An excellent exposition of key factors in a perennial economic conundrum.
How trade has evolved to impact nations and cultures in ways that are always dynamic but not always predictable.
Financial theorist and historian Bernstein (The Four Pillars of Investing, 2002, etc.) is equally at home plumbing the romantic dawn of trade or untwisting the mind-wracking complexity of modern international commerce. Evidence of trade’s inevitable origin shows Stone Age nomads settling by an obsidian quarry, where no food could be found; they bartered the raw material for tools and weapons to a tribe with agricultural abundance. Confusion and controversy over trade began early. Romans, the author notes, believed that silk obtained from overland caravans came from one place, silk arriving by sea from another. (It all came from China.) While trade has always been based on the notion of fair exchange, temptations to stack the deck have been unceasing. For example, when 18th-century Britain found its craving for tea was exhausting the exchequer of silver, and China had little appetite for British goods, the infamous East India Company began to trade in opium. The narcotic, harvested in colonial India, created a social problem that still haunts East-West trade negotiations, Bernstein claims. At about the same time, British thinkers like Adam Smith and David Ricardo advanced the basic free-trade argument that persists unchanged. Politics always muddied the water, the author reminds us: The Boston Tea Party, celebrated as a patriotic act, was committed by tea merchants and their allies against a British open-market move that would have lowered the price for all colonial consumers. Bernstein doesn’t believe that high tariffs (Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act) precipitated the Great Depression, as often claimed. The challenge for free traders, as he neatly outlines it, is convincing the inevitable damaged minority to take a smaller piece of a bigger pie. Or else—and he doesn’t shrink from the word—“bribing” them with subsidies as the most efficient remedy.
An excellent exposition of key factors in a perennial economic conundrum.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-87113-979-5
Page Count: 484
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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