A captivating if necessarily fragmented look at an American institution. (50 b&w illustrations)
Essays, excerpts, snippets, and snapshots of the Street, from 1670 to 2000.
Colbert presents the third of his “eyewitness” volumes (Eyewitness to the American West, 1998, etc.), and again offers a large chorus of voices (more than 80) singing about Wall Street with useful commentary by the editor. The performers range from Andrew Jackson (closing the Second Bank of the United States) to Andrew Carnegie (lining up investors for a bridge) to Charlie Chaplin (selling Liberty Bonds) to Christopher Buckley and Art Buchwald (waxing wise on investment vagaries) to Louis Rukeyser (providing the last words: “It’s just your money, not your life”). So many are the soloists that Colbert sometimes loses track of who’s sung what, so a cute quotation from H.G. Wells appears thrice. And readers may wonder why two personal essays by a journalist-cum-online-trader get nine pages, while the Crash of 1929 gets only four. Still, there is as much fascination as information here. A 1670 visitor noted Wall Street’s prominent gallows and whipping post—items perhaps once again needed, to judge from the accounts of the dark doings of Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky (few of the excerpts here are creepier than the transcript of Boesky’s 1990 testimony). An observer of Street-types during the Panic of 1857 noted a still-familiar sight in times of stock-stress: “People's faces in Wall Street look fearfully gaunt and desperate.” More amusing is a little piece by Harpo (not Karl) Marx about accepting investment tips from an elevator operator, and there is an especially eerie news item concerning the bombing of Morgan Bank on September 16, 1920: the bomber left a horse-drawn cart filled with explosives in front of the bank. And in his introduction of pioneer Muriel Siebert, Colbert cracks, “Wall Street was never an exclusive men’s club; it was a locker room.”
A captivating if necessarily fragmented look at an American institution. (50 b&w illustrations)Pub Date: May 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-7679-0660-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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