A straightforward, engaging look at this “German Rockefeller.”
An intriguing exploration of the life of an Augsburg moneylender as a prototypical capitalist in the modern mold.
A former journalist (Wall Street Journal Berlin and London bureau chief), now a New York securities analyst, Steinmetz makes a convincing case for the value of studying enigmatic banker Jacob Fugger (1459-1525), who persuaded the pope to lift the ongoing ban on usury, among other acts that proved galvanizing in the Renaissance era. As the shrewd moneylender to the up-and-coming Habsburg emperor, Maximilian (“the man who, with Fugger’s help, would take the Habsburgs to greatness”), Fugger learned early on the value of making connections with those in power, thanks to indoctrination in his family’s textile business in Augsburg, followed by apprenticeship in the trading houses of Venice. Muscling his way to a monopoly in the silver mining business in the alpine town of Schwaz, then in the Hungarian copper belt, Fugger became the go-to lender for the massive sums required to raise armies and wage war—not just for Maximilian, but for the Portuguese, who traded pepper for Fugger’s metal. Though contemporaries excoriated Fugger as a “profiteer, a monopolist and a Jew,” Steinmetz believes he acted out of the “radical” belief that one did not have to be born noble to be superior. On the contrary, intelligence, hard work, and constant effort made one successful in life, as he amply demonstrated. Eventually, these qualities were the ones he valued the most in the nephews he selected to succeed him. A devout Catholic and severe critic of the restive Lutherans, Fugger served seven popes, lobbied Pope Leo X successfully to lift the ban on what was considered usury, “midwifed” the famous St. Peter’s indulgence that spurred Martin Luther to pen his 95 Theses, and helped bankroll the crushing of the German Peasants’ War—and still managed to die solvent.
A straightforward, engaging look at this “German Rockefeller.”Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8855-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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