Revealing history of a powerful but little-known “banker revolutionary.”
Early America’s “dominant financier.”
Thomas Willing, writes Vague, author of The Paradox of Debt (2023), was America’s dominant merchant. Robert Morris, the better-known “financier of the Revolution,” was his employee and later his business partner. Willing was perhaps the richest man in the Colonies, widely respected but colorless, with few interests besides work. He protested British actions, which hurt business, but voted to oppose independence in 1776, although he later supported the war. Armies fight wars, but money wins them, and Vague points out that the only sources of ready money in the Colonies were rich men. Willing immediately accepted supply orders from the Congress, a risky tactic because Congress was slow in paying—when it paid at all. In this unregulated free market, profits could be spectacular, but so were risks. Willing grew richer, but others (Morris included) were ruined. Willing soon headed the nation’s first bank, which helped finance the war, yet victory left a huge debt. More than most scholars, Vague emphasizes debt as a motivation for the 1787 Constitutional Convention, and the Constitution as “a triumph for the money system advocated by the conservative elite.” President Washington’s approval of treasury secretary Hamilton’s plan to pay off the entire debt at full value produced widespread outrage because almost all was held by wealthy men and speculators who had bought it at a fraction of its value, often from soldiers. Few historians praise Hamilton’s defense, and Vague states bluntly that this was a corrupt bargain that benefited the wealthy and exerted a malign influence on subsequent American history. Appointed director of the First Bank of the United States, Willing served for 15 of its 20-year existence, remaining untouched by the fraud, speculation, bubbles, and crashes that occurred while America’s GDP nearly tripled.
Revealing history of a powerful but little-known “banker revolutionary.”Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781509569083
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Polity
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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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