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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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
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