Altogether fascinating, and a sound investment for readers seeking high return in the form of useful ideas.
Democracies are habitually broke, and for good reasons revealed in this provocative study by a former investment banker.
“Liberty and credit,” wrote a 19th-century French finance minister, “are always united.” His English counterpart would surely have agreed, suggests Macdonald: in ridding Europe of Napoleon and assuring liberty of a certain kind, the British government amassed a debt of more than £800,000,000, a sum that vastly outstripped the gross national product. No matter, writes Macdonald, for politicians of the recent past understood that “there was a connection between political freedom and public debt.” They also understood, as contemporary politicians seem loath to do, that the growth of democracy requires vast outlays of money, particularly in the matter of training an educated workforce. Following the work of Niall Ferguson and other contemporary economic historians, first-time author Macdonald pursues any number of promising lines of inquiry, suggesting here that democratic institutions have been furthered through time by the requirements of financing wars, there that universal suffrage was hastened along by the development of public savings banks, and elsewhere that autocracies attaining a certain level of gross domestic product find it hard to prevent democracy from taking hold, while those who insist on holding absolute power are unable to advance economically. Drawing on a broad range of historical examples over thousands of years, he shows the political implications of the quest for prosperity and examines options that include keeping the coffers of the state perpetually empty. Never mind those who decry deficit spending; as Macdonald notes, “peacetime deficits, however much finger-wagging they may incite, are relatively small.” Such lessons are likely to give advocates of the Thomas Friedman globalization-is-good school much fuel for their side of the debate, but Macdonald is careful not to oversimplify—and certainly not to cheerlead for “a new global elite who view national governments as largely irrelevant to their needs.”
Altogether fascinating, and a sound investment for readers seeking high return in the form of useful ideas.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-17143-2
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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 Yorker staff 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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