An uneven economics treatise that gets off to a rocky start but ends with some thought-provoking ideas about the...
An exploration of the post-2008 global economic crisis that’s not for the fainthearted.
Fonluce’s debut offers a fresh perspective on an economy that has shed millions of workers in recent years. He relies on lightly edited government fact sheets and textbook prose to summarize and explain the devastating effects that the Great Recession and the expansion of digital technologies and robotics have had on the economy. Among its many lingering aspects, the author writes, is the fact that banking institutions now choose to invest in speculative financial instruments instead of lending to businesses and customers at reasonable interest rates. Fonluce finds his voice when he speculates about a future economic model in which the real value of a new business venture might be judged in terms of how many opportunities for employment, investment, research and quality-of-life benefits it provides. He asks readers to imagine an economic model in which traditional notions of “cost” wouldn’t forestall investment in modernizing the U.S. electrical grid or replacing aging city and county water pipes. The author is at his best when he writes that traditional notions associated with market capitalism could change to reflect new notions of economic value. But it isn’t until the book’s final third that he shares his insights into how market-based economies might evolve into new forms that can sustain economic development and long-term prosperity for all. His humane, forward-looking perspectives are often undercut by awkward prose (“The paradigm shift of the proposed solution might be potentially equivalent to that faced by humanity”), and overall, the book reads like a series of blog posts instead of carefully crafted chapters. The author aims to give general readers “a different perspective” on the economy; however, general readers may prefer economist Paul Krugman’s similar exploration, End This Depression Now! (2013), which has 200 fewer pages. For the most part, this book is simply too technical for general readers and too general for technical readers.
An uneven economics treatise that gets off to a rocky start but ends with some thought-provoking ideas about the 21st-century global economy.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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