At Stake: The greatest threat to world stability in history.
The Story: One man's journey of profound personal transformation in the midst of extreme international crisis.
The Title: The Lazarus Covenant
BREATHE PressPublisher of The Lazarus Covenant
Publication Date: March 2009
488 pp. 6 x 9
ISBN: 978-0-9822379-0-8
Hardcover
$24.95PRE-ORDERS ACCEPTED NOW!
Get Your Copy of THE LAZARUS COVENANT First!
The Book in One Sentence:
As chosen by the editors of American Book Review...
1. Call me Ishmael.
-Herman Melville Moby-Dick, 1851
2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
-Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 1813
3. A screaming comes across the sky.
-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, 1973
4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
-Gabriel García Márquez (trans. Gregory Rabassa), One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967
5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
-Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, 1955
6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
-Leo Tolstoy (trans. Constance Garnett), Anna Karenina, 1877
7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
-James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939
8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
-George Orwell, 1984, 1949
9. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
-Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859
10. I am an invisible man.
-Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952
11. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard.
-Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts, 1933
12. You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.
-Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1885
13. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
-Franz Kafka (trans. Breon Mitchell), The Trial, 1925
14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
-Italo Calvino (trans. William Weaver), If on a winter's night a traveler, 1979
15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
-Samuel Beckett Murphy, 1938
16. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
-J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 1951
17. Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.
-James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916
18. This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
-Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier, 1915
19. I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.
-Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 1759–1767
20. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
-Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, 1850
21. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
-James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922
22. It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
-Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford, 1830
23. One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.
-Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 1966
24. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.
-Paul Auster, City of Glass, 1985
25. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
-William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, 1929
David Farber's new book,What They Think of Us: International Perceptions of the United States since 9/11, has some intriguing insights on how other countries see the United States, post 9-11. This excerpt is from the chapter on Chinese perceptions of the United States....
China's concerns that the United States had turned actively hostile were reinforced in the early 1990s by a series of unfortunate events. One of the most unpleasant occurred in the early fall of 1993 when the Chinese ship Yin He, which was carrying a load bound for Iran, was stopped in international waters by an American navy ship.
American intelligence officers believed the vessel was carrying ingredients for chemical weapons. However, when the ship was inspected no such cargo was found. This inciedent was widely reported in the Chinese mass media, and the public was furious with the United States, especially after the American government refused to apologize for the mistake.
This event, together with U.S. efforts to block China's bid for the 2000 Olympic Games, annual scrutiny of China's most favored nation status, and Washington's constant objection throughout the 1990s to China's entry into [the] World Trade Organization, were viewed by many Chinese as a continuation of nineteenth-century Western Imperialism. Deep-rooted suspicions about American intentions toward China began, once again, to grow....
The Chinese people are extremely aware of how American decisions affect their nation. They are, to put the matter gently, wary of American unilateralism and bellicosity. While relations are generally good, both sides, with some reason, look at one another with suspicion and mistrust, which is made worse by misunderstandings....
The American people need to realize the power they have in shaping Chinese images of the United States. They need to understand that China will become an ever greater force in the world and that working with China will produce far better results than working against China. With global challenges of all kinds ever present, America surely cannot go it alone, and in that regard it matters what the Chinese people think of the United States.
In 1975, Chuck Ross, a writer with a wicked sense of humor, copied in manuscript form the first 20 pages of the 1969 National Book Award-Winning novel Steps, by Jerzy Kosinsky. Ross then submitted it as a sample chapter under his own name and sent it to four publishing houses incuding Houghton Mifflin, Kosinsky's publisher at the time. They all rejected it. Not satisfied that he had fully made his point, in 1978 and 1979 he sent the entire manuscript of Steps to 14 pubishers and 13 literary agents. They all rejected it--including Random House, which was the book's original publisher--with no indication that any of them remembered it.
This excerpt was taken from 1,000 Unforgettable Senior Moments, by Tom Friedman. Perfect reading for those moments when you need a quick laugh!
Dr. Sherwin Nuland, professor of surgery at Yale Medical School, and author of the new book, The Art of Aging argues that the quality of our last decades remains fully within our control. Aging, he says, is an art as well as a science...and even with the prospect of getting older, there's plenty of room for optimism and hope....
