Russia’s tailspin is by now a tale with some moss on it, but Brzezinski tells it with appealing dash and indispensable black...
A cool stroll down the mean streets of Novy Russky’s financial madness, under a rain of cynicism from former journalist Brzezinski.
Working as a stringer for the Wall Street Journal, Brzezinski poked about the backwaters of post-Soviet Russia and the republics before landing a job in the Moscow bureau. Returning to the capital after a five-year absence, he was dazzled by the wealth on display in the city, but he cast a more jaundiced eye on the sources of that wealth, from the big business of humanitarian relief-aid theft to the disastrous privatization of the nation’s resources (natural gas, oil, gold, diamonds, and aluminum are now all under the command of the banking oligarchy). The author tried to rustle up interest in big-money operators in Moscow (grasping bankers both native and foreign, the robber baroness Timoshenilo, the lord of privatization Anatoly Chubais), but the only remarkable thing about most of these characters (many of them former Party apparatchiks) is their wealth—and even Brzezinski’s caustic pokes can’t turn them into a good story. But when he returned to the provinces, he found the kind of natural resources that make for captivating reading, hiply told: a visit to a Russian submarine in Sevastapol, the wasteland of St. Petersburg as it makes a pathetic bid for the 2004 Olympics, the beyond-rough-and-tumble of the Far East energy business, and the dead zone around Chernobyl (where the grass is always greener—literally—thanks to the irradiated soil). And the story of his mugging in his Kiev apartment is riveting in its menace, although his description of its milieu—“the overflowing dumpster that formed the decorative centerpiece of our courtyard”—allows some comic relief.
Russia’s tailspin is by now a tale with some moss on it, but Brzezinski tells it with appealing dash and indispensable black humor.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-86976-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
HISTORY | BUSINESS | WORLD | ECONOMICS | GENERAL BUSINESS
An informative if overlong account of how American car makers regained much of the ground they had lost during the 1980s to foreign rivals in their own backyard and Europe. Drawing mainly on their own reportage as Detroit-based correspondents for The Wall Street Journal, Ingrassia and White offer a lively series of set pieces illustrating how Motown's Big Three (Chrysler, Ford, General Motors) managed to avert envelopment by their Japanese counterparts (Honda, Nissan, Toyota, et al.) and to launch an impressively effective counterattack. In large measure, the authors conclude, the improvement in the US industry's fortunes is attributable to its capacity to adopt and adapt the cost-control, employee-empowerment, productivity, and quality- assurance techniques pioneered by Japanese manufacturers. As Ingrassia and White make clear, however, the makeover was convulsive on the assembly line as well as in the executive suite. The authors do a fine job of reconstructing the boardroom coups that resulted in the ouster of such old-guard stalwarts as Chrysler's Lee Iacocca, Ford's Don Peterson, and GM's Bob Stempel (the unfortunate engineer who inherited the god-awful mess Roger Smith had made of the planet's largest commercial enterprise). Covered as well are the lesser lights who designed the passenger vehicles (Chrysler's Neon and Ford's born-again Mustang among others), plus the plant managers who reconciled the requirements of lean production with the aspirations of a unionized work force accustomed to adversarial labor relations. On the minus side of the ledger, Ingrassia and White have not resisted the temptation to include whatever they've learned in more than a decade on the automotive beat, and their narrative occasionally veers into trivial byways. Nonetheless, an engrossing and cautionary take on a consequential industry whose welfare is everybody's business. (16 pages of photos, not seen) (First serial to the Wall Street Journal; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 28, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-79214-8
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
A wonderful pudding of a book that serves up large helpings of US socioeconomic history over the past 35 years or so. The title and subtitle notwithstanding, GQ columnist Nocera never makes clear precisely what he means by the middle class. Nor does he provide a systematic reckoning on the financial times since 1958 (when BankAmerica launched what became the Visa credit card). What he does offer, though, are thoroughly engrossing takes on the breakthrough innovations that democratized America's monetary life. There are tellingly detailed briefings on the largely unsung creators of money-market mutual funds (including the first to give investors check-writing privileges), NOW accounts, negotiable CDs, no-load mutual funds, and other financial services that an affluent society now takes for granted. The author also profiles the bankers, Wall Streeters, and others who played leading roles in a revolution that profoundly altered Main Street's attitudes toward credit, debt, investment, and savings. Cases in point range from Peter Lynch (Fidelity's star portfolio manager until his 1990 retirement) through Charles Schwab (of discount brokerage fame), Citicorp's Walter Wriston, and Marshall Loeb (former editor of Money, which continues to overstate the rewards while minimizing the risks of do-it-yourself capitalism). Assessed as well are the convulsive consequences of Paul Volcker's conquest of inflation, deregulation of depository institutions, the stock market's 1987 crash, and the low interest rates that channeled increasing amounts of money into equities during the early 1990s. Conspicuous by its absence, though, is any sustained coverage of the S&L scandals, insider trading, the takeover boom, junk bonds, the assets controlled by insurance companies, derivative securities products, exchange-listed options, futures contracts, and allied aspects of the domestic financial scene. Even so, Nocera delivers a savvy rundown on the landmark developments that in less than four decades have made consumer finance a multilateral bazaar in which beating the markets is a populist pastime.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-66756-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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