A lucid history that invites readers to consider how human life might be organized otherwise—no easy task.
An economic historian examines a system that’s not just insatiable but intractable.
It’s easier to imagine the end of the world, the adage has it, than the end of capitalism. That is because, Jackson writes, it has become the dominant economic system worldwide, so much so that “most people alive have never lived under any other kind of economy.” But the economic historian at the University of California, Berkeley, says that system, characterized by the buying and selling of “things that produce all other things,” is also a historical artifact shaped by many forces. One was the development of private property rights, another the rise of wage labor, “the capitalist mode of labor par excellence,” and with it the steady monetization of the economy. The rise of finance and banking furthered capital concentration, allowing entrepreneurs to bankroll long expeditions from, say, Britain to China that would not be able to return a profit for years, given the distances involved in the first steps toward globalization. Readers familiar with terms such as the “price revolution” and the economic concept of rent as something much beyond simply what one pays a landlord will benefit most from Jackson’s deeply researched and accessibly written study. In it, Jackson turns up some surprises, many small but telling, such as that the cotton economy of the American South actually grew after slavery ended, “which suggests it could have increased if slavery had ended earlier, and that in turn suggests that, if anything, slavery held back cotton production.” More central to American and thus world capitalism, in Jackson’s opinion, was the post-Civil War “vertically integrated, capital-intensive corporation,” with its introduction of automation, the managerial class, mass production with interchangeable parts, and undisguised class warfare against its discontents. That leads us to today, when, Jackson concludes, “capitalism is more dominant than it has ever been,” and unlikely to go away.
A lucid history that invites readers to consider how human life might be organized otherwise—no easy task.Pub Date: March 24, 2026
ISBN: 9781324106876
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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
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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