A most timely business narrative.
A well-written, comprehensible assessment of the 1929 stock-market crash.
Klein (The Life and Legend of E.H. Harriman, 2000, etc.) is a seasoned business historian, and he humanizes a potentially dry subject, capturing how the rapid post-WWI transformations affected both average Americans—who, as “minnows,” were seduced by the market—and the powerful cabals that ran “the Street.” Although the dark chaos of October 1929 provides the center here, Klein reconstructs the halcyon days preceding the crash, the ethos of greedy naïveté, which may have caused it, and its relationship to the worldwide depression that followed. He is adept at explaining complex business ideas (such as covert stock pools and the bearish tactic of “selling short,” both of which were factors in the crash) in terms that convey the gravity of what followed 1929’s “Summer of Fun.” He builds toward the climactic disaster via scrupulous readings of primary sources, and strengthens the milieu by depicting many of the era’s most significant industrial and cultural figures, such as Henry Ford and Aimee Semple McPherson, as well as the Street’s many gold-plated gurus, from Sunshine Charley Mitchell of the National City Bank to the famous stock-tipping bootblack Pat Bologna, some of whose shady tactics undeniably contributed to the final panic. Of the Great Crash itself, which began on Thursday, October 23, and continued through Tuesday, Klein notes that “the selling wave seemed irresistible . . . frightening holders into ‘selling at the market’ ” (at any price), while technology was overwhelmed by human fallibility, with stock tickers running over an hour late. Throughout, as Klein ruefully observes, one cannot miss the glaring similarities between Hoover’s pro-business “New Era” and our own recently hobbled, high-tech “new economy,” such as the irrational exuberance demonstrated in both eras by an uneducated investing public. Klein is an elegant (if detail-obsessed) constructor of business histories, and one can read dire warnings between the lines here.
A most timely business narrative.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2001
ISBN: 0-19-513516-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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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