A cogently argued account that lays bare the similarities and differences between the world today and earlier theoretical...
An economic historian challenges both politicians and economists in this account of why the post–World War II economic boom came to an end and what followed.
Former Economist finance and economics editor Levinson (The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America, 2011, etc.) argues that 1973 was when the world changed course. Then, he writes, “average income per person around the world leaped 4.5 percent. At that rate, a person’s income would double in sixteen years….Average people had reason to feel good. And then the good times were over.” The author considers various causes—e.g., the first oil shock, when OPEC, following Saudi Arabia’s lead, hiked its prices by 400 percent, and foreign exchange volatility, which preceded President Richard Nixon’s decision to take the dollar off gold in August 1971. Levinson also considers the ineptitude of both politicians and economists as major contributors to the crisis. Neither “had any idea what was causing the ailment. They acted because they were under pressure to act, not because they had confidence in their prescriptions.” This view is absolutely worth heeding in these days of unprecedented worldwide financial experimentation. Levinson contends that beginning with Arthur Burns, the chair of the Federal Reserve from 1970 to 1978, efforts to control inflation proceeded from doctrinal bases that only a few years later would be considered “bizarre.” The author shows the ending of a world in which government action was thought to be capable of providing competent direction to economic processes. He associates that world with two thinkers: Argentinian Raúl Prebisch and German Karl Schiller. Prebisch advocated import substitution as a pathway to development for developing economies, while Schiller was a master planner. Free-market advocates Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan changed that bygone world, but in Thatcher’s case, Britain didn’t achieve growth comparable to the times before the 1970s.
A cogently argued account that lays bare the similarities and differences between the world today and earlier theoretical shortcomings.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-465-06198-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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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