Here is an excerpt:
The Art of Aging
by Sherwin B. Nuland
So gradual a progression is the onset of our aging that we one day find it to be fully upon us. In its own unhurried way, age soundlessly and with persistence treads ever closer behind us on slippered feet, catches up, and finally blends itself into us—all while we are still denying its nearness. It enters at last into the depths of one's being, not only to occupy them but to become their very essence. 
In time, we not only acknowledge aging's presence within us, but come to know it as well as we knew—and still covet—the exuberant youth that once dwelt there. And then, finally, we try to reconcile ourselves to the inescapable certainty that we are now included among the elderly. Realizing how much of our dreams we must concede to that unalterable truth, we should not only watch our horizons come closer but allow them to do precisely that.
If we are wise, we draw them in until their limits can be seen; we confine them to the possible. And so, the coming closer can be good, if by means of that closeness—that limiting of expectations—we begin to see those vistas more clearly, more realistically, and as more finite than ever before. For aging can be the gift that establishes the boundaries of our lives, which previously knew far fewer confines and brooked far fewer restrictions. Everything within those boundaries becomes thus more precious than it was before: love, learning, family, work, health, and even the lessened time itself. We cherish them more, as the urgency increases to use them well.
Many are the uses of the newly recognized limits. Among their advantages is that our welcoming acceptance of them adds to the value, adds to our appreciation, adds to our ability to savor—adds to every pleasure that falls within them. The good is easier now to see; it is closer to the touch and the taking, if we are only willing to look truthfully at it there and gather it up from amid the cares that may surround it. There is much to savor during this time, magnified and given more meaning and intensity by the very finitude within which it is granted to us.
Aging has the power to concentrate not only our minds but our energies, too, because it tells us that all is no longer possible, and the richness must be more fully extracted from the lessened but nevertheless still-abundant store that remains. From here on, we must play only to our strengths. Some of the more meaningful of those strengths may be not at all less than they once were. The later decades of a life become the time for our capabilities to find an unscattered focus, and in this way increase the force of their concentrated worth. Even as age licks our joints and lessens our acuities, it brings with it the promise that there can in fact be something more, something good, if we are but willing to reach out and take hold of it. It is in the willingness and the will that the secret lies, not the secret to lengthening a life but to rewarding it for having been well used. For aging is an art. The years between its first intimations and the time of the ultimate letting go of all earthly things can—if the readiness and resolve are there—be the real harvest of our lives.
It is the purpose of this book to tell of human aging and its rewards—and also of its discontents. And the book has as its purpose as well to tell of how best to prepare for the changes that inevitably demand accommodation, demand a shift in focus, and demand a realistic assessment of goals and directions, which may be new or may be a rearrangement of the trajectory of a lifetime. We do this at every stage of life without noticing the new pattern to which we are becoming attuned, whether it be in adolescence, the twenties, or middle age. Though the changes may be more obvious as we approach our sixties and seventies, they are, in fact, only a continuation of everything that has come before. For becoming what is known as elderly is simply entering another developmental phase of life. Like all others, it has its bodily changes, its deep concerns, and its good reasons for hope and optimism.
Excerpted from The Art of Aging: A Doctor's Prescription for Well-Being by Sherwin B. Nuland. Copyright (c) 2007.
Occasionally an investment book comes along that is not replete with gimmicks; but instead offers cogent insights gathered from careful and knowledgeable analysis of markets, corporate infrastructure, and global energy trends. Dr. Stephen Leeb's The Coming Economic Collapse: How to Thrive When Oil Costs $200 a Barrel is one of those rare books (as was his first book, The Oil Factor). Dr. Leeb's prevailing thesis is that the United States is on the most dangerous economic precipice in its history. As the economies of China and India expand at record rates, pushing oil demand beyond production capacity, permanent energy shortfalls will result. Anticipating and planning for this crisis, Leeb says, will make all the difference....
My Strongest Recommendation.
Here are some excerpts from his excellent book:
The Coming Economic Collapse: How to Thrive When Oil Costs $200 a Barrel
The Only Bonds Worth Owning from Now On
One type of bond that is worth holding as inflation rises is Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS). Unlike with most bonds, the value of TIPS is protected from rising inflation. The principal and interest payments on TIPS automatically increase or decrease according to the inflation rate. The higher the inflation rate, the higher the payments. TIPS also have a built-in protection against deflation. You are guaranteed to get back your principal on maturity.
