ETTY HILLESUM DIED IN AUSCHWITZ ON 30 NOVEMBER 1943

Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries, 1941-1943 and Letters from Westerbork, Translated from the Dutch by Arnold J. Pomerans, Foreword by Eva Hoffman, and Introduction and notes by Jan G. Gaarlandt (New York: Henry Holt, 1996) ("We know little about Etty's life before the war. Esther--her official first name--was born on 15 January 1914 in Middelburg...." Id. at xv. From a diary entry, from Amsterdam, dated 18 December 1942: "I know that those who hate have a good reason to do so. But why should we always have to choose the cheapest and easiest way? It has been brought home forcibly to me here how every atom of hatred added to the world makes it an even more inhospitable place. And I also believe, childishly perhaps but stubbornly, that the earth will become more habitable again only through the love that the Jew Paul described to the citizens of Corinth in the thirteen chapter of his first letter." Id. at 256. From a letter dated 10 July 1943: "This is something people refuse to admit to themselves: at a given point you can no longer do, but can only be and accept. And although that is something I learned a long time ago, I also know that one can only accept for oneself and not for others, And that's what is so desperately difficult for me here. Mother and Mischa still want to 'do,' to turn the whole world upside down, but I know we can't do anything about it. I have never been able to 'do' anything; I can only let things take their course and if need be, suffer. This is where my strength lies, and it is a great strength indeed. But for myself, not for others." Id. at 314. "Etty Hillesum died in Auschwitz on 30 November 1943." Id. at 365.).

SUGGESTED FICTION, or what to read to balance the brain when teaching Corporate Finance, Secured Transactions and Mergers & Acquisitions

Andre Aciman, Harvard Square: A Novel (New York & London: Norton, 2013) (See Clancy Martin, "Taxi Driver," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 5/5/2013).

Benjamin Black (aka John Banville), Holy Orders (A Quirke Novel) (New York: Henry Holt, 2013).

J. M. Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus (New York: Viking, 2013) (See Joyce Carol Oates, "Saving Grace," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 9/1/2013).

Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at The End of The Lane: A Novel (New York: William Morrow, 2013) (See Benjamin Percy, "It All Floods Back," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 6/30/2013.).

David Gilbert, & Sons: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2013) (See Blake Bailey, "The Descendants," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 7/28/2013.)

Andrew Sean Greer, The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells (New York: Ecco, 2013) (See David Leavitt, "Second and Third Chances," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 7/14/2013.).

Pico Iyer, Abandon: A Romance (New York: Knopf, 2003) (From the bookjacket: "Abandon is a mystical romance in the classic Persian tradition brought into the bleached sunlight of Southern California today. But it is also an unexpected and distinctive look at the clash between Islam and the West, at a time when Los Angeles is partly run by Iranian exiles and the long-closed cities of Iran are slowly opening up to Westerners.").

Kevin Kwan, Crazy Rich Asians: A Novel (New York: Doubleday, 2013).

Alexander Maksik, A Marker to Measure Drift: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2013) (See Norman Rush, "Escaping the Past," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 8/25/2013).

Philipp Meyer, American Rust: A Novel (New York: Spiegal & Grau, 2010).

Philipp Meyer, The Son: A Novel (New York: Ecco, 2013) ("A man, a life--it was barely worth mentioning. The Visigoths had destroyed the Romans, and had themselves been destroyed by the Muslims. Who were destroyed by the Spanish and Portuguese. You did not need Hitler to see that it was not a pleasant story. And yet here she was. Breathing, having these thoughts. The blood that ran through history would fill every river and ocean, but despite all that butchery, here you were." Id. at 415. Also see Will Blythe, "Lone Star" NYT Book Review, Sunday, 6/16/2013.).

Benjamin Percy, Red Moon: A Novel (New York & Boston: Grand Central Publishing, 2013) (See Justin Cronin, "Cry Wolf," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 6/16/2013.).

J. K. Rowling (aka Robert Galbraith), The Cuckoo's Calling (New York: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown, 2013).

Carlos Ruiz Zafron, The Watcher in the Shadows, translated from the Spanish by Lucia Graves (New York & Boston: Little, Brown, 1995, 2013).

