An exemplary work of economic history, with many lessons for the present.
Economist Ahamed follows his Pulitzer Prize–winning Lords of Finance with another cautionary tale of economic catastrophe.
In the spring of 1873, the Vienna Stock Exchange collapsed. Market watchers weren’t surprised: A bubble that began with housing and that had prompted a frenzy of investment burst, and, in a single day, the exchange lost 45% of its value. Ahamed doesn’t belabor the point—“It does not actually take enormous prescience to spot when a market has entered bubble territory,” he writes—but there but for the year is our recent Great Recession. Although the world economy wasn’t so closely integrated as it is today, the 1873 panic spread nonetheless: In New York, $1 billion of railway bonds went into default, and everywhere the “extraordinary boom” of the post–Civil War years went bust in a “cascading chain” of economic reversals. What ensued, by Ahamed’s lively account, was a series of reforms that deepened the crisis. One was the abandonment of the silver standard that backed currency to that of gold alone, casting off the “bimetallic” system and setting off a massive wave of deflation, which, in the loopy world of finance, meant that borrowers suffered and creditors—mainly the big banks—prospered. The author traces some of the predictable effects, among them a marked rise in antisemitism, with incendiary writers and populists claiming that the Rothschilds and other Jewish bankers controlled the global economy and were engaged in “an eighteen-hundred-year conspiracy to dominate the world.” In the U.S., both Democratic and Republican leaders were beholden to the establishment and “proved unwilling to challenge the nation’s financial elite on the core issue of monetary policy”—again, very much like today. Overall, Ahamed notes, the world’s major economies fell into a recession that lasted for nearly the entire decade of the 1870s—a pattern that would be repeated in years to follow.
An exemplary work of economic history, with many lessons for the present.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9781594204173
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
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 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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