Not without biases, but a smart and engaging look at the workings of the economic machine under various regimes,...
Everyone’s favorite Randian economist explains the rise of American economic supremacy and worries for its passing.
Former Federal Reserve chair Greenspan (The Map and the Territory: Risk, Human Nature, and the Future of Forecasting, 2013, etc.) teams up with Economist political editor Wooldridge (co-author: The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State, 2014, etc.) to chronicle the emergence of the United States from economic backwater to powerhouse, with its 5 percent of the world’s population accounting for 25 percent of its GDP. By the authors’ account, this rise has several key components, including diversity, equal opportunity to enter a marketplace with few barriers to entry, and an openness to contribution from just about everyone—the farmer’s son Henry Ford, for instance, who toured the great slaughterhouses of Chicago and marveled at the carcasses moving through the saws and trimmers: “It was during a visit to one of these abattoirs that Henry Ford got the idea of the mass assembly line.” Though of a libertarian bent, Greenspan and Wooldridge seemingly approve of public goods in the form of education, which, among other things, has long allowed the U.S. to be a “talent magnet” for entrepreneurially minded immigrants; now, events inspire them to decry “the current rise of nativism and populism.” Rather more predictably, the authors lament the rise of regulation. “In the 1930s," they write, “Americans turned to government to save them from the instability of the market. In the 1980s, they turned to entrepreneurs to save them from the suffocation of government." The current regulation-heavy environment, coupled with lack of innovation and misguided efforts to place barriers on free trade, may lead to the emergence of rivals better attuned to the global market. Meanwhile, the authors foresee the beginnings of stagflation and the eventual economic decline of the once peerless U.S. market.
Not without biases, but a smart and engaging look at the workings of the economic machine under various regimes, isolationist and internationalist alike.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2244-1
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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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