Lowenstein doubts the Federal Reserve Act could be passed in today’s volatile political climate, but he provides an...
The story of the creation of the Federal Reserve.
In the mid-19th century, American banking was antiquated and chaotic. In other industrialized nations, centralized banking systems ensured monetary stability. By contrast, the banks in the United States were “disconnected and isolated, left to prosper or flounder (or fail) according to the reserves of each individual institution.” Most were small, rural institutions chartered by state governments and issuing thousands of currencies. As a result, there were frequent “financial panics, bank runs, money shortages, and indeed, full-blown depressions,” bank failures, and note forgeries were commonplace. But as veteran financial journalist Lowenstein (The End of Wall Street, 2010, etc.) makes clear in this dramatic creation story, Americans remained wary of the idea of a central bank. “When the subject was money, central authority had always been taboo; it was a demon that terrified the people,” he writes. Mainly rural Americans favored “the comfortable Jeffersonian principle of small government.” After the severe Panic of 1907 (when financier J.P. Morgan stepped in to shore up the banking system), Sen. Nelson W. Aldrich formed a commission whose investigation of the crisis paved the way for passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Lowenstein traces the heated congressional battles that led to establishment of the Federal Reserve System, consisting—then as now—of 12 banks with power shared between the federal government and private banks and with responsibility for supervising the banking system, setting short-term interest rates, and guiding national monetary policy. His well-researched account for general readers takes us from Aldrich’s secret meeting with leading Wall Street figures on Jekyll Island, off the Georgia coast, to plot banking reforms, to Woodrow Wilson’s Princeton bedchamber, where the ill president persuaded Virginia Congressman Carter Glass of a key compromise to ensure creation of a national bank.
Lowenstein doubts the Federal Reserve Act could be passed in today’s volatile political climate, but he provides an unusually lucid history of our nation’s central bank.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59420-549-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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