascaris reveals himself as a person who should never have been dismissed simply as White's "housekeeper".

© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald

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