Colm Toibin, The Testament of Mary (New York: Scribner, 2012).

DANCE THE DANCE THAT IS BEING DANCED

"I remember what my grandmother used to tell me: 'It don't make no difference how well you fox-trot if everybody else is dancin' the two-step.'' James Alan McPherson, 'The Story of the Scar,' reprinted in Elbow Room: Stories (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1993), at 116, 124. Often times, especially in my professional life, I sense I am not dancing the dance being danced by everyone else.

James Alan McPherson, Crabcakes: A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).

James Alan McPherson, A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000) (I know how it feels to be an exile in one's country, in one's own home.).

THE RACE IS LONG

Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain: A Novel (New York: Harper, 2008) ("'No race has ever been won in the first corner,' he said. 'But plenty of races have been lost there.' I looked at him. He reached out, settled his hand on the crown of my head, and scratched my ear like he has always done. 'That's right.' he said to me. 'If we're going to be a cliche, let's be a positive cliche.' Yes: the race is long--to finish first, first you must finish." Id. at 206.).

IN THE EVENT OF A CATASTROPHE

"PRACTICAL RECOMMENDATIONS IN THE EVENT OF A CATASTROPHE

    It usually begins innocently enough with an acceleration, unnoticeable at first, of the turning of the earth. Leave home at once and do not bring along any of your family. Take a few indispensable things. Place yourself as far as possible from the centre, near the forests the seas or the mountains, before the whirling motion as it gets stronger from minute to minute begins to pour in towards the middle, suffocating in ghettoes, closets, basements. Hang on forcefully to the outer circumference. Keep your head down. Have your two hands constantly free,.Take good care of the muscles of your legs."

Reprinted in Zbigniew Herbert, The Collected Poems: 1956-1998, translated from the Polish and edited by Alissa Valles, with additional translations by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott, & an introduction by Adam Zagajewski (New York: Ecco, 2007), at 262.

THE PROBLEM OF FULL EMPLOYMENT

Robert Pollin, Back to Full Employment (Book Review Books) (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 2012) ("[W]e have to pose the question of full employment more precisely. It is not simply a matter of everyone spending their days trying to scratch out a living somehow. A workable definition of full employment should refer to an abundance of decent jobs." Id. at 12. "The real problem with U.S. employment conditions has never been globalization broadly defined, nor is it immigration or the trade deficit. [] The real problem is ... the absence of a full employment agenda tat takes account of the challenges presented by globalization, along with other major challenges." Id. at 62-63.).

BEYOND MERE COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS OF THE VALUE OF NATURE

David Keith, A Case For Climate Change Engineering (Boston Review Books) (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London. England, 2013) ("The language of environmental advocacy has become increasingly technocratic. Calls for action rely almost exclusively on (seemingly) objective quantitative measures of cost and benefit that amount to a crude appeal to self-interest. We are urged to protect natural landscapes not because walking through them brings pleasure, but because of the ecosystem services they yield, services like oxygen and clean water. These arguments have merit, but I think they obscure much of what actually drives people's choices. If we are protecting a rainforest because it stores carbon or yields wonder drugs, then we should be happy to cut down the forest if some carbon storage machine or molecular biotech lab can better provide these services. If we are protecting a wetland for its ability to hold and purify water then we should be happy to replace it with a housing project development if that development includes technologies for water storage and filtration that does these jobs better than the wetland. For me the utilitarian benefits of nature are a grossly insufficient measure of its value. Id. at xv-xvi,).

BURYING ONE'S HEAD IN THE SAND REGARDING CLIMATE CHANGE

Kerry Emanuel, What We Know About Climate Change, 2d. ed. ( Boston Review Book) (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: MIT Press, 2013) (But even while science has reached a strong consensus that climate is indeed changing, that the change is caused mostly by us, and that it poses important risks, public recognition of and concern about these risks has diminished, particularly in the United States." Id. at ix-x. "There are other obstacles to taking a sensible approach to the climate problem. We have precious few representatives in Congress with a background or interest in science, and some of the others display an active contempt for the subject. As long as we continue to elect scientific illiterates such as James Inhofe, who believes global warming to be a hoax, we will be discouraged from engaging in intelligent debate at the policy level." Id. at 92-93.).

