by Steven Fraser ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2005
Comprehensive, considered, and literate: a real accomplishment.
Main currents in American thought about money and Wall Street, traced by journalist Fraser (Labor Will Rule, 1991, etc.) in an expansive social history.
The same attraction and greed that brought colonial traders together in the Street’s coffeehouses or under its fabled buttonwood tree (fictional, debunks Fraser) continue to gather hustlers in myriad Starbucks or under trees everywhere in the world. The Wall Street of the American mind contains capital markets, commodities exchanges, mighty banking institutions, bucket shops, lenders, borrowers, buyers, sellers, owners, workers, debtors, creditors, confidence men, dupes, builders, thieves, entrepreneurs, swindlers, billionaires, tricksters, bulls, bears, and pigs. Fraser’s grand, often incisive, survey begins with the Founders (Hamilton in particular) and the first IPO (the Bank of the US in 1791). We meet moguls and miscreants, including Gilded Age titans like Cornelius Vanderbilt, August Belmont, and evil Jay Gould. The author depicts Populists, muckrakers, Liberty Bonds, the Jazz Age, the Crash, Andrew Mellon, and Jay Gatsby. He neglects nothing of social significance, from Ponzi and the New Deal to Milken, the Long Term Capital Management fiasco, and WorldCom. He analyzes books, music and art as meaningful signals, paying heed to Melville, Dreiser, Dos Passos, Auchincloss, and Tom Wolfe, among others. He considers such cultural phenomena as agitprop, Thomas Nast, Eddie Cantor, Gordon Gekko, the Depression’s Big Bad Wolf, and J.P. Morgan’s nose. He bemoans the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the statute that once kept banks from being brokers. And he discerns a recurrent theme rarely noted by other surveyors of the Street: anti-Semitism, which prompted implausible accusations of Jewish manipulations from the likes of Father Coughlin and Henry Ford. Certainly, “Wall Street” is a synecdoche for much of our commercial culture. Will attentive readers be quite ready to privatize some of their Social Security funds after this visit to the lair of the plutocrats?
Comprehensive, considered, and literate: a real accomplishment.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-662048-1
Page Count: 672
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
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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
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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 ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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