Markopolos knew that Bernie Madoff was a fraud. He knew it in 1999, fully ten years before Madoff’s Ponzi scheme collapsed, evaporating some $40 billion. For years he tried to make the Securities and Exchange Commission aware of what he knew, but he was met only with resistance. The SEC turned him away time and again. And over the years, Madoff’s fraud grew by tens of billions. Finally, in the closing days of 2008 when Madoff’s empire collapsed, Markopolos was vindicated, finally able to say a well-earned, “I told you so!” No One Would Listen is the story of his long battle to expose Madoff.

The power of this book is not in exposing who Madoff was or what he was doing. That is all well known by now. Rather, the book’s force is in exposing the gross negligence and incompetence of the SEC and, further, in exposing the systemic greed that allowed Madoff to prosper for so long.

What may be most surprising and what may be the greatest statement about human nature is that most of Madoff’s clients, the big corporate ones at least, knew that he was a fraud. They knew that he was in some way gaming the system. Yet as long as he was doing so for their benefit, they were not going to complain. Most thought he was front-running; therefore, though he was cheating and would eventually be caught, their money would be returned to them and in the meantime they would enjoy great returns. None of them understood that he was running a Ponzi scheme which would return them nothing. So it was not just Madoff’s corruption and greed that cost investors billions; it was their own greed and lack of ethics. No one would listen because no one wanted to listen.

For years Markopolos lived in fear of Bernie Madoff, convinced that, because of his crusade against him, he was a marked man. He slept with a gun by his side and picked up a concealed weapon permit. He constantly thought back to his military training, figuring out how he would escape from a hail of bullets. He got into the habit of looking under his car for hidden bombs and spent a great deal of money upgrading his home alarm system. Yet beyond a single incident of a car tailing him for a short time he had no evidence that anyone was out to get him. He lived in a fear that seems to have been fueled primarily by his own imagination. And no sooner had Madoff fallen then Markopolos loaded up his shotgun, convinced that the SEC was now going to invade his home (do they have an accounting SWAT team?).

The whole book is tinged with this bizarre altered reality. Markopolos clearly has a lively imagination and an inflated sense of his own importance. Throughout the book he shows that he can do his own job well and that he is convinced that he can do everyone else’s job just as well–certainly better than they can do it themselves. Time and again he offers not just facts, but opinion and judgment. Read through some of his submissions to the SEC and you can see why they were ignored–they are full of self-importance, demands for bounties and snide comments about how the SEC needs to do its job better. Though we cannot excuse their negligence, we can hardly fault them for regarding Markopolos with some suspicion.

To call No One Would Listen a thriller, as the subtitle does, is quite a stretch. Yes, the book is interesting enough, but it is only a thriller in Markopolos’ own imagination (or in the creative mind of a marketer). It’s actually rather a plodding tale that goes into great detail about financial transactions that are well outside the experience of most of us. Wall Street jargon pervades its pages. The value of the book, at least in my mind, is not in the tale of one man crusading against a massive fraud. Rather, it is the harsh reality that Madoff thrived only because so many of his biggest customers wanted him to. His scheme would never have grown so large without these corporate customers. They knew, or at least suspected, that he was corrupt, but as long as his corruption fed their bank accounts, they were willing to overlook it. It was only when his corruption caused their accounts to evaporate that they grew incensed. They eventually paid the price for their greed.

Verdict: Read it to see a clear example of the hard cost of greed.

Not Without Hope is Nick Schuyler’s description of the incident. It is a survival story, the kind of tale we’d expect to find in condensed form in Reader’s Digest in a year or two. He describes the circumstances surrounding the fishing trip and describes in agonizing detail the deaths of his three friends including his best friend, Will Bleakley.

Let me say off the top that the book is not particularly well written. Actually, it’s downright poor at times. Here’s a sampling of the prose:

I caught my first fish and I was like, oh my God, forget this. I was so confused. Why would anybody like this? It took me almost fifteen minutes to get the damn fish up. A big amberjack. As soon as I made a little leeway, it yanked out everything I had reeled in. It fought like a shark. My back and shoulders were burning. I kind of wedged the pole between my legs and told Marquis, “I’m taking a little break.” I couldn’t imagine anyone pulling up a giant marlin or something.

Or, a short time later:

He played in thirty-four games during his career, starting eight times at tight end and catching ten passes. I think he made honorable mention at All-Big East Conference his senior year. He was clever at chop blocking. His parents, Bob and Betty, were at the games, always.