AND THE NATIONS WERE ANGRY, AND THY WRATH IS COME . . . ---REVELATIONS, XI:18

A. Scott Berg, Wilson (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2013) Yet, see Kevin Baker, "Professor in Chief," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 9/22/2013, at 14: "Nowhere does [Berg] address Margaret MacMillan's argument in 'Paris 1919' that the whole idea of a tragic peace is overstated--that deconstructing the ancient empires leveled by World War I was too complicated a task to have ever gone well, and that there was no conceivable peace the Germans would not have resented." "Yes, we should have joined Wilson's League. But how much would a deeply isolationist and distracted America have wanted to intervent in the Europe of the 1930s? How much would England and France have allowed us to do so? In short, did Woodrow Wilson's martydom really matter so much in the end . . . or is it more a story we like to tell ourselves?").

Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York: Harper, 2013) ("It is the central argument of this book that the events of July 1914 make sense only when we illuminate the journeys travelled by the key decision-makers. To do this, we need to do more than simply revisit the sequence of international 'crises' that preceded the outbreak of war--we need to understand how those events were experienced and woven into narratives that structured perceptions and motivated behaviour. Why did the men whose decisions took Europe to war behave and see things as they did? How did the sense of fearfulness and foreboding that one finds in so many of the sources connect with the arrogance and swaggering we encounter--often in the very same individuals? Why did such exotic features of the pre-war scene as the Albanian Question and the 'Bulgarian loan' matter so much, and how were they joined up in the heads of those who had political power? When decision-makers discoursed on the international situation or on external threats, were they seeing something real, or projecting their own fears and desires on to their opponents, or both? The aim has been to reconstruct as vividly as possible the highly dynamic 'decision posiition' occupied by the key actors before and during the summer of 1913." Id. at xxx-xxxi. "In [a] sense, the protagonists of 1914 were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world." Id. at 562. "The last section of the book was written at the height of the Eurozone financial crisis or 2011-2012-- present-day event of baffling complexity. It was notable that the actors in the Eurozone crisis, like those of 1914, were aware that there was a possible outcome that would be generally catastrophic (the failure of the euro). All the key protagonists hoped that this would not happen, but in addition to this shared interest, they also had special--and conflicting--interests of their own. Given the inter-relationships across the system, the consequences of any one action depended on the responsive actions of others, which were hard to calculate in advance, because of the opacity of decision-making processes. And all the while, political actors in the Eurozone crisis exploited the possibility of the general catastrophe as leverage in securing their own specific advantages." Id. at 555. Also, see Harold Evans, "On The Brink," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 5/12/2013.).

Charles Emmerson, In Search of the World Before the Great War (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013) ("While enticing domestic migrants, California nonetheless had long feared foreign immigration, particularly from Asia, and had periodically sought to limit it. While the Chinese preferred San Francisco, Japanese migrant preferred the ear around Los Angeles, The numbers involved were small--8,000 Japanese in the whole LA county by 1910--but fear and prejudice were amplified by local politics, and a push-button issue was constructed out of little more than worked-up imaginings of the 'Yellow Peril'. 'Mu neighbor is a Jap', one farmer told a journalist: 'He has an eighty acre place next to mine and he is a smart fellow. He has a white woman living in his house and upon that white woman's knee is a baby. Now what is that baby? It isn't white. I isn't Japanese. I'll tell you what it is, It is the beginning of a problem--the biggest race problem the world has ever known.'" "In 1913 the California legislature in Sacramento prepared to pass legislation which would disbar Japanese farmers for owning land in the state. Washington advised California against it, on the basis that it would offend Asian sensibilities and might, as Japanese diplomats insisted, run counter to the United States' treaty commitments. The Los Angeles Times appealed to the legislators' common sense, leaving 'the Japanese in our midst to cultivate their vegetable gardens, and clean cloths, and make and sell kimonos without molestation'. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan was dispatched on a five-day trek to Sacramento to try and negotiate a for of word s which would allow all sides to claim a measure of victory. But the law Bryan lobbied against was passed in spite of him." Id. at 197.).