If you want steady income over the coming years, you can buy TIPS directly from the U.S. Treasury at auction four times a year (January, April, July, and October). Keep in mind that as the consumer price index rises your principal expands, and you will be taxed on the increase.
Another option is to buy units in a TIPS mutual fund, such as the Vanguard Inflation-Protected Securities Fund.
Eventualy, we hope the coming wave of inflation wil peak, just as it did in the early 1980s. That will be the time to buy long-term bonds heavily, when interest rates on bonds are beginning to fal. But until then avoid all bonds but TIPS.
Gold and Gold Shares
Gold has always been a hedge against inflation, because the federal government cannot increase the nation's supply of gold at whim, the way it can paper or electronic dollars. So as the value of dollars declines, the price of gold rises.
...God will regain popularity once people recognize that inflation is on the move. ...gold today would have to trade at about $2,800 to be on a par with its relative value to stocks in 1980. This would be equal to a sevenfold gain.
...today, a new option has become available for those who want to own bullion: exchange-traded funds (ETFs). For example, one of our favorites is the streetTRACKS Gold Trust (GLD), which invests in actual gold. ...each Gold Trust share represents one-tenth of an ounce of gold, less the trust's modest expenses of just 0.4 percent annually. The trust is not actively managed so its expenses should remain very low....
Today, the best-known major oil companies are British Petroleum (BP), Chevron (CVX), ExxonMobil (XOM), and Roya Dutch Petroleum (RDPL)> They are huge corporations that engage in both upstream operations (exploring for oil and extracting it) and downstream (refining petroleum into gas and producing other products from it).
As oil prices rise, big oil companies earn higher revenues. And when oil prices drop, they still do well, because one of the major costs of their refining operations has fallen. (Lower prices are not always passed on to the consumer.) So if our predictions regarding oil are correct, you will make excellent returns from the majors. And if we are wrong and prices fall, you will have some downside protection. Big oil companies also offer excellent yields, typically twice that of the market.
Of course, independent oil producers made higher gains than the majors in the 1970s, with an average real return for the decade of 205.1 percent. And they probably will again. One of the eading companies in this subsector is Devon Energy (DVN). As one of the most dynamic independent producers of both oil and natural gas, Devon will benefit from price increases in both commodities.
Why Oil Service Companies Will Soar
...Wall street--fixated on the idea that oil prices are due to plunge--has not given them the respect they deserve. At some point, when Wall Street finally bows to reality, gains in oil service stocks will start to accelerate dramatically.
How dramatically? To match gains in oil, the services stocks would have to climb more than 60 percent. That is if oil stays where it is. If, as we expect, oil continues to rise, the gains in oil services will be even greater.
Chindia
...Five [Chindia--China and India] stocks we think will do extraordinarily well in the next few years are 3M (MMM), Coca Cola (KO), Intel (INTC), Proctor & Gamble (PG), and Texas Instruments (TXN). Each has already established a powerful beachead in Chindia. Each is a dominant company in its industry. And each has the financial, marketing, and distribution channels to support continued rapid growth.
...GE offers solid near-term growth that is likely to accelerate, perhaps sharply. With an unmatched combination of quality and growth, it is a one-of-a-kind company that represents one of the best chances we have of successfully negotiating one of the most difficult periods we are likely to face.
Capitalizing on Liquefied Natural Gas
The alternative energy source that could make the most immediate contribution to energy supplies is liquefied natural gas (LNG). When natural gas is liquefied, importing it becomes a lot more feasible. We estimate that over the next fifteen years it could add the equivalent of 5 to 6 million bpd (barrels of oil per day) to the world's energy supply. Much of this supply will compensate for falling natural gas production.
...LNG will not solve our energy needs but will be a critical supplement. The development process will require perhaps $50 billion to $100 billion in expenditures, on everything from liquefaction processes to terminal construction. Many companies will win big.
General Electric, for example, is in the forefront in turbomachinery, products vital to the liquefied gas industry, as well as in the storage and transmission of energy sources such as natural gas. Two other companies we like are Chicago Bridge & Iron (CBI) and Air Products and Chemicals.
Based in the Netherlands, Chicago Bridge & Iron is the engineering and construction firm most leveraged to the world's growing need for new energy supplies. About 80 percent of its business is concentrated within the energy sector. The company's expertise ranges from building LNG terminals to constructing new refineries and retrofitting older ones.
