A remarkably concise, perspicacious introduction to the corporation’s past and future.
An incisive history of corporations coupled with a prognosis of their future.
According to authors Sarokin and Schulkin, corporations tend to be viewed contradictorily, both as catalysts of economic growth and ingenuity as well as corrupt drivers of inequality and wielders of undemocratic political influence. In order to properly understand the vices and virtues of corporations, the authors synoptically but rigorously reconstruct their long history, which dates back, at least in embryonic form, to the Roman Empire. However, the corporation as we now understand it, a “group of individuals acting as a single entity, and recognized as such under the law,” begins to emerge in 16th- and 17th-century Europe in the form of massive trading companies like the Dutch West India Company. Everything changed, though, when the United States was founded since its unique constitutional structure and entrepreneurial energy contributed to the explosive proliferation of the corporation through the 19th and 20th centuries. The authors deftly chronicle not only the evolving character of the American corporation, but also the nation’s shifting sentiments regarding it, including a thoughtful account of the regulatory backlash against the corporation during the Progressive Era and the tumultuous 1970s. Sarokin and Schulkin also furnish a convincing vision of the future corporation’s challenges, including globalization and the profound transformations wrought by the unstoppable march of technological innovation. Their prose is unfailingly lucid, and they avoid any peremptory dogmatism, carefully assessing the corporation’s pros and cons. “None of these institutions are perfectly angelic and none of them are unredeemably evil. Nor should we expect them to be. Corporations—like governments, like organized religion—are composed of human beings who bring to them all the promise and all the foibles that humanity possesses.” This is a timely contribution to an important issue, as philosophically attentive to the big picture as it is to the granular details of law and policy.
A remarkably concise, perspicacious introduction to the corporation’s past and future.Pub Date: June 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5275-4868-8
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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