Exquisitely revealing and written with real polish: a first-class account.
A history of the modern stock market, detailing its transmogrification from a “gambling hell” run by speculators and cronies to a rational, sophisticated exchange open to all.
Though Wall Street was a stock market as far back as the 1600s, former Goldman Sachs Vice President Smith begins his evolutionary history in 1901, the year J.P. Morgan put US Steel on the market. Even after 300 years, the market was still very much an insider’s game: scandal-ridden, wracked by periodic bouts of speculative excess, and lorded over by imperious figures who considered themselves above any law. The author shrewdly balances terrific biographical vignettes of such market figures as Morgan, Charles Dow, and Edward H. Harriman (the man who never met a crash he didn’t like) with economic theory and market approaches. He manages to chart the great currents that surged through the market, from 1901 (when the stock market was a “battlefield on which highly personalized conflicts between financial titans such as Hill, Harriman, and Morgan, as well as dozens of lesser combatants, were played out”) to the current era (in which nearly half of all Americans own stocks). Along the way, he does a good job of reviewing the 1929 crash (and uncoupling it from the subsequent Depression), detailing government interventions (such as the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934) in the market, chronicling the rise (largely through Charles Merrill) of the middle-class investor, introducing Harry Markowitz and the concept of portfolio covariance, debunking the notion that JFK caused the 1962 market gasp (through his heavy-handed interference in the steel industry), and poking a finger in the eye of go-go fund managers. Volatility adjustment, generally accepted accounting standards, and price/earnings ratios have a sensible place in the story, and Smith is savvy enough to admit that much of the movement of the stock market (particularly the panics and crashes) remain enigmas.
Exquisitely revealing and written with real polish: a first-class account.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-28177-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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