An eye-opening examination of the many ways money can be made—and disappear.
Can we time the market? No, but this timely book by an investment executive and CNBC contributor gives some idea of how various the triggers for its collapse can be.
The five market crashes Nations (The Complete Book of Option Spreads and Combinations, 2014, etc.) chronicles are comparatively recent, the first from 1907, the last from 2010. This lifts some of the predictive power from the author’s argument, since the so-called panic of 1893 was easily as severe as any of its successors, while some of the crashes of the early republican era were similarly devastating. Even so, the overarching points are valuable. Nations points out that investment in the market is key in moving the economy forward and that it has indeed led to individual enrichment; he notes that a dollar invested in 1899 would have been worth nearly $157 at the time of the 2010 hiccup. However, he adds, had we not experienced the ruinous crash of 1907, the whole package would have been worth another $45 or so, and if we had been able to avoid the five worst days of the ever cresting and falling cycle, then that dollar would have been worth $319.24. Nations describes some of the mechanisms for these moments of free fall, ranging from malfeasance in the market to technical glitches in our increasingly prevalent computer-driven trades. Interestingly, some of the market crashes, by the author’s account, were set in motion by the government’s doing the right thing in restraining monopoly, short trades, and other examples of the free market gone bad. Do what we will to avoid them, though, crashes are a function of that market and the people who participate in them, fiscal evidence of uncertainty and fear. As Nations also writes, though the climb back can be agonizingly slow, the market eventually recovers. In an account with more villains than heroes, indifferently written but full of useful object lessons, Nations concludes with the warning that for all that, “it will crash again.”
An eye-opening examination of the many ways money can be made—and disappear.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-246727-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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