Money for Nothing: One Man’s Journey Through the Dark Side of Lottery Millions, by Edward Ugel

Mr. Ugel spent the better part of a decade working for a company that buys lottery annuities in exchange for lump-sum payments to lottery winners. His account of the experience reflects a mixture of pride (by his own account, he was a heck of a salesman) and shame (his business, while not necesarily predatory, certainly thrived on the vulnerability and need of its clients; he characterizes one of his sales as something that continues to haunt him).

Mr. Ugel’s story is constrained by an obligation to not disclose specifics of the company for which he worked or the clients who employed his company’s services. The result is a narrative that is largely circumspect, one that skates close enough to proprietary information to allow readers to draw inferences that feel reasonably accurate.

He also talks very generally about the lottery business, and about how prizes and payouts work. It is unclear whether this is another case of needing to not give away too much information, or merely the specialist’s (and first time author’s) tendency to assume that everyone knows as much as they do about their particular area of expertise. He writes broadly about the payout structure of annuities, but far less about what happens when one wins the lottery, and about how the clients with whom he worked got from their winning ticket to seeking a lump sum payment. Again, he leaves the reader to fill in those blanks for themselves, and this is a real weakness of the book.

You Can Lead a Politician to Water But You Can’t Make Him Think: Ten Commandments for Texas Politics, by Kinky Friedman

Mr. Friedman ran as an independent candidate for governor of Texas in 2006. The book tells the story of his unsuccessful bid to unseat incumbent governor Rick Perry (a defeat he attributes in large part to too little money, too much voter apathy, and the hammerlock dominance of the Republican and Democratic parties on the Texas [and American] political system). It also serves as a reiteration of the principles on which he ran: common sense (in Mr. Friedman’s world view) and no-nonsense ideas for (among other things) education, immigration, and electoral reform.

Are his ideas realistic? Probably not given the entrenched interest that would be affected. On the other hand, he is addressing problems that need solutions, and his ideas are no crazier, or less practical, than any others put forward.

I Am America (And So Can You!), by Stephen Colbert

Eh. This book doesn’t really work for me. It’s satire, but it’s flat (does that make it flattire?). I don’t believe this is the fault of the material, but rather the medium.

I’m not a big fan of audio books (except for the John Cleese narrated version of C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters. That’s @#$%ing amazing), but I believe hearing the text of the book with Mr. Colbert’s delivery behind it would elevate the humor in ways that straight text didn’t manage for me.

Or maybe it wouldn’t be funny either way. I haven’t seen enough of The Colbert Report to know whether his television persona nets out as grating or hilarious, but based on work of his I have seen (The Daily Show, Strangers With Candy, Harvey Birdman, etc.) I’m optimistic. Not optimistic enough to run out and buy an audio book, you understand. Just generally optimistic in a rainbows and puppies kind of way.

Making Money, by Terry Pratchett

Imagine you are a powerful leader — king, president, senator, mayor, what have you. You have been in your job for a very long time, and have secured a reputation as a tyrant (with modifiers ranging from benevolent to absolute, depending on who is doing the modifying, and how much they truly understand about what leadership requires). At the same time, you are smart and savvy enough (not only do you not miss anything, but you know the precise location and configuration of every possible thing those around you do miss) to know that nothing lasts forever, including your own term of leadership. What do you do?

On the surface, Terry Pratchett’s latest Discworld novel is about banking and finance. It’s the second book featuring Moist von Lipwig (introduced in Going Postal, a book ostensibly about the postal system in Mr. Pratchett’s all too realistically fictional city of Ankh-Morpork). Lipwig is a semi-reformed con man whom the city Patrician, the above referenced leader Lord Vetinari, spares from execution and sets to work serving the city.

In Going Postal, he resuscitates the city postal service. In Making Money, he is rewarded for his efforts by being given command of the city’s ailing Royal Bank. This being a Terry Pratchett novel, there are the required complications — including, guardianship of the dog that is the bank’s majority shareholder, missing gold, prison breaks, ancient golems, lecherous necromancers, the sudden return of a former con game partners — that Lipwig must navigate in order to keep the bank running and his skin intact.

That’s the surface story. The larger story concerns the questions posed above. This is pure speculation on my part, but the real point of the Lipwig story appears to be an attempt to answer the question How does a leader choose his successor?

In Mr. Pratchett’s previous outings, the civic leaders of Ankh-Morpork are regularly depicted as scheming incompetents with limited understanding of the reality of anything beyond their own ambition. They see power as something to grab in order to wield it as a blunt instrument. The Patrician, on the other hand, has developed his rule into a precision machine, one that keeps the city running as smoothly as so complex an organism can possibly run. What happens to that machine when he no longer operates the controls?

One possible answer is to find someone who doesn’t crave power, but who needs a challenge to feel truly alive. Then, having found such a person, to put them through a rigorous apprenticeship organizing large systems and ensuring that they not only function properly, but that people accept and embrace the integrity of these systems.

I could be wrong — predictions often are. At the same time, I read the Lipwig books as the education of the next Patrician. Presumably Mr. Pratchett still has plenty of Lord Vetinari stories to tell, but having crafted such a rich and sweeping world, I have to believe he thinks of such things. A suggestion near the end of the book would seem to bear out this speculation, but, of course, only time will tell.