The savings and loan crisis and the banking troubles of the 1980s and early 1990s were not primarily due to fraud, deregulation, inadequate supervision, overly exuberant lending, abrupt changes in tax policies or a host of other short-term causes. All of these factors certainly exacerbated and, in some cases triggered, the problems of depository institutions. But the underlying fundamental reason for the thrift crisis and banking troubles, argues banking and financial analyst David S. Holland, was a form of excess capacity that resulted from many decades of protection from the rigors of competition and the marketplace. Dr. Holland shows that the protection was due to geographical and product limitations and a deposit insurance system that became focused on the prevention of failures of individual institutions. By 1980, the depository institutions industry was ripe for a severe culling--a culling that legislators and regulators probably could have done little to avoid, although they might have channeled and controlled it better. How the government, the industry, and the public reacted to the culling is an instructive and fascinating study in human nature for all those concerned with banking policy and regulation.

What caused the financial difficulties that exploded on the world's economies in 2007-2008 and that in the United States produced the Great Recession? Providing mortgages to unqualified borrowers has been blamed. So have complex financial instruments and strategies that few understood, and weird financial insurance products with names like credit default swaps. Also lax supervision, unfocused regulation, greed on Wall Street, greed on Main Street, accounting rules, maybe laissez faire government, maybe over-reaching government, probably some ideological hostility to government oversight in general, and much more. But the real story of the financial crisis involves much more fundamental matters. The real story lies in the rise of the importance of finance, a phenomenon that could be called the financialization of the economy. And that rise is a product of the Information Age and its tool, the computer. Complex financial assets and strategies were made possible by the computer and certainly were in their own right a significant contributor to the chaos that surfaced in 2007-08. But the cause and effect relationship between the computer and the recent, and ongoing, financial troubles is much more complicated. Complexity has actually served to mask the primary impact of the computer. That primary impact is money creation. The computer is a money-creating machine of the first order. How so? Start with the name of the new era: the Information Age. The raw material of the Information Age is in that name: information-kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, and more of information. The tool that processes and manipulates the information is the computer. The product that is produced? Still more information. And ultimately money is nothing more than information: information about supply and demand, information about wants and desires. So a tool-the computer-that produces an endless supply of information is married to an industry-finance-that is information intensive if not solely about information and, more importantly, that actually creates a particular type of information, that type being money. The result is a money-creating phenomenon for which the world's economic systems, geared toward money as a scarce commodity, were not and are not prepared.

Vietnam, A Memoir: Airborne Trooper is the second work of a trilogy on one young Army officer's service in the Vietnam War. The first volume, Saigon Cop, covers his year as a Military Police platoon leader in Saigon. The third volume, Mekong Mud Soldier, describes the war seen by an American advisor to a Vietnamese unit in the wet Mekong Delta. Together, the three books tell a tale of war stripped of glory, high purpose, inspiration, and superficial patriotism. The focus is instead on five Bs: booze, babes, boredom, bureaucracy, and occasionally battle. In Airborne Trooper, the author is a semi-trained infantry platoon leader trying to quickly climb a steep learning curve in one of the Vietnam War's legendary units, the 173rd Airborne Brigade. The central ingredient of the book is not so much actual fighting as the hard, almost animal-like existence of the U.S. infantryman-the grunt, the line doggie, and the boonie rat-during Vietnam. The fighting itself ranges from brief, sometimes one-sided, engagements to one of the most costly efforts of the war, the Battle of Dak To in November 1967.

Should one space or two follow the period at the end of a sentence? Such issues can occupy a large portion of a government bureaucrat's time. In fact, for far too many bureaucrats, such issues are paramount. "One Space Or Two" is a work of fiction that portrays a government agency in which picayune issues of editing, organizational structure, status, turf protection, and one-upmanship dominate the agenda. As a result of the attention paid to these issues, the intellectual environment of the agency is stifling. Important, fundamental matters go unexamined. Preparing for the future, a major agency responsibility, receives little more than cursory attention. Unfortunately, the imaginary agency in this book is not atypical. ("Not atypical," now that's a double negative a government bureaucrat could spend half a day pondering.) Intellectually stifling environments were contributing factors to the failure of certain government agencies to foresee and prepare for the events of September 11, 2001. Can government agencies become more forward thinking and more employee-friendly? A major hurdle would have to be overcome: human nature.

Vietnam, A Memoir: Mekong Mud Soldier is the third work of a trilogy on one young Army officer's service in the Vietnam War. The first volume, Saigon Cop, covers his year as a Military Police platoon leader in Saigon. In the second volume, Airborne Trooper, he is a semi-trained infantry platoon leader trying to quickly climb a steep learning curve in one of the Vietnam War's legendary units, the 173rd Airborne Brigade. Together, the three books tell a tale of war stripped of glory, high purpose, inspiration, and superficial patriotism. The focus is on five Bs: booze, babes, boredom, bureaucracy, and occasionally battle. This third volume, Mekong Mud Soldier, begins with bureaucracy: the author's experience as a staff officer, or more irreverently, as a rear echelon flunky. The action heats up after he is sent as an advisor to a Vietnamese unit in the wet Mekong Delta. The advisory business is frustrating and sometimes dangerous. Ideally, it should be limited to volunteers, but in the rush to Vietnamize the war in the late 1960s, many U.S. officers and NCOs unhappily found themselves in duties they were only minimally prepared for.

Want an uplifting account of one young Army officer's service in the Vietnam War? "Vietnam, A Memoir: Saigon Cop," is not it. The focus of this book and of two later volumes in the series is war stripped of glory, high purpose, inspiration, and easy but false patriotism. Instead, the focus is on five Bs: booze, babes, boredom, bureaucracy, and occasionally battle. Heroes are few. Hyperbole is minimal.

Yet the tale is an unusual one. The author was an ROTC graduate with no long term Army commitment. After serving a year as a Military Police platoon leader in Saigon, a period that is the subject of this first volume, he stayed in Vietnam for another year and a half. His months as an infantry officer are covered in later volumes.

Military Police duty in Saigon in 1966-67 was a surreal combination of Army nitpicking on a stateside scale, protecting U.S. facilities against Viet Cong terrorism, and policing the large U.S. presence in the city. MPs lived, worked, and occasionally played in the middle of an Oriental metropolis of strange sights, sounds, and smells. Lengthy stretches of tedious, humdrum activity were interrupted by sudden bursts of danger and fear.