A well-crafted, thorough biography sure to interest students of the modern economy and financial system.
The life of perhaps the wonkiest financial theorist to sit at the helm of the Federal Reserve.
Alan Greenspan (b. 1926) is infamous for having led the government’s chief financial institution in the years when all the perfect-storm conditions were setting up for the economy to tank and for, at least until that collapse, pressing an Ayn Rand–derived libertarian case whenever he could. Financial journalist Mallaby (More Money than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite, 2010, etc.) offers correctives and nuances to this view in this not uncritical portrait. As a math whiz kid with an interest in politics, Greenspan held a cautious contempt for the gray mass culture of the 1950s, “despite his eagerness to share in the prosperity it brought.” While he played golf and drove nice cars, sure, he also came to a rightist critique that turned, as Mallaby writes, on his membership in “a fringe group that was one part libertarian salon, two parts strange cult,” namely the circle around the Russian egotist Rand and its embrace of a particularly austere brand of logical positivism. Greenspan’s ideological purity did not preclude him from mixing in society—he dated Barbara Walters, after all—but it certainly seemed to reinforce an otherworldliness that prized theory over reality. In matters economic, Mallaby writes, Greenspan urged a kind of limited-government, free-market vision that rested uneasily with the close management required of the Fed. In that role, Greenspan took risky positions, including a complacent view of the housing bubble; after all, “subprime lending and mortgage securitization had been around for years without triggering a catastrophe,” though catastrophe is what ensued on his watch. Even so, as Mallaby closes by noting, Greenspan was not wholly averse to regulation, made financial calls that were seen as sound at the time, and may not have been able to ward off a crisis that was many years in the making.
A well-crafted, thorough biography sure to interest students of the modern economy and financial system.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59420-484-5
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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
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
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