It’s not the worst prose I’ve read–not by a long shot–but it’s still pretty bad. Certainly it’s about the worst I’ve encountered on the bestseller’s list. But I suppose it may be fitting for the person who wrote the book, a self-proclaimed jock more than an intellectual, a guy who, when rescued, looked in the mirror, noticed that his body fat had obviously fallen and thought, “not bad.”

Like you, I’ve often heard it said that there are no atheists in a foxhole. The same must be true when floating helplessly in the ocean. Though the men who set out that day were varyingly religious, it seems that none of them were particularly devout. And yet no sooner had the boat flipped and the storm winds risen than the men were crying out to God individually and communally, even reciting the Lord’s Prayer together. Schuyler, who makes it clear that he had no relationship with God whatsoever, was soon begging for his life saying, “Please, God, I’ll start going to church every Sunday.” He and his friends called out to God for deliverance. Only Nick survived. And in the aftermath he writes, “I’ve gotten so many e-mails and calls and text messages saying, ‘God has a plan for you, stay strong, you may not see it now.’ I kind of see it both ways. I hope so, but why didn’t God have a plan for these guys as good as they were? Why did He choose me out of the four?” Though he pledged allegiance to God during the hours of terror, it seems that he soon forgot his promises and has moved on. Though he cried out to God for rescue while he was helpless, now he regards that same God as culpable for the accident.

Reading this book I wonder why it is that we are so drawn to stories of survival. And honestly, there a few good reasons to read this book; it has little to commend it beyond the tale of disaster and survival. It’s poorly written and contains a cast of mostly unremarkable characters. And yet it has sold well enough that it has made its mark on the list of bestsellers. Somehow this tale of terror, this “drama in real life” (to borrow a phrase from Reader’s Digest) electrifies readers and draws them in. I’m not sure why we are so drawn to such tales. Perhaps we have imagined ourselves in such situations and are interested to see how others respond in their most difficult moments. Or maybe we want to imagine that we would do so much better–that if we had been there, we would have had the strength or ingenuity to rescue ourselves or to save the lives of our friends. There is something about such stories that we find almost irresistible.

Yet as stories of survival go, this one is just okay. It’s certainly no better than average and I see little reason to recommend it.

Verdict: Read it if you just have to read a survival story.

From his earliest days, Mosab Hasson Yousef had a view of the inner workings of Hamas. The son of one its founders, from childhood he was immersed in the shadowy world of Middle Eastern terror and politics. Arrested time and again by the Shin Bet, the Israeli internal intelligence service, he eventually made the decision to become a double agent, working for Israel instead of against her. For ten years, from 1997 to 2007, he lived like this, deeply embedded within Hamas, suspected by no one, yet passing vast amounts of information to Israel. In this way he prevented assassinations, stopped suicide attacks and provided information leading to the arrests or killings of many terrorists. He was Shin Bet’s most valuable source of information about Hamas.

In 1999 he had a chance encounter with a British visitor who invited Yousef to learn about the Christian faith. Curious and intelligent, Yousef took this opportunity and was immediately struck by the difference between Jesus Christ and Mohammed, between the Christian faith and the Islam he had inherited from his fathers. In the months that followed he made a slow conversion to Christianity and was quietly baptized.

Eventually Yousef grew tired of his double life and convinced the Israelis to release him from his position with them. With some reluctence they agreed and allowed him to move to the United States where he continues to live today. Son of Hamas is the story of his life, “A gripping account of terror, betrayal, political intrigue, and unthinkable choices,” according to the rather verbose subtitle.

And it’s a good story that is told well. Yousef offers a uniquely interesting perspective on Hamas and on the political background and context in that area of the world. His story involves just enough action and intrigue to keep it interesting. At times it is almost (but not quite) unbelievable.

One thing I found interesting is that Youself reveals the Israelis not as the good guys but as the less-bad guys. He develops some level of respect for them when he sees that they are fighting for their lives against a host of nations bent on their destruction. But still he shows how they are every bit as willing as the surrounding nations to torture and kill to further their own ends. Their respect for life is not much greater than that of their enemies. So the Israelis really are not the good guys in this story.

And of course I enjoyed reading not just of Yousef’s conversion to Christianity but also the long process and the inner turmoil that got him there. It was only through much soul-searching that he was able to see Jesus Christ not just as a prophet but as the Son of God who died for the sin of the world. So often I read books like this and am disappointed to see that the author finds joy in everything but Christ. But here Yousef finds rest and joy and peace only when he submits his life to Christ.

Yousef does not want to be a hero to Christians. At the end of the book he admits his own unsuitability for that task. He is a new Christian and one who is unskilled–still a novice. And yet he is one who has now written a book about his conversion that has landed on the New York Times list of bestsellers. His testimony is powerful and I both hope and expect that God will use it to show others the light that can be theirs if they turn to Christ.

