Lowenstein doubts the Federal Reserve Act could be passed in today’s volatile political climate, but he provides an...
The story of the creation of the Federal Reserve.
In the mid-19th century, American banking was antiquated and chaotic. In other industrialized nations, centralized banking systems ensured monetary stability. By contrast, the banks in the United States were “disconnected and isolated, left to prosper or flounder (or fail) according to the reserves of each individual institution.” Most were small, rural institutions chartered by state governments and issuing thousands of currencies. As a result, there were frequent “financial panics, bank runs, money shortages, and indeed, full-blown depressions,” bank failures, and note forgeries were commonplace. But as veteran financial journalist Lowenstein (The End of Wall Street, 2010, etc.) makes clear in this dramatic creation story, Americans remained wary of the idea of a central bank. “When the subject was money, central authority had always been taboo; it was a demon that terrified the people,” he writes. Mainly rural Americans favored “the comfortable Jeffersonian principle of small government.” After the severe Panic of 1907 (when financier J.P. Morgan stepped in to shore up the banking system), Sen. Nelson W. Aldrich formed a commission whose investigation of the crisis paved the way for passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Lowenstein traces the heated congressional battles that led to establishment of the Federal Reserve System, consisting—then as now—of 12 banks with power shared between the federal government and private banks and with responsibility for supervising the banking system, setting short-term interest rates, and guiding national monetary policy. His well-researched account for general readers takes us from Aldrich’s secret meeting with leading Wall Street figures on Jekyll Island, off the Georgia coast, to plot banking reforms, to Woodrow Wilson’s Princeton bedchamber, where the ill president persuaded Virginia Congressman Carter Glass of a key compromise to ensure creation of a national bank.
Lowenstein doubts the Federal Reserve Act could be passed in today’s volatile political climate, but he provides an unusually lucid history of our nation’s central bank.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59420-549-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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