Sheila's Reviews

Michael Lewis' THE BIG SHORT may make you really angry but, read it, and you will actually understand why the markets crashed in 2008 - and you will be very entertained.  Lewis, a former trader at Goldman Sachs,  is the perfect narrator to those events which made our heads spin and our bank accounts hemorrhage.  He can be laugh-out-loud funny as he spotlights some of the leading characters of the debacle,  including Michael Berry, one of the very few managers who shorted the subprime mortgage market and whose Asperger's Syndrome made him immune to the herd mentality.  It's an incredible story that has drastically changed our lives. Order here

RULES OF CIVILITY, by Armor Towles, is a good old-fashioned novel of manners with overtones of F. Scott Fitzgerald.  It is set in New York, 1938, with a bright,  first-generation heroine who rises from secretary to a power in the publishing world.  The Gatsbyesque hero is Tinker Grey, an investment banker with "a smile on his face that could have lit every lamp at the North Pole."  One of the charms of Towles" novel is his recreation of the period, still mired in the Depression, on the verge of a bloody war, with a class structure struggling to preserve its elegance and boundaries - and just about to collapse.  Order here

TURN OF MIND, by Alice LaPlante, is the best literary thriller since PRESUMED INNOCENT. The narrator is a hand surgeon who has dementia,though she experiences lucid moments. She is also the prime suspect in the murder of her best friend, who was found with her fingers surgically removed. She doesn't know whether she did it. This is a page-turning thriller and a moving and fascinating glimpse into the deteriorating mind of a tightly controlled, intelligent woman, who is slowly succumbing to her disease. Alzheimer's works brilliantly as a literary device, revealing family secrets, tragedies and an ending you won't expect. It will be one of the most read and talked-about books of 2011. Order here.