This one is well worth reading. Buy a copy and marvel at God’s grace. Marvel at how God will go to great lengths to draw his people to himself.

Verdict: Buy it and rejoice in the grace of God.

Shooting straight to the top is Mitt Romney’s No Apology. Subtitled The Case for American Greatness, I think we all know the real subtitle is Why I Need To Be Your Next President. It’s no coincidence that both Palin and Romney have released books in the past few months.

Coming in right behind it at #2 is Lift by Kelly Corrigan. This is a wee little book, under 100 pages, that is simply a letter from a mother to her two young daughters.

At #4 is Not Without Hope by Nick Schuyler. You may remember that in early 2009 four men went deep sea fishing in the Gulf of Mexico (two of them NFL players), only one of whom returned. This is the story of the survivor of that tragedy.

#6 brings us No One Would Listen, a “financial thriller”  by Harry Markopolos. It is “the exclusive story of the Harry Markopolos-lead investigation into Bernie Madoff and his $65 billion Ponzi scheme.”

Close behind at #7 is Hugh Ambrose’s The Pacific. Written specifically to coincide with the new and highly-anticipated HBO miniseries of the same name, this book and it’s author will draw inevitable comparisons to Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers. It’s been too long since I read a good book on the Second World War, so I’m looking forward to this one and was anticipating that it would end up on this list.

And showing up on the list at #11 is Mosab Hassan Yousef’s Son of Hamas. I had hoped this book would make it to the list and started reading it in advance, actually finishing it just as this week’s chart was released. This is the story of a son of one of the founders of Hamas and his eventual conversion to Christianity.

And that’s that. On Thursday I finally caught up with all of my reading and on Friday I caught up with all of my reviewing. And it seems that I did so just in time.

Now let me explain. It’s not that the book is devoid of any good information. Servan-Schreiber is a former cancer patient who has twice survived brain tumors, so he writes about this subject from hard personal experience. He is a doctor and researcher so he deals with the subject from the medical perspective as well. He nicely blends the scientific with the biographical and this gives him credibility on two levels. Unfortunately, he has also read too many New Age books and has spent too much time doing yoga.

Anticancer succeeds where Servan-Schreiber attempts to describe the kind of lifestyle and diet that can prevent cancer, assist in beating the disease and help recover from it. Here he shares the latest wisdom on the foods and components of food that have been found to promote good health (the usual suspects: garlic, fish, omega-3, etc, etc) and those that have been found to hinder good health (processed and synthetic sugars, trans fats, and so on). He shares good and common sense about getting sufficient amounts of exercise and avoiding undue stress. All is well and good.

Where Anticancer fails is where he deals with all of this from the mental and spiritual angles. Here we find him speaking more from personal experience than from scientific fact. He has dabbled in eastern religions and has absorbed more from them through New Age practices. And so he promotes eastern-style meditation as a necessary component to a healthy lifestyle. He also writes about the importance of embracing one’s “true self” as a crucial component to holistic good health, going so far as to say that denying one’s natural homosexuality can inhibit the body’s immune system (which is a real head-scratcher if you consider that sexually-active homosexuals are hardly known for their strong immune systems).

So I suppose we have an interesting mix of good and bad. I appreciated Servan-Schreiber’s attempts to view health as more than just a sound body or a strong immune system. Certainly a well-rounded understanding of health has to go farther than just the physical. At the same time Servan-Schreiber appears to deny the Creator, the one who gave us both body and soul and who prescribes how we are to live holistically in both the physical and the spiritual. For a book of this nature to truly minister to the Christian in times of illness, it would need to minister at both levels. So while Anticancer’s teaching on the physical dimension may be sound and well worth reading, its teaching on the spiritual level is sorely lacking and, worse, patently unbiblical.

It would only be with some hesitation that I’d recommend this book. Admittedly I have not read much else in this category (and hope I never have to), but I assume there must be books out there that would offer similar wisdom on the body while leaving the spiritual angle for a true physician of the soul.

Verdict: Read it if you can find nothing better on the subject.

The book is not purely memorial, though, as it tells two stories–that of Amy’s life and that of life after Amy. After her death, Roger and his wife, Ginny, moved into her home to join in the task of caring for her children. And in Making Toast Rosenblatt weaves these two threads together, speaking of one life that has ended and many more that carry on, though only incompletely without daughter, wife, mother.

