A masterly work best suited to those who study marketing and are undaunted by the dense, detailed narrative.
A wide-ranging exposition of the human life of buying, selling, and trading from the Renaissance until now.
This book is the result of a lifelong study of man and his need to acquire, and Trentmann (History/Birkbeck Coll., Univ. of London; Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption, and Civil Society in Modern Britain, 2008, etc.), who directed Birkbeck’s Cultures of Consumption research program, seems to cover every single aspect of trade and markets since the Renaissance. He begins with early Ming dynasty China and 17th-century England and the Netherlands. The Black Death created a new labor market, raising wages, making for cheaper goods, and fostering the growth of the middle classes. The discovery of the New World brought Spanish silver to the marketplaces, monetizing trade for travelers to the Far East as well as those in Europe. New settlers provided cheap new commodities and an additional customer base. Class distinction plays an enormous part in consumerism, especially the way people dressed. The elite demanded sumptuary laws to prevent lower classes from dressing above their stations. Novelty was the fuel for consumer societies, fed by adaptation, innovation, and imitation. As people moved to the cities, their desire for goods only increased. It’s hard to find an area the author missed, though he is distressed over having to omit Brazil. Throughout the book, the quotes from economists demonstrate how the values of things change, from being defined by the producer to being demanded by the consumer. The growth of literacy and the arrival of piped water, gas, and electricity all worked together over the years to make a field of study as broad as can be imagined. In an exceedingly comprehensive, overlong narrative, Trentmann takes it all in and explains the importance of coffee, tea, cotton, pensions, credit cards, and household waste. Most fascinating, perhaps, is how little the facts of consumerism have changed over centuries.
A masterly work best suited to those who study marketing and are undaunted by the dense, detailed narrative.Pub Date: March 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-245632-8
Page Count: 848
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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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