by Leonard S. Hyman ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2017
An occasionally complicated but always informative look at the transformation of an industry over centuries.
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A political and economic history of the nationalization and deregulation of the United Kingdom’s electricity systems.
American investment banker Hyman (The Water Business, 1998, etc.) builds on his body of writing about energy deregulation to offer a detailed look at Britain’s electricity industry from the invention of the generator to the present day. The book shows his deep research, but it’s also shaped by his personal connection as one of the bankers responsible for marketing shares in newly privatized U.K. utilities in the 1980s. The book follows the country’s electric companies from their municipal origins through nationalization, highlighting the many difficulties that the U.K. faced in standardizing supply and distribution across the country, the windfall profits of the privatization era, and the challenges of modernizing a system that has long relied on coal. There are also frequent comparisons to regulation and infrastructure in the United States, which will offer simple points of reference for American readers. Hyman is generally a proponent of free-market solutions, but he offers plenty of criticisms of how privatization was implemented and suggestions for equitable treatment of both customers and shareholders. Many tables and charts illustrate his points, and an appendix provides concise, coherent explanations of financial and scientific concepts for nonexperts. The book’s structure makes it feasible to track Hyman’s arguments across hundreds of pages; he highlights each chapter’s conclusions and provides a list of points to consider at the end of the narrative. Although the subject matter can be dense at times, Hyman has clearly mastered his subject, and he has an eye for intriguing details (noting, for example, that by 1949, only 150 of 155,000 utility employees weren’t part of a union), and he sprinkles his prose with pithy insights and memorable turns of phrase (“The UK could, also, openly re-regulate, simplify life for all and reduce electric company cost of capital but the odds of that happening are lower than a Papal nullification of priestly celibacy”).
An occasionally complicated but always informative look at the transformation of an industry over centuries.Pub Date: July 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-910325-38-7
Page Count: 502
Publisher: Public Utilities Reports
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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developed by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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