A deeply argued call to action from a lucid, impassioned polemicist.
A concise, cogent assessment of the 2008 banking disaster and how the fallout has affected the country.
In his Oscar-winning 2010 documentary, Inside Job, Ferguson did a first-class job of explaining the mess on Wall Street. This book is a longer, more detailed version that underscores the film’s points, offering a broader picture of how Wall Street has poisoned the country. The author returns to the scene of the crime, where the slow rise of deregulation under President Ronald Reagan had turned into a lawless frontier by the time Clinton left office. Scrapping the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act—which kept investment and commercial banks separate—allowed investment firms to indulge their greediest desires, such as credit default swaps. Their partners in crime were Ivy League economists, who were paid handsomely for either testifying before Congress or writing papers that told banks what they wanted to hear, and ratings agencies like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, who recklessly doled out AAA ratings to the well-heeled major firms. So why didn’t anyone go to jail? Well, you can’t break laws that don’t exist. Still, Ferguson argues that real crimes were committed, from lying to federal authorities to filing fictitious financial statements. The author makes sure we get the big picture, too: that the money-driven Wall Street culture of corruption doesn’t advance American progress; it weakens it. Ferguson points to key areas—broadband technology, innovation and education—where greed has kept America lagging behind the rest of the civilized world.
A deeply argued call to action from a lucid, impassioned polemicist.Pub Date: May 22, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-95255-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown Business
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
Irritatingly melodramatic and superficial treatment of the 1988 murder of a Florida woman who drank a poisoned Coca-Cola. Surprising, considering that coauthor Goreck was the undercover cop whose work brought the killer to trial. Peggy Carr took four months to die; two sons, Travis and Duane, spent several weeks in the hospital, ravaged by the thallium that had somehow been put into an eight-pack of Coke. Peggy's new but troubled marriage to Pye Carr made him the initial suspect, but he, too, had the poison in his system. As Good (a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times) and Goreck recount the case, they pass over seemingly obvious questions. For example, why had no one contacted the police about the threatening letter the family had received four months earlier? Why did it take two months for the police to get around to questioning next-door neighbor George Trepal, an ex- convict (he had operated a methamphetamine lab) whose belligerent wife, a doctor, fought bitterly with Peggy over her teenage sons' loud music and shenanigans? There had even been suspicion that Trepal had poisoned Pye's dog. When Goreck goes undercover, she introduces herself at a Mensa Mystery Weekend hosted by Trepal. A computer hobbyist and a ``fumbling nerd,'' Trepal befriends Goreck, who pumps him for advice on how to rid herself of an abusive ``husband.'' The investigation took more than a year and produced primarily circumstantial evidence and supposition over George's eccentricities: his collection of bondage equipment and movies; the unfinished ``torture chamber'' in his new home. A bottle of thallium was found in his workshopone year after the murderand he had compiled a manual on voodoo poisoning. That was enough to convict him; he's now awaiting appeal on Florida's death row. Despite all the details of his lifestyle and the FBI-generated psychological profile, there's so much left unexplained that the book feels incomplete. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Film rights to HBO)
Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1995
ISBN: 0-688-11947-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
A provocative look at a rising industry that may soon change the nature of the world’s too-busy roadways.
Tired of paying hefty insurance bills and parking fines? A self-driving car may be the flying car of our near-future dreams, as this all-for-it account makes clear.
Given that Burns is a former General Motors executive with responsibility for R&D, as well as an adviser to Waymo (formerly Google’s Self-Driving Car Project), it stands to reason that he’d be a fan of the autonomous car. Some of this book is the usual by-the-numbers, back-slapping, you-are-there reporting from the front lines of the lab and test track, as when the author writes of one robotics experimenter, “Whittaker was another big guy, an inch or two taller than Urmson at about six-foot-three, with shoulders that look like they’d brush the sides of interior door openings.” The pro forma stuff notwithstanding, though, Burns and co-author Shulgan provide a series of winning arguments for why we should be wanting to see self-driving cars on the road. Despite well-publicized failings, for instance, they will lead to a substantial decrease in accidents and fatalities—and given that road fatalities are climbing after years of steady decline, that makes a good starter. Burns also notes that automobile ownership is inherently inefficient; at most, the average driver uses a car for 5 percent of a waking day, and “when we do drive these vehicles, they’re terribly inefficient,” with only about a third of the chemical energy used to drive them translating into kinetic energy. The author argues that the business of motorized transport is the most disruptable on the landscape, and while the writing is too often like traveling down a potholed road, the reasoning is sound, and the thought of not having to look for an empty parking space seems payoff aplenty for entertaining this modest proposal.
A provocative look at a rising industry that may soon change the nature of the world’s too-busy roadways.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-266112-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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