Free-reserves Books

When you have a disability, traveling isn't easy. As the Disabilities Host on BellaOnline, I found this book to be very useful. It needs to be updated, but I think it is still beneficial and worth buying.

Although this book is also useful for senior and families with young children, we use it to learn which areas in the national parks are accessible and were private vehicles are restricted. It also advises when special passes can be obtained.

Visitors to restricted areas of the parks must ride in busses, special provisions are often made for the disabled (usually requires a state diabled permit for your vehicle) allowing you to drive your private vehicle in these areas. This book gives you advance notice of when you need a special permit for this privilege. In some cases, the book has provided us with information that is not easily available from any other source. This makes the park much more accessible for the disabled.

The only reason this is not a 5 star book is that the book is 8 years old and does not cover the newer parks.

Reading this book felt a bit like listening to the pompous diatribes of an elitist that is so self absorbed about his own knowledge that he does not care to take the time to explain anything. I'm sure there is lots of good information to be had if I had a solid understanding of how the fed worked already, but then that would have defeated the purpose for which I bought the book!

If you are starting out in finance and want to know how the Fed works, this is the best book for you. It's not the easiest or the smallest, but it is the most illuminating. This book was very helpful to me when I started on Wall Street. It's a bit long (to be fair I'm still about 100 pages away from finish) but will make you understand why, as of April 23, 2007 "The 13 1/4 percent bond due in 2014 that the government sold on May 15, 1984, returned an annualized 24 percent. The S&500 returned 13 percent, including dividends, during the same period. Bonds gained more than shares of Motorola Inc., DuPont Co. and Duke Energy Corp." - this is from today's Bloomberg.
This and reading Pimco's McCulley/Gross monthly pieces is a must if you want to understand what's driving world capital markets.

Martin Mayer has been writing about banking for decades. He has held positions in government, and testified as an expert in various governmental committees. He has known personally many of the people about whom he is writing in this book.

His writing style is dense. He often assumes the reader is familiar with banking terms or processes (or can go look them up). If you can get through this, the information he provides is priceless. I came away from reading this book with a variety of insights into banking and the federal reserve that will continue to inform me for years to come. I have read a number of books on the fed, and this is certainly one of the best (along with Greiders).

I'm not sure that the book lives up to its claim of providing the inside story on the Fed. The writing style is not user friendly and the author uses concepts or lingo that he doesn't bother to explain. More interesting and informative books on the Fed can be found elsewhere. This is a good one to skip.

When people buy books like this, in most cases, they don't know much about the topic and would like to learn more about it. This author writes as if the reader knows everything already, speaking of person after person and concept after concept all along he barely introduces anyone or explains the concepts which he is writing about in any logical fashion. In addition, the author goes on tangents and loses focus which is hard to follow. On top of that, this book is packed with pro-fed propoganda I found to be out of place. If you already know everything about how the federal reserve works and it's history, this book might keep your attention, but then again why would you buy this book if you already knew everything about the fed? I would not suggest this book. I wanted to learn about the fed but instead I wasted both my time and money.