An absorbing and often entertaining look at precious metal and its place—or lack thereof—in our wallets.
Is the dollar as good as gold? Not for a long time, writes Inc. editor Ledbetter (Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military-Industrial Complex, 2011, etc.), and therein hangs a tale.
As the author notes, gold finds in Americans “a psychological wellspring that reaches beyond any purely physical qualities.” Monetary gold, however, is more complicated: gold mania may be one thing, but a modern economy is better based on more abundant materials. Still, arguments for the gold standard, which was finally abandoned during Richard Nixon’s second term, have been constant throughout American history. Ledbetter has a knack for finding the most interesting, if sometimes-obscure, pleas for gold, many offered by government officials. In the early Republic, one argued strenuously against paper currency, saying “there would be no end to the legion of paper devils which shall pour forth from the loins of the Secretary.” In later times, the father of the multibillionaire Warren Buffett, a Nebraska congressman, urged that the Bretton Woods monetary agreements would weaken American sovereignty—which was being betrayed, he added, by Dwight Eisenhower, earning Buffett a reputation as “a bedrock reactionary who shot off his mouth once too often,” as columnist Drew Pearson said. Arguments for and against the gold standard have as often been politically as economically grounded, and Ledbetter’s book is a touch short on the actual mechanics of gold and its convertibility while satisfyingly long on the sharp political divisions that have formed around it. Now that individual Americans are allowed to own gold—a right, one Swiss-born commentator gloomily warns, that can be taken away at any time—it has returned to popularity. Meanwhile, politicians on the right, including Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, have either outright endorsed a return to the gold standard or confessed to a liking for the sound of it.
An absorbing and often entertaining look at precious metal and its place—or lack thereof—in our wallets.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-87140-683-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
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.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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