Chicago Bridge & Iron's backlog, revenues, and profits are expanding by about 30 percent a year, mostly from its North American operations. Recently, though, the company has established a position in China, which could further accelerate its already torrid growth. In that event, our long-term estimates of 20 percent annual growth for the company could well prove conservative.
Air Products and Chemicals (APD) is best known as a supplier of industrial, medical, and specialty gases such as oxygen, nitrogen, argon, hydrogen, and helium, and of chemicals such as performance polymers, additives for coatings, lubricants, and corrosion inhibitors. However, it also has a thriving equipment business serving the chemical process, electronics, basic steel, oil, power generation, food, and institutional health care industies. This is the group that will drive the company's growth in the years ahead.
Specifically, Air Products makes heat exchangers used in converting natural gas into a liquefied form that can be stored and shipped....
If you had to put all your money on just one oil service company, we would recommend Schlumberger (SLB), the hands-down leader in well discovery and management and seismic services. Its clear technological edge is reflected in profit margins far higher than those of its competitors.
Other Alternatives
Emerging economies like China and India have little choice but to increase their reliance on nuclear energy, sharply boosting Uranium demand. The world's only significant uranium producer is Canada-based Cameco. It stands to benefit from both this tighter market and its own aggressive expansion plans. Trading at nearly twenty times forward earnings, the stock is not cheap for a mine. However, it is cheap for a company likely to grow by better than 20 percent a year for the next five years.
Copyright © 2006 by Stephen Leeb
To read the first chapter of The Coming Economic Collapse, go to TWBookMark.com
Here is an excerpt from Steven Mosher's insightful book on China entitled, Hegemon: China's Plan to Dominate Asia adn the World. A timely topic, given China's decision to increase their military spending by 17.8%, continuing more than a decade of double-digit annual increases in military expenditures....
The Tiananmen generation was born in the sixties and early seventies, during the Cultural Revolution. Its earliest memories were of the turmoil and violence of that experience, and open warfare among competing Red Guard factions, with son set against father and brother against brother. The coming of age of this generation took place against a backdrop of bitter criticism of the homicidal policies of Chairman Mao. Its leaders were in school when the Chinese Communist Party repudiated much of its own past. They were disaffected from their own leaders, deaf to Maoist cant, and open in a unique way to ideas from abroad on how to organize society to foster human freedom. When Tiananmen began, they took to the streets in large numbers to give voice to their disaffection and to call for an end to corruption, bureaucracy, and dictatorship.
The next generation--the present one--are the children of the economic reform and the political backlash that followed Tiananmen. Born in the late seventies and early eighties, when the chaos of Maoism was just a receding memory, they have known only stability and increasing prosperity. In their minds, Tiananmen has been distorted into an outbreak of chaos like the Cultural Revolution, though it was nothing of the sort. When they ponder it all, it seems to them both a warning and a curse. Their political education has veered away from ideology in favor of nationalism: they have been made familiar with the glories of China's imperial past, and with the history of her humiliation at the hands of the Western powers. They have been taught, and have come to believe, that America is denying China her rightful place in the world.
Here are the investment lessons from Antoine van Agtmael's superb book The Emerging Markets Century:
1. Buy only stocks that are underrated rather than "hot," cheap, fast-growing, safe, or even world-class. Prejudice is an investor's best friend. Conventional wisdom often reflects lazy thinking.
2. Always do your own research and dig deep.
3. Distrust the "wisdom" of the markets.
4. Use crises to get "in" and investment fashions to get "out."
5. Be skeptical of proven success because it is quickly recognized by other investors and competitors.
6. The greatest potential is in the next generation of world-class companies and their competitiveness really matters.
7. The best insights come from unusual sources. When you hear from companies, read in newspapers, or are told by brokers is often already reflected in market prices.
8. Spend more time studying economic and industry trends than reacting to events that--good or bad--are always overblown.
9. Always write down why you made a decision to invest or sell. Later, take the time to look back at your notes and analyze why an investment really worked or didn't work.
10. Look for unusual and unexpected South-South connections.
Janusz Korczak was a Jew born in 1879 in a poor Warsaw neighborhood. He went on to become a physician and one of Poland's most famous writers — not only of parenting guides, but of children's books, too.
A new book, edited by Sandra Joseph, compiles the writings of Janusz Korczak, a famous Polish writer and pediatrician and a hero of the Holocaust.
