British television executive Balen (Kenneth Clarke, not reviewed) displays both understanding and incredulity in his account of the infamous 18th-century trading scandal.
It was a remarkable story of fraud and political fixing, but it might have been worse, Balen writes; it could have spelled the doom of an entire economic system. The stupendous share-trading shenanigans he deliciously dissects could easily have besmirched and destroyed a mighty swath of English nobility: lords, ministers, MPs, and even King George IV sold their influence for a slice of the tainted pie. Balen makes the dirty doings fairly easily to digest, but readers will have to pay close attention to understand the queer world of share-trading and the sheer transparency of the fraud. The South Sea Company’s ships, he notes, “had not sailed anywhere near the South Seas” in 1720, and many saw through the scheme quickly enough to get out with their money. But the company had the king's imprimatur, the ear of people who could make things happen, and the political clout to close down other speculative operations that were siphoning off funds that might have been invested in South Sea. Ultimately, investors wanted to cash out, but of cash there was little, even though the paper debts they owed were still in effect. The roller-coaster ride ended when the whole foundationless edifice crashed, but the financial conflagration was contained, and the blue-blooded perps stood ready for another day of business. Canny Robert Walpole guided the post-crash inquiry in such a fashion as to screen important players, protect the established order, and secure a seat of power for himself.
Sound familiar?Pub Date: May 12, 2003
ISBN: 0-00-716177-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | GENERAL BUSINESS | BUSINESS | WORLD | HISTORY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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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. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
Categories: BUSINESS | LEADERSHIP, MANAGEMENT & COMMUNICATION | PSYCHOLOGY
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