A compelling examination of a still-vilified monetary policy that has continued to show results in spite of conservative...
An accessible economic study of Franklin Roosevelt’s daringly effective monetary policy in the face of the Depression.
The first order of business upon Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933 was to abandon the gold standard, as New Deal historian Rauchway (History/Univ. of California, Davis; The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction, 2008, etc.) shows in this nicely focused work on the president’s gradual adoption of Keynesian policy—without actually calling it that at the time. How did FDR come to understand that the economy needed a policy “guided by the hand of man”? Indeed, Rauchway emphasizes that luck had nothing to do with Roosevelt’s policies: he was well-read and well-advised. At the time of economic crisis, bold new ideas had to be embraced, and Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes was among a group of forward-thinking innovators. Having propounded that the gold standard was unnecessary and irrational in his work on the Indian rupee, he had subsequently set forth a grand scheme to get the post–World War I economy moving normally. However, the plan was rejected by President Woodrow Wilson, prompting the economist to write The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), which warned presciently of the cost of excessive reparations on Germany and lack of a stabilizing cooperation among the victors. Rauchway walks readers carefully through these first months and years of FDR’s presidency as he moved to raise prices, push through an inflation bill before Congress, and advocate for an internationally managed currency along Keynesian lines. Holdovers from Herbert Hoover’s failed policies were nudged out, and the new Keynesian thinkers were in—e.g., Henry Morgenthau Jr., secretary of the treasury, and economics professor Harry Dexter White. Moreover, the new currency program was actively used to thwart fascist extremism abroad.
A compelling examination of a still-vilified monetary policy that has continued to show results in spite of conservative criticism.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-465-04969-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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