Forget the misleading subtitle. To Mayer (Whatever Happened to Madison Avenue, 1991, etc.), virtually all members of the US financial community have, by pursuing their own selfish interests, undermined the public purpose of securities markets—i.e., to provide reliable price information necessary to allocate the domestic economy's resources. Worse yet, Mayer charges, cops on the Wall Street beat are responding to opportunists' depredations with winks or nods. In a savvy, wide-ranging overview longer on anecdotal than statistical evidence, Mayer warns that the open, honest, and liquid markets that have contributed so greatly to American prosperity face grave dangers. With a big assist from advances in data- processing and telecommunications technology, for example, institutional investors are, he says, doing business among themselves, filling orders at prices that need not be disclosed. And with less than one fifth of their income now accruing from commissions, according to the author, brokerage houses apparently are on the game as well, trading for their own accounts—and frequently using inside information about client plans and strategies. In the meantime, Mayer cautions, the development of so- called derivative instruments (notably, options on stock indexes) and the trend to passive management of portfolios designed to mirror the performance of popular market averages have greatly increased the risks of manipulation. At best, the author argues, federal regulatory authorities have been complacent witnesses to these unfortunate events. Among other sins of commission, he cites the SEC's decision to let major institutions traffic in privately placed as well as publicly offered securities. Not surprisingly, Mayer offers a short list of needed reforms. He proposes full disclosure for all transactions involving equity in American enterprises, plus confiscatory taxes to discourage short-term trading by investment professionals. Mayer would also impose levies to create friction between futures and exchange markets that currently tend to move in lockstep. A timely and thoughtful alert on a socioeconomic problem whose implications are (or should be) of general concern.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1992
ISBN: 0-465-05362-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1992
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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