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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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