A useful, timely primer.
“Much as I admire the Americans, when laissez-faire takes the form of agreeing to do whatever the Americans do, I am a little terrified.” Thus John Maynard Keynes, savior of capitalism.
It’s no small irony that it has taken a second depression to bring Keynesian ideas of government-induced economic stimulus back into fashion, since the first depression was supposed to have provided sufficient reasons for keeping an eye on the economy to ensure that such intervention was not needed again. Cambridge historian Clarke (The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Birth of the Pax Americana, 2008, etc.) paints a careful portrait of the prophet whose voice was once heard only in the wilderness of social democracy. Ironically, Keynes was only passingly sympathetic to socialism, and his advice to Franklin Roosevelt, who called on the British economist to help think through New Deal–era economic policy, was that the president conduct a “reasoned experiment within the framework of the existing social system” so that capitalism might be kept alive. Clarke writes a touch tunelessly at odd moments (“Keynes served as a temporary wartime civil servant and took to the administrative life like a duck to water”), but his brief but detailed biography makes for, well, stimulating reading in a time when Keynes’s notions of stimulus have proved once again to be an economic lifesaver. The author also notes that Keynes did not view government-injected stimulus funds as ideal policy, but that such actions were better in crisis than sitting around and waiting for the free market to straighten itself out, as capitalist orthodoxy holds that it will do. There are lessons aplenty to be drawn from Clarke’s recitation of the facts of Keynes’s life and thought—not least the lunacy of cutting government spending in tough times.
A useful, timely primer.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60819-023-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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