The second in the Writers in Residence series is about the IMF and is really interesting. Lots of interesting anecdotes about the history of the IMF.
The latest one was that bankers started going to the annual IMF conference because it brought together many developing world finance ministers. As a public body the IMF was susceptible to protests and therefore the bankers abandoned it for the stricter (and less democratic) Davos Economic forum.
I started reading the first Writer in Residence book about life onboard the USS George H. W. Bush aircraft carrier.
Dyer comes across as a bit of a bore, offering up a self-portrait of a duffer but still behind it prickly, smug and self-involved. He referrers to the photographer that accompanies him as "the snapper", affects to be indifferent to that person's experience; an affected boorishness.
Sometimes his sentences clunk with non-sequiturs but when he writes reportage his imagery is striking and immediately conjures a scene into the imagination. Every now and then he drops a well-observed detail, the sailor with a black eye, the catapult shuttle returning to position.
The photography works as well, supplementing the words, telling its own story without being in competition.
It's expensive but so far an interesting purchase.
The third volume is Kitten Clone and is written by Douglas Coupland. It's about Alcatel-Lucent and more generally about the internet as part of the fabric of our lives.