by Adam LeBor ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 4, 2013
Wonkish at times, but a real eye-opener.
Searching, provocative history of the most secretive—and globally influential—of Swiss banks, “the most important bank in the world and predates both the IMF and the World Bank.”
Ben Bernanke is a governor, as is the head of the Bank of England, the head of the Bank of China and the heads of the central banks of Germany, Brazil and Spain. Altogether, 60-odd banks make up the membership of the Bank for International Settlement, headquartered in Basel, Switzerland—a town specifically chosen for its quiet and orderliness. Financial journalist LeBor (The Believers: How America Fell for Bernard Madoff's $65 Billion Investment Scam, 2010, etc.) traces the evolution of the bank from useful instrument of establishing international financial stability in post–World War I Europe to an amoral institution that is closely implicated in both the establishment of the euro zone and its fraying at the zone’s edges in places like Greece, Cyprus and Spain. In the time between, the BIS, by LeBor’s account, was politically evenhanded in all the wrong ways: Although putatively one of the “new multilateral institutions run by apolitical technocrats,” its directors in fact gave information to the Third Reich on Allied logistics (and vice versa), even as the bank served as a bulwark of capitalism in the Cold War—and even if the combatant nations were moving funds back and forth among themselves. Particularly in the latter sections dealing with the unification of the currency and the sink-or-swim social Darwinism of austerity, LeBor’s account has a bit of a conspiracy-theory feel to it, but one backed up by solid reporting and interviews with bank players, all that Swiss secrecy notwithstanding. The author closes with recommendations for how the bank could better serve the world instead of itself, including greater transparency and lifting the “legal inviolability” accorded to it by international treaty.
Wonkish at times, but a real eye-opener.Pub Date: June 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61039-254-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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