A useful, timely primer.
“Much as I admire the Americans, when laissez-faire takes the form of agreeing to do whatever the Americans do, I am a little terrified.” Thus John Maynard Keynes, savior of capitalism.
It’s no small irony that it has taken a second depression to bring Keynesian ideas of government-induced economic stimulus back into fashion, since the first depression was supposed to have provided sufficient reasons for keeping an eye on the economy to ensure that such intervention was not needed again. Cambridge historian Clarke (The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Birth of the Pax Americana, 2008, etc.) paints a careful portrait of the prophet whose voice was once heard only in the wilderness of social democracy. Ironically, Keynes was only passingly sympathetic to socialism, and his advice to Franklin Roosevelt, who called on the British economist to help think through New Deal–era economic policy, was that the president conduct a “reasoned experiment within the framework of the existing social system” so that capitalism might be kept alive. Clarke writes a touch tunelessly at odd moments (“Keynes served as a temporary wartime civil servant and took to the administrative life like a duck to water”), but his brief but detailed biography makes for, well, stimulating reading in a time when Keynes’s notions of stimulus have proved once again to be an economic lifesaver. The author also notes that Keynes did not view government-injected stimulus funds as ideal policy, but that such actions were better in crisis than sitting around and waiting for the free market to straighten itself out, as capitalist orthodoxy holds that it will do. There are lessons aplenty to be drawn from Clarke’s recitation of the facts of Keynes’s life and thought—not least the lunacy of cutting government spending in tough times.
A useful, timely primer.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60819-023-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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