A revisionist history of financial collapses in the United States radiating to other parts of the globe, with implications for what really caused the ongoing economic meltdown.
Nelson (Steel Drivin' Man: John Henry: the Untold Story of an American Legend, 2006, etc.) is a professional historian with a nonestablishment focus. The major problem with traditional historic accounts is that they diminish the role of ordinary citizens—i.e., debtors—while overplaying the roles of gigantic banking institutions. Though the economic declines documented here occurred long before the current mess, the author makes the case that each of those declines (in 1792, 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893 and 1929) share common factors and can teach important lessons for contemporary policymakers. Systemic declines would probably never occur if not for the huge numbers of individual consumers wanting material goods, spending beyond the realm of common sense and then defaulting on promised payments. What happens next rarely stops at national borders, with panics crossing oceans and continents throughout the international economy. Additional fallout includes the formation of new political parties or the rejuvenation of existing but moribund parties. One compelling example, ably delineated by Nelson, is the rise of Andrew Jackson to the presidency due to fallout from a financial disaster. This revisionist account is eminently readable, in large part because Nelson offers flesh-and-blood examples rather than relying on abstractions. He opens the book with the story of his father’s career as a repo man. In that job, he dealt with deadbeat consumers every working day, gaining an acute understanding of how widespread financial collapses begin at the community level. A fascinating historical narrative, even if Nelson occasionally confuses cause and effect with correlation or even coincidence in some of his case studies.
Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-27269-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
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
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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