Harford’s contagious delight in his subject reminds readers not to take for granted the impact of objects and ideas so...
A well-known British economist shapes his radio broadcasts into chapters of a diverting collection of what he considers humanity’s greatest inventions.
Best taken in small doses, the chapters sometimes cover the expected territory but more often head off in surprising directions. For Financial Times senior columnist Harford (Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives, 2016, etc.), an invention might be a concrete object, like a plow or a battery, but it’s just as likely to be a more abstract idea, like intellectual property or index funds. Fortunately, the author has a knack for making potentially dry and demanding concepts spring to life. For example, in a chapter on management consulting, Harford darts from a messy factory in contemporary Mumbai back to the 1930s to introduce the first cigar-chomping management consultant and the creation of a consulting company requiring its employees to wear white shirts and hats—and then back to Mumbai, pointing out telling details along the way. The author shines when tackling seemingly homely topics. Writing about barbed wire, he weaves together the philosophy of John Locke into a discussion of a material that its marketer called “lighter than air, stronger than whiskey, cheaper than dust.” Some might quibble that Harford awards a disproportionate amount of attention to relatively modern inventions. However, he makes it clear that these are personal choices, and his zest for his subjects makes them hard to resist; his lively, humorous style and wide-ranging curiosity make hard topics go down easily. And while the essays stand on their own, he has a broader point to make. “Inventions shape our lives in unpredictable ways,” he writes, “and while they’re solving a problem for someone, they’re often creating a problem for someone else.”
Harford’s contagious delight in his subject reminds readers not to take for granted the impact of objects and ideas so familiar they’re easy to overlook.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1613-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2017
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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