And with that—and herein lies the takeaway of this valuable book—every ounce of integrity seemed to disappear from the world...
Economic historian Ferguson (History/Harvard Univ.; The Ascent of Money, 2008, etc.) turns to the last of the high financiers of old, before the hedge-funders of Wall Street took over the world.
Siegmund Warburg (1902–1982), writes the author, was on the face “no more or less than a very successful London banker.” Yet he was much more than that. Having chronicled the Rothschilds in a wide-ranging set of books, Ferguson finds Warburg a kindred figure as a German Jew who immigrated to England and built a fortune “with a combination of intelligence and industry,” building a powerful merchant bank from the ground up and using it to reshape the financial practices of the time. Like the Rothschilds, too, Warburg used his fortune to expand into other arenas, acquired considerable political influence and became a prominent philanthropist, funding many good-works organizations in Great Britain and Israel. Warburg was an enthusiastic citizen of both nations, but also, unlike many of his generation, was a “committed Atlanticist” who welcomed the integration of the European and North American economies, spending as much of his time in New York City as in the great financial capitals of Europe. Apart from that, Warburg was a patron of the arts and culture, a bibliophile and a scholar who remarked that had necessity not pushed him into the business of making a living, he would have happily lived out his days as a poor intellectual—though it certainly helped that his family had been in the banking business since the Napoleonic Wars. For all his success in the world of haute banque, however, Warburg enjoyed a type of career that would be replaced by a different kind of banking in the go-go days of deregulation and speculation. In the end, writes Ferguson, the house he built was sold for pence on the pound.
And with that—and herein lies the takeaway of this valuable book—every ounce of integrity seemed to disappear from the world of high finance. Readable, accessible and not a little nostalgic.Pub Date: June 28, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59420-246-9
Page Count: 540
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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