A brilliant, generation-spanning history of the Morgan banking empire, which offers a wealth of social and political as well as economic perspectives. Whereas most annalists leave off with the 1913 death of John Pierpont, Chernow (a former staff member at the Twentieth Century Fund) delivers a start-to-present chronicle, tracing the Morgan dynasty from the mid-19th century—when founding father Junius Spencer left New England to assume control of a London-based merchant bank—through 1987's traumatic stock-market break. To a significant extent, moreover, the narrative lives up to the subtitle's promise to track the development of latter-day finance. The House of Morgan, Chernow shows, spawned consequential enterprises on both sides of the Atlantic. Over the years, however, legislation (notably, the Glass-Steagall Act), wars, and other factors severed the ties that once bound them. Together or on their own, Morgan firms have been involved in remarkable ventures, escapades, and scandals. To illustrate, Chernow recounts how Pierpont organized major industrial corporations like AT&T, GE, and US Steel, also engineering celebrated "rescues" of the US Treasury in 1895 and 1907. His successors financed the Allies during WW I and then survived Wall Street's 1929 Crash. Between the wars, the author reveals, Morgan partners (in addition to more conventional clients) treated with Japanese militarists, Nazi bankers, Mexican dictators, and Italian fascists. With relationships an increasingly less important factor after WW II, Chernow documents how Morgan entities shifted gears to compete for business in an era marked by negotiated commissions, shelf registrations, and violent swings in interest rates. By way of example, he shows how Morgan Stanley, once an above-the-battle investment bank, pioneered hostile takeovers. Its UK counterpart, Morgan Grenfell, followed suit, only to come a cropper in a bid-rigging scheme for Guiness. In the meantime, Morgan Guaranty succumbed to the lure of seemingly easy money from LDC loans and M&A work. Chernow captures and records investment and commercial banking's fitful evolution from a time when institutions relied more on personal character and credit than on collateral to an era of casino capitalism in which tradition plays no part to speak of. He does so in lively, definitive fashion that could make his exhaustively documented account the standard reference for specialists as well as lay readers. The lengthy (771-page) text has over 80 photographs (not seen).
Pub Date: March 20, 1990
ISBN: 0802144659
Page Count: 1165
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
Ultraviolet venery.
Brite at her most skanky and, yes, charming, in a set of 23 nonfiction squibs written for journals such as Cemetery Dance Magazine. Some pieces are more touristy and informative than lively, as in “Sur la Decádence,” a review of the literary sources of New Orleans’s beauty and decay, in Poe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Wilde, and other cursed poets. In “Mardis Gras,” the author clears up some of her fans’ misconceptions about her, such as her being “very young” when actually she’s “a cranky, boring geek” of 30—or her thinking that “unwanted children should be lobotomized and given to registered pedophiles,” when more accurately she thinks “unwanted children should be eaten.” She tells how she and her six-foot transsexual buddy are “Depraved in Dublin,” then defends “The Poetry of Violence” and “the visceral soup inside us,” which she finds “most beautiful” while she’s writing about it. In “R.I.P.,” going down on the corpse of William S. Burroughs, she gets “death’s sloppy seconds” and gives him the farewell, “Rest in perversion.” She prefers to be thought a fag, not a lesbian, although Larry Flynt pays her for a picture that “has me fingering my pussy in a graveyard.”
Ultraviolet venery.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2001
ISBN: 1-892284-89-8
Page Count: 185
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
A sympathetic, authoritative collective biography.
From 1929 to 1959, five women were central to a profound artistic revolution.
Drawing on memoirs, more than 200 interviews, a huge trove of archival material, and a wide range of books and articles, Gabriel (Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution, 2011, etc.) has created an ambitious, comprehensive, and impressively detailed history of abstract expressionism focused on the lives and works of Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler. The author effectively sets her subjects in historical and cultural context, including “the ever-changing role of women in U.S. society, and the often overlooked spiritual importance of art to humankind.” The last goal is realized best through the testimonies of the women themselves about the significance of art to their spiritual well-being. Of different generations and often rivals, they did not cohere into a group, but they shared “courage, a spirit of rebellion, and a commitment to create.” They noisily railed against being ignored by the art establishment, angry that their husbands or lovers (Elaine’s Willem de Kooning and Krasner’s Jackson Pollock, for example) won attention and accolades while they were assumed “to accept the part of a grateful appendage” or, at best, a muse. Pollock, touted in a Life magazine profile as possibly “the greatest living painter in the United States,” emerged as the first artist celebrity. Gabriel takes her title from a groundbreaking exhibition organized, mounted, and publicized by artists in May 1951 that made the New York School of painters—the term was coined by Robert Motherwell—instantly visible. Although gaining critical attention, the first generation of New School artists struggled financially, working and living in unheated studios, subsisting on meager meals, trading art for food, and fueling themselves with copious amounts of alcohol. Their “community of goodwill and creativity” was undermined by betrayal, infidelity, and drunkenness. The author traces the changing art world with the influx of new galleries and “a tidal wave of money” as art caught on as an investment.
A sympathetic, authoritative collective biography.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-22618-9
Page Count: 944
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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