5 Smart Books: Money Matters, Iconic Battles

With Greece in an economic uproar, and Britain perhaps not far behind, how is a mere personal investor going to navigate finances when mighty nations can't? Our staff has here a couple of books that should help the everyday investor cope with money matters.

These new releases help everyday investors cope, and get a handle on history.

Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich return with a revised edition of their advice on avoiding financial mistakes, while investment guru Phil Town offers a plan for making money by not relying on the experts. We've also got a new look at iconic battles: Waterloo and the Crusades, and a novel about a war-ravaged country that offers a new spin on Conrad-like adventures.

By Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich
Simon & Schuster; $15
Reviewed by: Robert J. Hughes

Economics may be a science, but the how and why of our spending, investing, saving and overall money handling are much harder to quantify. In this newly revised edition of their 1999 book, authors Belsky -- editor of ESPN The Magazine -- and Gilovich -- a psychology professor -- take us point-by-point through our various actions when it comes to cash. Or credit. Or investing.

This is a study in behavioral economics that is written in clear, straightforward prose, without any of the finger-wagging you sometimes see in books geared toward people hoping to clear up their finances. Belsky and Gilovich point out some of the common mistakes all of us make in daily transactions, such as mental accounting (we're often wrong about what we think we're actually spending for something), the continuing perils of credit-card purchases (we spend more than we have, because we don't think of it as real money) and decision paralysis (the more choices one has, the harder it is to choose).

There is also a wealth of sound advice for investors. You might not be aware, for instance, that some people base important investment decisions on a certain fact or reference, whether that fact is relevant or not. There's also the problem of overconfidence: Investors aren't as smart as they think they are.

This very helpful book is aimed at the novice and the expert, and you come away from it somewhat chastened by your own financial mistakes, but hopeful that you might learn a thing or two about holding onto your hard-earned cash. The authors don't offer simplistic solutions, but hard facts and sound advice.

Making Big Money Is the Best Revenge

By Phil Town
Crown Business; $26.99
Reviewed by: Robert J. Hughes

In his new book, investment guru Phil Town, author of "Rule #1," outlines the ways in which investors can profit by avoiding the financial services industry entirely. Basically, it means taking charge of your portfolio and not trusting your future to mutual fund advisors, who Town says are in the "asset-collection business" rather than the investing one.

Town argues that investors need to understand the concept of stockpiling, used most famously by Warren Buffett. This is an investing strategy where you buy stocks in businesses you like (and businesses you like should be businesses you'd like to own) with the understanding that the stock will go down so you can buy more shares, until the stock goes up and you've made a lot of money.

Along with this is understanding the nature of the business in which you're buying stock. A company should have meaning to the investor, should be protected from competition -- by being durable and profitable -- and have management that is dedicated, passionate, honest. Town realizes that these are hard qualities to come by, but investors such as Buffett have found them, so they do exist.

Town writes in the manner of a seminar speaker: with great enthusiasm and a lot of "take-away" points. But that doesn't mean what he says isn't worthwhile. It is. It may seem like too much work to undertake -- many people would rather have others do the managing of their money for them -- but Town makes a good case for taking the reins of your money future into your own hands.

A Modern History of the Crusades

By: Jonathan Phillips
Random House; $30
Reviewed by: Will Swarts

The sweep of history and the attendant clashes between Islam and Christianity get a thorough recounting here. Jonathan Phillips' one-volume history hits all the high -- or low -- points of the seven major European forays into the Holy Land, by the Catholic Church and royals in quests whose motivations to control the land of Jesus Christ's life and birth were both valiant and venal.

Phillips writes many well-limned sketches of prominent figures in the saga of the Crusades from their start with the first quest in 1095 to capture Jerusalem to their end in 1492 with the trial of the Knights Templar. He also offers a bruising array of dates and vividly sketched battle accounts, many of which are so gruesome as to nearly defy belief. Phillips, a professor of crusading history at the University of London, also deftly weaves in Muslim sources that define the terminology of jihad, or holy war, through the 11th and 12th centuries. This fills out the narrative and offers a perspective throughout the book that gives it an essential quality for the interested, non-scholarly contemporary reader.

In particular, Phillips provides sharply drawn portraits of 12th-century foes, England's King Richard III, aka "Richard the Lionhearted," and Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, the Sultan of Egypt and Syria, known as Saladin. Both leaders had reputations for rectitude and fierceness that earned them respect among the other's troops and officers. Also, Phillips sketches the many instances of Muslim-Christian cooperation in the Holy Land, from trade links to political arrangements that variously provided degrees of comity, if not actual peace, since neither competing theology could justify breaking off conflict.

In a closing chapter on "New Crusaders," from Sir Walter Scott to Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush, Phillips argues that the roots of the actual crusades have supplied a linguistic shorthand that is all too easily invoked in justification of many ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and throughout the world.

By Jeremy Black
Random House; $26
Reviewed by: Jami Makan

If you don't know much about history, you can be excused for thinking the Battle of Waterloo erupted in Washington, D.C., circa 2009. That's because critics have been using the word "Waterloo" to blast the Democrats' massive health care push. In July 2009, South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint famously said, "If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him." Around this time, Google Trends measured a huge spike in news stories mentioning Waterloo.

The term Waterloo, of course, has come to mean any life-changing event where one party is so soundly defeated that his career is over. The actual Waterloo had nothing to do with soaring insurance premiums or saving Grandma's Medicare Advantage. It was a bloody 1815 battle waged in present-day Belgium. On one side: a French army led by Napoleon. On the other: a Prussian army led by Gebhard von Bl cher and a coalition commanded by the Duke of Wellington. The upshot: Napoleon lost, and was subsequently imprisoned and exiled. He had met his Waterloo, as the saying goes.

Since then, historians have been drawn to this dramatic battle again and again, to look at options available to both sides, to what Napoleon could have done that might have turned the tide (although he was a military despot, it doesn't diminish his fascination for military strategists). History professor Jeremy Black, who has written on the era, here takes an in-depth look at this epic showdown. Black discusses how Waterloo became the iconic battle that launched Britain's 19th-century dominance as a world power, and how immediately afterward, the battle itself was referred to again and again to discuss other seismic national conflicts.

Although Black is a sure-handed guide to the battle and to its aftermath politically and culturally, he tends to write less here for a popular, casual audience and more for an academic one. For us normal readers, an encyclopedia might offer a clearer picture of the conflict. But the military-history buffs out there (and there are many) should appreciate Black's copious details and sometimes-obscure references.

By David McConnell
Alyson Books; $14.95
Reviewed by: Robert J. Hughes

A revolution-ravaged city. A shipment of gold. Warring factions. Lawlessness. Sounds like the setting for a Conrad tale. In his new novel, author McConnell visits Conradian territory and gives it a lyrical postmodern spin, in a story of intrigue that, like Conrad, explores the role of an observer of human adventures and failures who is also something of a failed adventurer himself.

The setting for "The Silver Hearted" is a coastal city -- unnamed -- that could be tropical, Middle Eastern or subequatorial but also evokes such hot zones as Bosnia. The protagonist -- also unnamed -- is trying to leave the city amid its violent political insurrection, with a horde of silver coins he is transporting for a company. The effect gives the reader a sense of dislocation, of being in a war zone, of trying to live in the uncertain seconds of upheaval.

McConnell has written a thriller that also, like a Conrad novel, explores conflicting motivations and a world without heroism, only survival.