Refreshingly free of jargon and long on ideas—including the thought that if it’s money that got us into our current mess,...
What is money? If you think you know the answer, then you may not have thought hard enough about it, a problem that kings and commoners alike have shared throughout history.
The Micronesian residents of the island of Yap, long a case study in the history of money, reckon currency by giant stones that, even if sunk in the ocean and therefore inaccessible, nonetheless have value. Their system matches the symbolic abstraction of money with a concrete basis for it. However, writes investor/economist Martin in this improbably lively account, that concreteness no longer underlies our modern economy: “The vast majority of our national money—around 90 percent in the US, for example, and 97 percent in the UK—has no physical existence at all.” So is money merely symbolic? By one measure, perhaps. But Martin seeks a deeper understanding, relating money especially to power: If on one hand it served as an instrument of rule for sovereigns, it also reined in those sovereigns as something even mightier than they. By that light, as one medieval philosopher formulated it, money “is not the property of the sovereign but of the entire community that uses it.” Martin expands on this provocative idea, suggesting that money is a system for allocating economic risk “by making a simultaneous promise of stability and freedom.” All this talk can get quite heady, and that's not to mention the ancient Chinese proverb that “the fish is the last to know water”—i.e., those of us who use money are so deeply steeped in it that it’s hard to think about, let alone answer the more important question: How much power should money have to govern our lives?
Refreshingly free of jargon and long on ideas—including the thought that if it’s money that got us into our current mess, it’s money that can get us out of it.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-96243-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
HISTORY | BUSINESS | WORLD | ECONOMICS | GENERAL BUSINESS | GENERAL HISTORY
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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