by Stephen Roach ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 28, 2014
Full of implication, well-written and of much interest, especially to fiscal policy wonks.
Eye-opening look at a condition that wanders from the boardroom to the psychiatrist’s couch: financial codependency, which enables the worst qualities of two powerful economies.
It’s no secret that much of America’s consumer culture is predicated on the availability of cheap goods from China. Neither is it a secret that China has grown wealthy in large measure because Americans are willing to go into debt to buy such cheap things. The news that Roach, former chairman and chief economist of Morgan Stanley Asia, brings in this book is how deep that relationship extends and how quickly it has enriched one nation and impoverished another. Meanwhile, the United States keeps spending, and China keeps saving, both in ways that endanger the health of their domestic economies. The solution is obvious: Roach proposes a “rebalancing prescription…grounded in the economic imperatives facing both nations—pro-consumption in the case of China, and pro-savings in the case of the United States.” Obvious, yes—but possible? Perhaps not, given how deeply ingrained the habit of saving is in Chinese households and given that “personal consumption is the essence of the American Dream,” one that Americans don’t like to be told is detrimental in excess. Roach’s arguments are complex and data-packed, and it helps to have some grounding in economics in order to appreciate such matters as how Ben Bernanke, in his role as chairman of the Federal Reserve, helped keep the U.S. economy afloat during the crisis of 2007–2009 (“Bernanke…laid out a menu of unconventional choices that a zero-bound-constrained central bank might also consider as part of a quantitative stimulus package”). Even without such background, readers will not mistake the urgency with which Roach approaches his subject—which promises economic meltdown if our bad habits are not lessened.
Full of implication, well-written and of much interest, especially to fiscal policy wonks.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-300-18717-5
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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 Yorker staff 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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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