Feldman's Faves: April 1, 2024

GOOD MORNING EVERYONE

Happy Easter to those of you who are celebrating.

I hope you all had a nice long weekend. It feels that we are on the verge of spring,

So excited for the Final Four – my heart is with NC State but my money is on UCONN.

Even more exciting is tonight’s rematch of last year’s final of LSU vs  Iowa.  Last year the Tigers won the championship but I feel this is the year of Caitlin Clark (too bad these teams are meeting so early this year).

I’m not sure what all of you did on Friday night but I went to the Olivia Rodrigo concert with my daughters and their friends (amazing how welcome one is when one pays…). It was a great show and I am now a fan.

Finally, I want to wish both Duncan and Olivia best birthday wishes from last week. I hope you celebrated in style.

No theme this week, just random topics of interest.

THE WOMEN By: Kristin Hannah – Kristin Hannah is on of my favourite authors of historical fiction.  Her approach is to take a deep dive research wise into historical events but then find the unlikely and unexpected heroes of that time, which routinely end up being women.  The sisters in her WWII book, The Nightingale (a book a reviewed last year) were one great example, and Frankie McGrath, the protagonist of The Women, a privileged child who becomes an army nurse in Viet Nam during the war is her most recent example. I absolutely LOVED The Nightingale and so I had great expectations for this book as well. Unfortunately, The Women is not Hannah’s best work.  It was filled with clichés of the naïve youngster coming of age in Viet Nam and then struggling to integrate back into society.  One of the main storylines is with the man she fall’s In love with during her tour, she thinks he dies and then finds out he doesn’t (and the drama that ensue) but overall not much there that was unique or interesting in my view. As one reviewer notes, “A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life. When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away. A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.” I agree that The Women is not Hannah’s best book but I do see its enormous value in recognizing the unsung heroes of Viet Nam and jumping into issues these brave people had to contend with for the rest of their lives. I just wish she had done her normal brilliant job here. Here’s a good review from the NYT Book Review -  https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/01/books/review/the-women-kristin-hannah.html

Conversations at GFI - Lessons From Charlie Munger, Railroads and Utilities, Capital Allocation – This PODCAST is run by a few local guys, one of whom is Dan Goodman, son of legendary investor Ned Goodman and very successful in his own right. This PODCAST includes a really interesting discussion of the relationship and history of Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger - probably the most successful dynamic duo in investing history. There is a good discussion about price vs value and how these legends look at both. So much wisdom to share in a very short period. Buffett and Munger are/were life-long learners and readers, which I greatly admire. They always believed that there is so much out there to learn and not enough time to learn it all. I am totally on board with that thinking. Their global polymath approach to life has been a major contributor their investment success and has always helped them understand the broader context in which they are operating. They cover other topics as per the PODCAST summary itself, “(00:00) Opening + Intro (01:25) Lessons From Charlie and Warren (13:23) Railroads and Utilities (19:20) Capital Allocation (29:32) Disclaimers” https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/conversations-at-gfi/id1732061883?i=1000649324164

Thank you for your ongoing engagement and participation.

And remember to stay safe, stay healthy and to docket daily.

Jon