Essential for readers with an interest in the history of economics and, more important, how to write about and read the...
Financial journalist Grant (The Forgotten Depression: 1921: The Crash That Cured Itself, 2014, etc.) pays homage to the founding genius of the genre, the pioneering Economist editor and capital Victorian chap.
Walter Bagehot (1826-1877)—as the author helpfully points out, it’s pronounced “Badge-it”—was impossibly accomplished, devouring libraries of Latin literature as a child, writing literary essays as a teenager, insatiably learning, and, at his peak as a journalist, writing at least 5,000 meticulously arranged words per week. He was also largely self-taught in economics, a discipline that was then only beginning to shape itself. Grant recounts the prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer William Gladstone’s remark, “The machinery of our financial administration is complicated, and Mr. Bagehot is the only outsider who had thoroughly mastered it. Indeed, he understood the machine almost as completely as we who had to work it.” The author’s account is not without its complications, from the opening discussion of the British monetary system in the two-metal years to repeated encounters with financial panics and depression brought on by wishful thinking, willful error, and the inevitable bubbles and busts of the business cycle. Born into both banking and journalism, Bagehot, as editor and principal columnist for the Economist, was in a position to admonish, correct, and suggest; by Grant’s account, the treasury note is one result. He was also in a position, as Grant notes, to prognosticate and imagine: “To write about finance in a useful way,” writes the author, “is to take an unconventional view of the future (there’s not much demand for what everybody already knows).” Bagehot’s imagination led to a publication that, in his own image, was politically somewhat liberal and fiscally conservative, learned without being ponderous, and able to adapt and to admit error, all qualities that lend credence to Grant’s estimation of Bagehot as one whose “words live.”
Essential for readers with an interest in the history of economics and, more important, how to write about and read the dismal science.Pub Date: July 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-60919-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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