Fat Books
News@11K - First Quarter 1999

This article from the Dallas Fed's employee newsletter springs from Mr. McTeer's prolific and varied reading. He's also a movie buff.

Since I haven’t seen many good movies lately, I’ve been asked to recommend some good books. As you know, I prefer skinny books, but there are a few good fat ones out there. I don’t want you to think I’m limited. But, just for the record, I still believe that inside every good fat book is a better skinny one trying to get out.

The fattest book I’ve read lately is Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full. I’d hoped for another Bonfire of the Vanities, but that was probably unrealistic. Still, the 742 pages in Wolfe’s latest went pretty fast, partly because it’s set in Atlanta, where I read it over the holidays. Charlie Croker is the master of the universe this time, a successful but fatally overextended real estate developer who’s desperately trying to salvage his fortune and dignity. Evil bankers are bent on taking both. Like Bonfire, the theme is the fall of the high and mighty. As usual, Wolfe enriches our language. My favorite additions are "red dog," as in "let your red dog off the leash," and the banker’s line as he prepares for a workout session: "Let’s take the safeties off the ring binders."

Purple Dots, by Jim Lehrer of "The NewsHour," was my other holiday novel. The plot—retired CIA agents try to save their old buddy, the current director nominee, who is being framed—is merely okay. The fascination for me was seeing what kind of novel a full-time newsman would write. I kept thinking of Tom Clancy, the insurance man, writing The Hunt for Red October, wishing I could do that. I think I have writer’s envy.

Much of my nonfiction reading lately has been books written by friends. Our own Mike Cox just emerged from two years of nights and weekends with Myths of Rich and Poor. The Research Library has a couple of copies, but if you buy your own, Mike would be happy to sign it. I recommend it.

Another friend’s first book is Dale Crownover’s Take It to the Next Level, the story of Dale’s quest for quality at Texas Nameplate. I read it in galley proofs on a flight from Washington. My endorsement appears as the book’s foreword. As you probably know, Texas Nameplate just became the smallest company ever to win the Malcolm Baldrige award.

I’ve also endorsed Getting Rich in America, by my friend Dwight Lee and Richard McKenzie. The book’s subtitle is 8 Simple Rules for Building a Fortune and a Satisfying Life. I won’t reveal the eight rules, except to say they’re especially applicable to young people in the habit-forming stage of life.

Another friend with a new book is Larry Lindsey, former member of the Board of Governors. Economic Puppetmasters focuses on key economic decision makers in the United States, Europe and Japan, how they are each a product of their country’s history and how their positions are dictated by that history and their roles. The U.S. focus is on Chairman Greenspan, which is interesting, but the best thing about the book for me was the material on Japan.

The best nonfiction book I’ve read lately is Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes, by Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich. It applies lessons from behavioral economics to our investment decision making. More broadly, it’s about mental habits that make smart people do dumb things. That’s us, folks.

Another recent nonfiction favorite is The Commanding Heights, by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw. It chronicles the postwar movement from command and control economies to greater reliance on the market. The book highlights key events and players in this transformation, such as former University of Chicago professor Arnold Harberger, whose "Chicago Boys" brought free-market ideas to Latin America. Ironically, I read this book on the way to a Dallas Fed conference in Buenos Aires, where Professor Harberger was scheduled to speak. I was able to quote from it when I introduced him. It’s a small world.

On the lighter side is Jay Milner’s Confessions of a Maddog: A Romp Through the High-Flying Texas Music and Literary Era of the Fifties to the Seventies. The Maddogs were a loose group of Texas prose and songwriters and pickers. If I have writer’s envy in general, I envy "picker poets" in particular—such as Willie Nelson and Billy Joe Shaver, mentioned in the book, and Lyle Lovett and Robert Earl Keen, who came along later. This book gives a peek into their world, but this late-arriving Texan-by-choice doesn’t have the background to appreciate it fully.

Another effort to catch up on Texas lore was my attempt to read Kinky Friedman’s Roadkill. Even putting Willie Nelson in the plot wasn’t enough for me. I probably should have heard his band first.

On the other hand, I found the mother lode of Texas lore and flavor in Jerry Flemmons’ Texas Siftings. Get it in the Texas section of your bookstore. It goes great with a Corona and lime, and it even features the Research Department’s Bill Gruben on page 53. Is Texas a great country, or what?

To get in touch with my feminine side, I tried to read two of my wife’s books: Message in a Bottle, by Nicholas Sparks, and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, by Rebecca Wells. I got more than halfway through the first one but only a quarter of the way through the second. Both come highly recommended, but not for me. I haven’t seen it yet, but Message probably makes a better movie.

Movies, by the way, are what we call some of the skinny books we find inside fat books.

 

About the Author Bob McTeer is president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.