looking for a little light reading... only to find myself with the most disturbing book about capitalism ever. The Ax is much more upsetting than any Left- wing novels denouncing free markets from the likes of John Steinbeck or Upton Sinclair. Westlake takes property rights, suppoly and demand, profit and loss, corporate structure, senior management motivations, investor incentives, and ruthless competition as givens. Then Westlake ups the ruthless to a lethal dose. The Ax debuted during the glory days of NAFTA with every corporate downsize and shift to lower labor costs greeted with a “hooray” from Wall Street. The narrator, Burke Devore, loses his middle- management job running the production line at a paper mill that moves to Canada. Devore is an articulate man who rose to what seemed to be a safe and comfortable height on the corporate ladder. He finds his finances, family, and whole life wrecked by two years of unemployment. And there are other paper mill
production-line managers out of work, too – some of them better qualified than he is. In an all too convincing way, Devore explains what goes wrong with capitalism when investors quit paying attention to anything except a corporation’s share price... when C-suite management loses touch with its chain of command... when a business becomes cynical about its workforce... when the cooperation that is the requisite other half of competition disappears from the free market... and when it’s every man for himself. But Devore makes all this clear not because he wants to change the economic system but because he wants to join it – as the kind of guy you don’t want on your side. Devore researches what well-paid jobs are still available in his industry. Then he tracks down the best-qualified applicants for those jobs. And he sets out to kill them. I won’t give away the ending. But I will provide a hint... Depending on which way your moral compass is spinning these days, everything turns out for the best.
DOUBLE RECOMMENDED EMPIRE OF THE SUMMER MOON Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History S.C. Gwynne TOM CARROLL This book is the history I never learned in school – it’s about the Comanche Indians in western Texas from 1830s to early 1900s. Great book. BILL SHAW A fascinating true story of the mixed-race son of a kidnapped settler – if you enjoy the history of the American West, you›ll have a tough time putting this one down.
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