Can you imagine, says Oddo, the personal history that a 12-year-old little girl has to come from to start smoking pole 50 times a night for her pimp? It breaks your heart.

From art, from nature, from the schools, / Let random influences glance, / Like light in many a shivered lance, / That breaks about the dappled pools.

The answer appears on the thirty-ninth page of the book.

On top of all this, banks are prying less into the private lives of their mortgage applicants. Traditionally, lenders wished to know something of the borrowers' background—their jobs, their wealth and soforth. In an age of perennially rising home prices, these tedious details could be dispensed with. Low doc and no doc loans have proliferated. One mortgage provider, HCL Finance, advertises itself as the home of the 'no doc' loan. Among the products listed on its Web site is the NINJA loan: Even borrowers with No Income, No Job and No Assets are welcome to apply.