The lessons to be learned are many, but, the editors conclude, the regulatory mechanisms meant to preclude future meltdowns,...
Think Bernie Madoff was an outlier? To gauge by some of the contributors to this volume, the whole speculative economy is a vast Ponzi scheme.
Indeed, notes David Shapiro, a legal/financial investigator, there are some fine distinctions between “hedge and private equity funds and Ponzi schemes,” the former being “pools of investment capital that are largely unregulated by federal, state, and local authorities,” which is just the way the wizards of Wall Street like it. By contrast, of course, other investment instruments such as mutual funds are intricately regulated, such that financial hanky-panky seldom occurs there, at least not by comparison. Shapiro wonders why it is that a financial crisis is required to ferret out the bad guys, observing, “The nature of today’s unregulated or lightly regulated market often makes the distinction between outright fraud and high-risk vehicles hard to discern.” In such a climate, an operator like Madoff was destined for success, and that he got away with it for so long—thus the title of the book—is a matter that should provoke much discussion among regulators. Writes Jock Young, “He is the right gender to be sure but the wrong class, ethnicity, and age; we usually spend our time looking down, not up, the social structure when analyzing criminal behavior.” “They”—the layers of malfeasants that include “Wall Street, Washington, and Main Street”—got away with it for so long, in other words, because people were looking the wrong way, hoping, in the case of Main Street, to get a little of the proceeds themselves, and no one should have been surprised when the whole thing came tumbling down.
The lessons to be learned are many, but, the editors conclude, the regulatory mechanisms meant to preclude future meltdowns, such as the Dodd-Frank Act, are now under assault. Stay tuned.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-231-15691-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
