A lucid work of economic history.
Readable history of an ethereal financial instrument.
“There is no such thing as the dollar,” writes financial journalist and historian Greeley. It’s instead a grand abstraction that takes many forms, and those forms aren’t always entirely fungible. Five hundred years ago, in a mining district of present-day Czechia, dividends for investors took the form of large coins called Joachimsthalers, and they spread throughout the world for two reasons: The “dollar,” as it would become known, was useful as an instrument of trade, and dollars were plentiful, carried around the world by galleons and freighters, a global currency that made itself known as far afield as the Americas and Asia (Japan’s yen and China’s yuan, Greeley notes, come from the word “round,” the coin’s shape). The United States eventually “succumbed to the dollar,” and, of course, the dollar is now strongly associated with U.S. finance and still highly desirable in financial markets around the world. Yet the U.S. dollar is no longer based on a real thing—namely, a hunk of metal—but is instead something “sitting on the balance sheet of an American bank.” Interestingly, Greeley writes, this unlinking of the dollar from a physical object was the cause of a major political battle in the late-19th century, with a regional dimension: East Coast bankers favored anchoring the dollar in gold, while Westerners preferred silver. All of this is regulated by the Federal Reserve, lately much in the news for political reasons, but Greeley has reservations about that system, which “is incredibly effective using emergency loans to rescue foreign banks holding Eurodollars, but less effective at figuring out how to get American banks to push loans out to Americans.” Indeed, Greeley notes, ordinary consumers engage in “low finance,” and that “low finance” involves fees that are “profoundly more expensive” here than in other countries—yet another index of inequality.
A lucid work of economic history.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9780593138885
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Crown Currency
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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 Yorkerstaff 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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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