An enthralling account of an economic revolution that emerged from a scandal.
The story of government debt finance, which sounds boring but definitely isn’t.
Science writer and MIT professor Levenson reminds readers that rulers throughout history have taxed citizens to pay bills. During wars, this proved insufficient, so they borrowed from rich people and often didn’t pay it back. As a result, governments paid higher interest than private borrowers and sometimes found no lenders. Alternatives such as seizing church money created other difficulties, but unpaid soldiers wreaked havoc. Britain solved this problem around 1700 when clever men invented the joint-stock company, which would exchange government bonds for stock in their business. The bonds were collateral for loans that the company would invest, make a profit, and pay dividends. What could go wrong? Succeeding in business takes time and expertise, but joint-stock shares had value immediately. One could profit trading them, and savvy company owners, with insider knowledge (not then illegal) and a printing press, went to town. Levenson’s fascinating subject, the South-Sea Company, was not the first but the most memorable. In 1711, Parliament approved a plan to trade its bonds for South-Sea stock, which they believed would skyrocket because the company possessed exclusive trade rights in South America. This trade never amounted to much, but few paid attention. The company absorbed a great deal of government debt and satisfied both owners and shareholders until 1720, when—for reasons no one, including the author, can explain—stock prices shot upward during a buying frenzy and then collapsed. While historians often portray this as a scam, Levenson points out that it worked. Despite recriminations following the crash, British leaders understood that issuing bonds that buyers could trade or use as collateral was a superb way to borrow. Other nations did not catch on for another century, during which time Britain’s ability to raise immense quantities of money allowed it to “punch above its weight class” in wars against far more populous and wealthy nations.
An enthralling account of an economic revolution that emerged from a scandal.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9846-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
HISTORY | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | BUSINESS | MODERN | WORLD | ECONOMICS | GENERAL BUSINESS
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 Yorkerstaff 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
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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