Excerpt: 'Loving Every Child'
by Janusz Korczak and Edited by Sandra Joseph
No Book Is a Substitute
I want everyone to understand that no book and no doctor is a substitute for one's own sensitive contemplation and careful observations. Books with their ready-made formulas have dulled our vision and slackened the mind. Living by other people's experiences, research, and opinions, we have lost our self-confidence and we fail to observe things for ourselves.
Parents find lessons not from books, but from inside themselves. Then every book they read can be considered to be of small additional value; and this one, too, will have fulfilled its given task if it has managed to contribute to bringing this idea home.
Know yourself before you attempt to get to know children. Become aware of what you yourself are capable of before you attempt to outline the rights and responsibilities of children. First and foremost you must realize that you, too, are a child, whom you must first get to know, bring up, and educate.
A Child Is Born
As a mother, you say: "My child." When if not during your pregnancy do you have more right to say this? The beating of the tiny heart, no bigger than a peach stone, echoes your own pulse. Your breath provides the child with oxygen. The blood courses through you both and no drop of blood quite knows yet whether it will remain the mother's or become the child's. Every bite of bread becomes material for building the child's legs on which she will run about, for the skin which will cover her, for the eyes with which she will see, for the brain in which thoughts will burst, for the arms which she will stretch out and the smile with which she will call you Mommy.
As a parent, you say: "My child." No, the child belongs jointly to the mother, the father, the grandparents, and the great-grandparents. Somebody's distant "I" which remained dormant in several ancestors, a voice emerging from a decayed, long-forgotten tomb, suddenly speaks again in this child.
A child is a piece of parchment which has been thoroughly covered with minute hieroglyphics, only a very small part of which will you ever be able to decipher.
As a parent, you say: "She ought to…I want her to…" And you look for a pattern for your child to follow and you search for a life which you wish for her to have. You ignore the fact that all around you there is nothing but mediocrity and banality. People wander around, bustle, they fuss over small problems, fleeting aspirations, uninspired goals, unfulfilled hopes, perpetual longing.
Where is happiness? What exactly is it? Do you know the way to it? Are there those who might know? Will you be equal to the task? How can one anticipate the future and offer protection?
The child is like a butterfly hovering above a raging torrent of life. How to imbue her with toughness without encumbering her lightness in flight; how to temper her without wetting her wings? Should one offer one's own example, help, advice, and words? But what if she rejects them all?
Just remember: A child hungry for advice and direction will absorb it, digest it, and assimilate it. Overfed with moral rules the child will suffer from nausea.
As a parent, you say: "Who is the child to become?" A warrior or just a worker, a leader or one of the followers? Or will she simply want to be happy?
As a parent, you say: "She is supposed to be healthy, so why does she keep crying? Why is she so thin, why does she not suckle properly, why does she not sleep, why does she sleep so much, why does she have such a big head, why does she clench her fists, why is her skin so red, what about the spots on her nose, why does she squint, hiccup, sneeze, choke, sound hoarse? Is this normal?"
You look at this small, helpless thing, which does not resemble any of the other equally small and toothless creatures in the street or in the park. Can it be that in three, four months she, too, will become like them?
Just remember: When is the proper time for a child to start walking? When she does. When should her teeth start cutting? When they do. How many hours should a baby sleep? As long as she needs to.
As a parent, you say: "But is the child clever?" If a parent anxiously asks this question right from the start, it will not take long before the parent will be placing demands on the child. Eat up your food, even if you are not hungry and feel nauseated; go to bed, even though you are not tired and will have to wait an hour to fall asleep. Because you have to, and because I want you to be healthy.
Just remember: Mentalities vary, and children can be steady or capricious, compliant or contrary, creative or imitative, witty or earnest, concrete or abstract; the memory can be exceptional or average; some are congenital despots while others have a wide range of interests.
How often do parents feel disappointment when children fail to live up to expectations, and how often to parents feel disappointment at every step of their development? Parents can be their harsh judges, rather than their counselors and consolers.
It is nothing but a mistake, utter foolishness, to imagine that everything which is not outstanding is therefore pointless and worthless. We are all suffering from the immortality syndrome. Anyone who has not managed to have a monument to himself erected in the marketplace would like a side street named after him at the very least, as a perpetual record.
