Steig Larsson and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest: A Fitting Conclusion to the Millenium Trilogy

Unable to contain my suspense after reading the first two books of the Millennium Trilogy, I ordered a UK edition of Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.  The US publication is due to come out on May 5, 2010.  Stieg Larsson fans have to read this last book or they would forever be in suspense.  Those of you who have not read Stieg Larsson's books, I implore you, start with the first, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, then move to the second, The Girl Who Played with Fire.  Each volume builds on the previous.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is Lisbeth Salander, an unlikely and uniquely strange heroine.  A math genius, Salander is a master hacker, the best in the business, and previously employed by a research and security firm in Stockholm.  We meet her in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo when she is employed by social activist writer, Mikael Blomkvist, part owner of Millenium Publishing who in turn is hired by the patriarch of wealthy Swedish Vanger family to research family secrets.  Salander and Blomkvist forge a strange but loyal friendship.  Having gone through a horrific childhood in the hands of her father and the Swedish mental health system, Salander has serious relationship problems. Salander is a loner. She chooses who she works for, works with deliberate accuracy and has no qualms about intruding into other people's privacy or operating outside the law.  Skinny as a young boy, she is capable of changing her identity and fading away if she does not want to be found.  Tenacious, resilient, cunning and extremely resourceful, Salander can exact revenge on those who have harmed her and fight to the end those who plan her demise.

The writing is fast paced and gripping and the reader is compelled to keep on reading to the last page  to learn what happens to this unlikely heroine.  As in the first two books, Hornet's Nest is entertaining and answers many questions from Tattoo and Fire.  The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is long, meanders somewhat in the beginning but becomes more action packed in the last 200 pages as the reader wonders how Salander will get out of her predicament.  If she survives a head wound, will bad guys succeed in killing her? If she survives both, how will she evade her enemies in the Swedish government who are determined to return her to the modern dungeons of the mental health system.

While the Millenium Trilogy is a mystery series, the books actually decry violence to women and speak to the threats to the Swedish democratic system.  So few writers are able to weave social statements into a spell-binding novel and here, Larsson excels. Stieg Larsson was a social activist from a very young age.  He was a spokesperson against racism and right wing extremists who try to influence youth into white supremacy ideology.  He founded the Swedish Expo Foundation and became editor of its magazine, Expo.  His life was under constant threat.  He submitted manuscripts for the three Millenium books just before his death of a heart attack in 2004.  It is rumored that there was to have been a series of 10 books and that he had written the beginning and ending of a fourth book.  To the reader's misfortune, a future book is unlikely due to some estate problems which pit Larsson's father and brother against Larsson,s lifelong companion Eva Gabrielsson who had been a collaborator in the research of the novels.

Larsson was the second bestselling author in the world in 2008.  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was adapted to the screen in Sweden and released under the title, Men Who Hate Women starring Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander and Michael Nyqvist as Mikael Blomkvist.  Sony and producer Scott Rudin bought the rights to an English language remake and a US version is soon to come.   Besides leaving a wonderful trio of mystery novels, another Larsson legacy is that his success has brought the works of Swedish writers into the international scene such as earlier writer Hakan Nesser whose crime novels featuring Inspector Van Veeteren have been translated into English.

                                                       Stieg Larsson 1954-2004
                                          

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine Is Another Michael Lewis Must Read

As a senior citizen who watched helplessly as her 401K tanked down to an 001K, I read whatever could help me make heads and tails of the great 2008 economic tsunami.  In his new book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, published March 15, 2010, Michael Lewis helps ordinary people understand some of the elements of the perfect storm that brought on the problem.


The Big Short is fast paced and entertaining as the great economic fall is told in the narratives of a group of not very well known hedge fund managers who knew about the disastrous economic practices of big mortgage lenders, banks, and Wall Street firms and warned others of the impending doom.  Having been ignored, they bet against the tide and earned big money for themselves and their clients in the process. Thus, they profited from shorting the market, betting on its fall as they predicted.  Key to the storm is the greed and seduction of money of Wall Street firms matched by the seeming incompetence and denial of Wall Street to manage the snowballing tide of subprime mortgage.  Wall Street's failed risk management is discussed by the different hedge fund managers in the book.

Steve Eisman, one of the protagonists tried to describe the scenario," How do you explain to an innocent citizen of the free world the importance of a credit default swap on a double-A tranche of a subprime collateralized debt obligation?" How, indeed, would you explain that to this innocent citizen of the free world?

We, of course know it now.  We know that mortgage lenders and big brokerage houses found a way of packaging real estate units which were sold on Wall Street.  As these got gobbled up, brokers beat the bushes to find more home buyers by lowering lending standards, offering mortgage to unqualified borrowers so they could buy price-inflated homes.  When this was not enough, brokerage houses sliced and diced these mortgage packages and took out insurance in case the market went sour.  Motivated by greed and seduced by the ease with which money came, Wall Street firms operated in disregard of sound financial practice and failed to police their own.  And so on and so on. 

Michael Lewis blew into the writing world in his debut book, The Liar's Poker an entertaining and humorous account of his life as a finance analyst trainee at Salomon Brothers during the financial folly of the 1980's.  His subsequent book, The Money Ball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, about the effect of statistical analysis on baseball was a best seller. His other best seller,The Blind Side,( about football player, Michael Oher who was rescued from poverty by foster mother Leigh Anne Touhy and prodded into football stardom) was adapted into the big screen, became a blockbuster movie and earned Sandra Bullock an Oscar.  Lewis is an engaging story teller  whether he writes about himself, a inspiring biography or, in this case, an economic disaster.  He lures the reader within the first few pages to read on and soon the reader is hooked. He writes with dark humor and sarcasm helping to make the terrible outcome more palatable.

Lewis revisits his cautionary tale in the Liar's Poker in the foreword to The The Big Short as he writes of his hopes that the finance industry would have learned from the 1980's " when a great nation lost its financial mind." Alas, it did not find its mind and the American economy tumbled into a recession taking the rest of the world with it.  Sadder still, harbingers of doom appear as we continue to get into debt like borrowers of the last decade and print money like the toxic mortgage units and credit default insurance of the 2008 fiasco, the government and the finance industry seemingly impotent to stem the tide or oblivious of the need to manage the risk. As the book characters caution, there may not be an adult in charge. Meanwhile already devastated innocent citizens of the world look on helplessly.

For other scholarly information, I suggest "The Greatest Trade Ever: The Behind the Scenes Story of How John Paulsen Defied Wall Street and Made Financial History." by Gregory Zuckerman, November 2009