by P.J. O’Rourke ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018
As with most of O’Rourke’s books, a mix of the smart and the throwaway but fairly entertaining throughout.
Noted wisenheimer O’Rourke (How the Hell Did This Happen? The Election of 2016, 2017, etc.) serves up a fan’s notes on “a blood sport that I greatly enjoy”—namely, the dismal science of economics.
Though a conservative on numerous mastheads and TV credits since the heyday of National Lampoon, the author isn’t reflexive in his cheerleading for capitalism; after all, he notes, it was capitalists who “hoovered my investment portfolio in the 2008 financial crisis.” Still, this is a mostly pro–free-market, conservative look at a complex subject that O’Rourke sometimes reduces to useful fundamentals—and that sometimes floats away on clouds of dumb abstraction. As to the former, the author points to the thought that the first thing a financial analyst needs to do is figure out how a company he or she is thinking of investing in makes money. In the instance of Enron, one mogul’s staff reported back that they were “utterly ignorant” even after studying the company up close for a month—a lesson, O’Rourke suggests, in the virtues of ignorance, or at least not proceeding until one is less ignorant than at the start. Where things get interesting is when the author turns subtly critical in the matter of corporations. As he notes, things got sticky in the financial realm when the banks sold themselves out to “clueless stockholders,” since the banks could then be comfortably managed by people who were clueless themselves. Of course, the whole business of corporate personhood is sticky. As for fundamentals, the author scores points with a sharp observation: The rise of credit cards suggests that the idea that goods and services seem sort of free if you don’t have to pay straightaway yields a topsy-turvy financial world, one whose craziness can logically be resolved only with the use of a “9mm Glock—VISA card of the future.”
As with most of O’Rourke’s books, a mix of the smart and the throwaway but fairly entertaining throughout.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2848-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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