Not surprisingly in a book dealing with death, the author wrestles with questions of deity and the age old question, If there is a God, how could he allow this to happen? And if you know me, you’ll know that the answers to such questions and, perhaps even more, the grappling with such questions, is of great interest to me. I always find it fascinating to see how people fight through such questions in times of great sorrow. Sometimes they are drawn closer to God and sometimes they turn their backs on him altogether. But in either case they are never the same.

Rosenblatt waits only a few pages before telling the reader his views on God’s role in his daughter’s death. “I cursed God. In a way, believing in God made Amy’s death more, not less, comprehensible, since the God I believe in is not beneficent. He doesn’t care. A friend was visiting Jerusalem when he get the news about Amy. He kicked the Wailing Wall, and said, ‘**** you, God!’ My sentiments exactly.” That anger toward God, a God whose existence he will really not even admit, is a subtle undertone through the book. Later on, reflecting on the fact that of those born with Amy’s heart anomaly, only the smallest percentage ever die from it, he says, “To find out, definitively, that Amy’s death was one in a million or a trillion would only deepen my anger.”

And yet somehow he wants to admit a glimpse of life after death, of something that will make sense of the tragedy. “From the outset, Ginny has told me she feels Amy’s spirit around us. From time to time I have repeated that thought to the children, but I have felt Amy’s spirit only fleetingly. My anger at God remains unabated, and it may be that I do not wish to concede Him anything as good or as kind as providing the superintending presence of my daughter. I know what comfort it gives people to think of the dead as nearby. It would be nice as well to think that the dead are happier to be close to us. But, I am more likely simply to accept Lewis Thomas’s idea of an afterlife based on the principle that nothing in nature disappears, and to go no further. The only spiritual thought that has come to me is a kind of prayer to Amy that we are doing what she would have us do.”

It is sad, really, how he looks for the right things in the wrong places and ends up only more frustrated, more angry, more uncertain. There is no redemption here, no peace or meaning. No joy.

But there are still lessons to learn. And maybe the book’s greatest lesson is one the author has discovered. He realizes that, having heard from Amy’s friends and family members and everyone who knew her at one time or another, he knows his daughter in death in a way he did not know her in life. “I do not know her any better,” he says, “(I doubt that I could know her any better), but there was so much to her life that I was unaware of until now, when I speak with her friends and colleagues and learn of this sound decision or of that small gesture of thoughtfulness. … The distance of death reveals Amy’s stature to me. My daughter mattered to the histories of others.”

It is only in death that we are really known. This is why it is so much better to read biographies of the dead than of the living. Any man may make himself grand in life and any man may appear insignificant in life. But death is the great leveler. Death has a way of drawing out the truth. With death comes the passage of time and through it, a more trustworthy assessment.

For the kind of book Making Toast is, a father writing about the sudden loss of his only daughter, it is surprisingly unemotional and unengaging. Rosenblatt is a good writer, no doubt. But somehow there is a strange emotional gap between what he must really feel and what he writes. It’s not a bad book, per se, but neither is it an excellent one. Yet still it is interesting in its own way, as we are given a glimpse of a family trying to hold itself together in the face of tragedy. One might only wish they had turned to God instead of away from him through it all. Then, perhaps, they might not hold that the death was in vain.

Verdict: Read it if you want to better understand how Christ redeems death.

There were 9 books added to the list of bestsellers in February, 7 in the first two weeks and just 2 over the course of the next two weeks. That offered me a bit of a respite which I (typically) did not use as well as I should have. Nevertheless…

Here are the books I reviewed this month:

• Evidence of the Afterlife by Jeffrey Long
• Drive by Daniel Pink
• Just Kids by Patti Smith
• I Am Ozzy by Ozzy Osbourne
• The Politician by Andrew Young
• Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell
• Making Rounds with Oscar by David Dosa
• Staying True by Jenny Sanford
• Courting Disaster by Marc Thiessen
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
• A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity by Bill O’Reilly
• Willie Mays by James Hirsch

Three of those books I purchased in hardcover while the rest I read on my Kindle.

The only two I have yet to review are:

• Anticancer by David Servan-Schreiber
• Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt

If all goes well, I will have reviews of both of those by the end of the week. And then, for the first time in my life, I will be all caught up.

In terms of categories those books fall into, it goes something like this (remembering that categories are often quite difficult to define):

• Biography (5) – Just Kids, I Am Ozzy, Staying True, A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity, Willie Mays
• Politics (3) – Courting Disaster, The Politician, Intellectuals and Society
• Business (1) – Drive
• Health (1) – Making Rounds with Oscar
• Medicine (1) – The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
• Religion (1) – Evidence of the Afterlife

Unless I miss my guess, biography and politics are going to prove the dominant forces on the list this year.

