Should we return to the gold standard? Has oil taken the place of gold on the world economic stage? Who will be the next big...
In Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World (2012), conservative Parliament member Kwarteng delivered an impressive chronicle of the long-term effects of British colonial rule. This book, about the economics of war and the use and abuse of the gold standard, is a bit less readable, but still informative, for those not well-versed in economic theory.
The author easily explains Robert Peel’s theory of balanced budget and sound currency and follows up with Keynes’ theory of borrowing and stimulating the economy. With the advent of 20th-century economics, the picture became more convoluted. The theory that war is the greatest influence on fiscal policy was illustrated beginning with the 17th century and the Habsburg’s perpetual need to fund their imperialism. While vast, the amount of gold and silver coming from their New World holdings was still not enough, so they had to borrow. Gold is the real story here, as Kwarteng traces the gold supply and who has held it, as well as the development of central banks as the lender of last resort. Funding for wars usually came from increased taxes and customs duties, but borrowing was inevitably the major source of capital. Usually, it came down to the country holding the biggest gold reserves. The British dropped the gold standard with the beginning of World War I in 1914, and gold was pegged to the U.S. dollar at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference. That made the dollar convertible to gold, a dangerous situation that forced President Richard Nixon to close the “gold window” in 1971.
Should we return to the gold standard? Has oil taken the place of gold on the world economic stage? Who will be the next big power? Kwarteng does not provide all the answers, but he does give a solid overview of the possibilities.Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-58648-768-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
HISTORY | BUSINESS | WORLD | ECONOMICS | GENERAL BUSINESS | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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