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THE SUMMIT

Name: THE SUMMIT
Author: Ed Conway
ISBN: 978-1605986814

BRETTON WOODS, 1944: J.M. KEYNES AND THE RESHAPING OF THE GLOBAL ECONOMY

by Ed Conway ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 11, 2015

The scope of the subject matter is impressive, and the execution is outstanding.

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Sky News economics editor Conway (50 Economics Ideas You Really Need to Know, 2009) covers the inside story of what really happened during the 22 days of the conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944.

The author provides a compelling portrait of the event, which took place on the international stage of big-power geopolitics and was driven by long-range changes in monetary relations. It was at Bretton Woods that the dollar became the world's senior reserve currency, replacing the debt-ridden British pound and the collapsed gold reserve system discredited during the Great Depression. Conway also chronicles the rise of the United States as the world's leading creditor from before World War I, and he outlines how that trajectory affected the proceedings, counterpointing the disastrous attempts of debtors like the British and French to revive the prewar gold standard. The author also extends the narrative to the present by way of President Richard Nixon's 1971 decision to take the dollar off the gold standard. Conway takes issue with earlier, narrowly focused economic treatments and the view that international monetary economics is “esoteric and irrelevant.” The author draws on previously untapped material from participants, (e.g., George Bolton of the Bank of England), including personal recollections, accounts and diaries, and archives from Russia. Conway documents the rich relationship between John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White. Competition between the two was long-standing—White was determined to secure hegemony for the dollar after the war, while Keynes attempted to protect the U.K.'s finances from the effects of its indebtedness to colonies like India and South Africa—and Conway presents the relationship intriguingly throughout. Additionally, he portrays how Keynes' incredible arrogance and rudeness undermined his effectiveness with American policymakers.

The scope of the subject matter is impressive, and the execution is outstanding.

Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2015

ISBN: 978-1605986814

Page Count: 480

Publisher: Pegasus

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014

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ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN

by Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 18, 1974

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Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."

Pub Date: June 18, 1974

ISBN: 0671894412

Page Count: 372

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974

Categories:

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by Bob Woodward

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THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

by Daniel Kahneman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011

Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...

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A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.

The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.

Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.