And already we are a week into March and the reading continues…

Coming up this week I’ll have a belated round-up of what I read and reviewed in February. And then I should have reviews of these two new titles. I should also say a word on how I’ve found the 10MillionWords experience to this point. Stay tuned for that.

When you read of hedge funds, ATQs, statistical arbitrage, credit default swaps and so many of the other terms that have very suddenly found their way into common parlance, you are speaking of the work of quants. Quantitative analysts are mathematicians or physicists or people from related disciplines who have found a role to play in the world of economics. The Times says, “Seduced by a vision of mathematical elegance underlying some of the messiest of human activities, they apply skills they once hoped to use to untangle string theory or the nervous system to making money.” Seeing the world markets as akin to the universe, a mystery to be solved, they set out to construct impossibly complex formulas and algorithms that can turn money into more money.

Yes, they can turn money into more money. But they can also turn credit into money and risk into money and pretty much everything else into money. The problem is that much of the wealth they were able to produce at the end of this process was created by borrowing billions and by increasing leverage to dangerous levels. Much of it was a very elaborate kind of fiction, a giant bubble just waiting to be deflated. Though many quants were convinced that the formulas were foolproof and that the flow of money could never dry up, the events of 2007 and 2008 proved them wrong. Suddenly the truth they thought they knew was reversed and recklessly-constructed edifices came crashing down. Hundreds of billions of dollars evaporated overnight and very nearly took world economies with them. And I am left asking, if money can vanish into thin air, did it really and truly exist in the first place? What exactly was it that these people were creating?

In this book the author writes often of the ultimate quest of the quants. The quants, more than anything else, want to discover the Truth. Truth, in their lexicon, describes the mathematical knowledge that would once and for all settle how the markets work. They want to solve the markets just as they’ve solved the Rubic’s Cube or the game of Blackjack. They pursue this Truth with abandon at times, pursuing it as one might devote oneself to a deity or, worse, a functional deity such as an addiction. Their Truth is their god.

It seems to me that at the heart of the work of the quants is the age-old combination of obsession and greed. In their world, making money is not a means to an end, but is an end in and of itself. They do not create anything beyond money and offer nothing beyond the fabrication of wealth. They are, essentially, gamblers. And throughout this book Patterson shows how many of these men turned first to gambling and only later to the ultimate poker game of Wall Street. Many of these quants are notorious gamblers still, finding the old thrill at the tables or at the trading desk.

As much as Too Big to Fail or On the Brink, The Quants shows just how close we were to a complete economic meltdown. And more than those other books, it shows how greed–unbridled greed combined with a worldview that treats life as if it is a kind of game–was at the heart of so much of it. A small handful of utterly brilliant individuals proved themselves hopelessly, utterly foolish. They gambled with their own money, they gambled with other people’s money, and they gambled with the world economy. In the end, only providence saved us from an epic disaster.

In The Quants Patterson neatly combines the biographical with the economic, tying together the stories of the quants themselves with the work they did and the economic turmoil they caused. It combines into an intriguing combination that makes the book a joy to read. Though the subject matter can at times be difficult and obscure, Patterson makes it accessible and enjoyable. I highly recommend this one.

Verdict: Read it if you are even the least bit intrigued by the subject matter.

Is this book business? Politics? Memoir? I hardly even know how to categorize it. Those categories all overlap as Paulson weaves together this account of the crisis as he saw it and, in his unique position, sought to overcome it.

On the Brink is less about what caused the downturn and more about what Paulson and others did to help America get through it and, in time (hopefully), recover from it. These decisions are often exhaustively detailed in day-by-day and moment-by-moment fashion. Paulson kept meticulous records of what he did, who he called and who he interacted with and here he shares those records with the world. Whether talking to his wife about their Christian Science faith or talking to politicians from nations on the other side of the world, he seeks to let the reader into his life.

This is not fast-paced reading; in fact, for most people it may well prove exhausting. Paulson does not expend a lot of effort in explaining the background of the crisis or in adapting the lexicon of his business world. Many terms will pass over the head of the average reader, I am sure (this was certainly the case with me and would have been more notable still had I not already read several books on the topic).

Yet, despite the plodding pace, it is interesting to hear Paulson’s defense of the decisions he and others had to make. It is easy for the armchair quarterbacks among us to announce what they would have done in his place, but as Paulson provides a glimpse at the decisions he was facing and the political realities he had to deal with, the black and white does turn to varying shades of gray. Though you may still rue the decisions he made, at the very least I believe you will have greater respect for the man and the grueling choices he faced.

Verdict: Read it if you just need to know what happened and why.