For finance wonks, a good-as-gold tome as imposing as the institution it covers—and with every promise of enduring...
Social historian Kynaston (Modernity Britain: 1957-1962, 2014, etc.) moves into fiscal realms with this overstuffed history of one of the world’s most important financial institutions.
The Bank of England, writes the author, was chartered on June 21, 1694, with then-staggering starting financing of 300,000 pounds, some of it provided by King William and Queen Mary. Democratically, Kynaston notes, even the royals were limited to the top investment of 10,000 pounds apiece; other investors were businessmen, among them a clockmaker and an apothecary. The bank was founded by three visionaries, one of them “a projector,” a speculator more interested in his own profit than in the success of the enterprise as a whole but still far-seeing enough to help put together a bank of credit of a kind more ambitious than any London had seen before—and, by extension, more ambitious than any in the world at the time. Other nations would develop similar institutions, which evolved into central banks. In closing his long history, the author notes that the very idea of a central bank is now under siege and that “their extinction cannot be ruled out,” while holding out the prospect that somehow the Bank of England will evolve to meet conditions as it has in the past. Though with no shortage of discussion of financial instruments, fiscal policy, and economic crises and turning points, Kynaston’s account is full of people as well—e.g., John Horsley Palmer, who was adamant in requiring that the bank actually be able to cover its loans with gold holdings, and Thomas Catto, who broke with John Maynard Keynes at just about the time the bank was nationalized (Catto never used that term, saying, “ ‘Public ownership’ sounds so much better”). Kynaston closes at the time the bank was emerging from the devastating financial crisis of a decade ago, so the effects of Brexit will have to await a revised edition.
For finance wonks, a good-as-gold tome as imposing as the institution it covers—and with every promise of enduring accordingly.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4088-6856-0
Page Count: 896
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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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