A bright literary exercise, the third in the new series Enterprise (“the business book as literature”). (14 illus., not seen)
The prolific Parks (Judge Savage, 2003, etc.), a Britisher now at home in Italy, offers a Renaissance splendor that is often scanted in the artistic glory of the era.
The wealth of the Medicis supplied the plates and pallets of painters like Donatello and Fra Fillipo Lippi in a symbiotic relationship of art and craftiness. In Parks’s portrait of doughty, gouty Cosimo (1389–1464), the emphasis is on the craftiness—on the way Cosimo ran his family, Florence and, as well, a mighty international banking system. When usury was a sin, depositary accounts entailed gifts, not interest. For nearly a century, the Medici banks were proficient in letters of credit, currency arbitrage, commodity exchange and other metaphysical financial practices, all without sin. The Church was a major client. Here’s the story of the Medicis—doctors of finance and statecraft, governance and religion, trade, warfare, intrigue and despotism as contending Dukes duked it out in Tuscany. Condottieri (hired armies) were the enforcers, ducats and florins the means and ends. Cosimo was succeeded by his fat son, Piero the Gouty (1416–69), who was followed by homely, captivating Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449–92). Lorenzo may have been more interested in poetry and politics than in negotiable instruments and capital markets, yet one son became pope (and two weren’t strong enough for the family business). The dynasty couldn’t last, of course. Its power waned with bank failures, ill health and, particularly, with the advent of Girolamo Savoranola, the fundamentalist who challenged the humanist Medicis. Parks’s narrative of the conflation of state power and the power of business, frequently told in the present tense, often in sentence fragments, flows like money. Financial history never had it so good.
A bright literary exercise, the third in the new series Enterprise (“the business book as literature”). (14 illus., not seen)Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-393-05827-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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