A stupefying philosophical meditation on money.
The mysteries of banking become even murkier in this dense economic treatise.
The pseudonymous author begins by noting the odd multiplier effect of fractional reserve banking: With a typical 10 percent reserve requirement and aggressive lending, every dollar of cash deposits creates $10 in bank accounts—new money out of thin air! Valis sees in this alchemy a deep confusion between the “identity” and “representation” of money, one that leads to a disastrously unstable monetary system built on debt. (The only solution, he suggests, is the encrypted bitcoin money scheme.) So far so good, until the book morphs into a foggy rumination on the nature of money, proceeding from turgid premises—“we are finally able to define monetary identity as being social omniequivalence itself”—into rarefied, baffling abstractions, as in, “Money, like everything else, is the substitution of nothing by nothing.” Sometimes, Valis’ book is less about money and banking than it is about nothing—or rather, nothingness: “Hence, nothingness is always different from itself, this way preventing the substitution of nothing by nothing from ever being impossible: even in the absence of any substitution as resulting from the absence of everything, nothingness can still substitute for itself, by remaining different from itself.” Every so often, Valis lapses back into intelligibility, touching on the labor theory of value, the difficulty of coordinating economic exchange through barter, and the origins of bank notes in vault storage receipts provided by goldsmiths. But for the most part, the mind-numbing prose drones on without much meaning or respite, so clotted with opaque jargon that it sounds like Marx and Heidegger balancing a checkbook after a few drinks.
A stupefying philosophical meditation on money.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 51
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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