Max Hastings, Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (New Knopf, 2013) (See Max Boot, "If One Knew," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 10/27/2013.).

Margaret MacMillian, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (New York: Random House, 2013) ("The future Supreme Allied Commander in the Great War, Ferdinand Foch, then an instructor at the French Staff College, worked out an elaborate proof in 1903 to show that two battalions of attackers would fire 10,000 more bullets than one battalion of defenders and so gain the upper hand. Technology and the power of defense would be overcome by making sure that the attackers outnumbered the defense by a large margin. Far more important than numbers, though, was the psychological factor: soldiers must be motivated through their training and by appeals to their patriotism both to attack and to die. They, and their generals, must accept large losses without losing heart. So, for example, bayonet drill was seen as important because it imbued the soldiers with the desire to attack. And so were dashing uniforms: 'Le pantalon rouge, c'est la France!' exclaimed a formerWar Minister when his successor proposed to take away the traditional red trousers and put the French soldiers into camouflage dress." Id. at 330. Also see Richard Aldous,"How Did It All Happen?," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 10/27/2013.).

David Stevenson, Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy (New York: Basic Books, 2004) (In America the Committee on Public Information was even more ambitious: 75,000 lectures by 'four-minute men', 6,000 press releases, exhibitions visited by over ten million people, and 75 million copies distributed in several languages over thirty pamphlets on the United States and the war. Its director, George Creel, and the publicists he co-opted had an evangelistic fervour for communicating the justice of America's cause, but American ideological mobilization had a darker side. The Sedition Act, passed in May 1918, prohibited abusive or disloyal language about the constitution, flag, government, and army or navy uniform, Wilson endorsing it to head off something even more extreme. The American Protection League, a private organization with federal government funding, enrolled 250,000 citizens to spy on neighbors and work colleagues. It opened mail, intercepted telegrams, and carried our raids against suspected draft evaders, preparing the ground for the post-war 'red scare'. The war became a disaster for the American progressive and pacifist movements, and by encouraging the growth of nationalist xenophobia (for example, in speeches condemning disloyal ethnic minorities) the president played sorcerer's apprentice, weakening the supporters of his diplomatic objectives. His home and foreign policies were poorly matched, and although he foresaw the danger his own actions magnified it. At the end of the war, when his ideals seemed to triumph abroad, he was politically humiliated at home." Id. at 374.).

David Stevenson, With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2011).

Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August; The Proud Tower, edited by Margaret MacMillian (New York: Library of America, 2012).

"LIFE IS A STINKING DOOMED CELL."

Jeanette Winterson, The Daylight Gate (New York: Grove, 2012) ("She thinks about Hell, and is it like this? She thinks that punishments of the Fiend are made out of human imaginings. Only humans can know what it means to strip a human being of being human. She thinks the Fiend has a kind of purity that humans never have. She thinks that godliness is ridiculous because it exists to hide this; this stinking airless doomed cell. Life is a stinking airless doomed cell. Why do we pretend?" Id. at 94-95.).

"THE DIVERGENCE OF TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS FROM MORAL AND SPIRITUAL PROGRESS"

Jonathan Franzen, The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus (A Bilingual Edition), translated and Annotated by Jonathan Franzen with assistance and additional notes from Paul Reitter and Daniel Kehlmann (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013) ("Culture can't catch its breath: to me the most impressive thing about Kraus as a thinker may be how early an clearly he recognized the divergence of technological progress from moral and spiritual progress. A succeeding century of the former, involving scientific advances that would have seemed miraculous not long ago, has resulted in high-resolution smartphone videos of dudes dropping Mentos into liter bottles of Diet Pepsi and shouting 'Whoa!' while they geyser. Technovisionaries of the 1990s promised that the Internet would usher in a new word of peace, love, and understanding, and Twitter executives are still banging the utopianist drum, claiming foundational credit for the Arab Spring. To listen to them, you'd think it was inconceivable that Eastern Europe could liberate itself from the Soviets without the benefit of cell phones, or that a butch of Americans revolted against the British and produced the U.S. Constitution without 4G capability." Id. at 140.).