Social History Books

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

Niall Ferguson

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Total reviews: 37 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Niall Ferguson follows the money to tell the human story behind the evolution of finance, from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia to the latest upheavals on what he calls Planet Finance.

Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the wherewithal: Call it what you like, it matters. To Christians, love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it’s the sinews of war. To revolutionaries, it’s the chains of labor. But in The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson shows that finance is in fact the foundation of human progress. What’s more, he reveals financial history as the essential backstory behind all history.

Through Ferguson’s expert lens familiar historical landmarks appear in a new and sharper financial focus. Suddenly, the civilization of the Renaissance looks very different: a boom in the market for art and architecture made possible when Italian bankers adopted Arabic mathematics. The rise of the Dutch republic is reinterpreted as the triumph of the world’s first modern bond market over insolvent Habsburg absolutism. And the origins of the French Revolution are traced back to a stock market bubble caused by a convicted Scot murderer.

With the clarity and verve for which he is known, Ferguson elucidates key financial institutions and concepts by showing where they came from. What is money? What do banks do? What’s the difference between a stock and a bond? Why buy insurance or real estate? And what exactly does a hedge fund do?

This is history for the present. Ferguson travels to post-Katrina New Orleans to ask why the free market can’t provide adequate protection against catastrophe. He delves into the origins of the subprime mortgage crisis.

Perhaps most important, The Ascent of Money documents how a new financial revolution is propelling the world’s biggest countries, India and China, from poverty to wealth in the space of a single generation—an economic transformation unprecedented in human history.

Yet the central lesson of the financial history is that sooner or later every bubble bursts—sooner or later the bearish sellers outnumber the bullish buyers, sooner or later greed flips into fear. And that’s why, whether you’re scraping by or rolling in it, there’s never been a better time to understand the ascent of money.

Boys Will Be Boys: The Glory Days and Party Nights of the Dallas Cowboys Dynasty

Jeff Pearlman

Amazon Price: $47.87 List Price: $75.99 Not yet published By: Tantor Media

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 40 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

"You mean to tell me there are places where women get naked? And they serve food there, too?" 5 out of 5 stars.
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Anyone who spent any time out in clubs or had friends or relatives in either the "entertainment" industry or law enforcement in the Dallas/Ft Worth area heard stories of the excesses of Michael Irvin, Charles Haley, Deion Sanders, Emmitt Smith, Kenny Gant ("You mean to tell me there are places where women get naked? And they serve food there, too?") as well as other Dallas Cowboy football players and staff in the 1990's. The existence of a player owned "safe house" (the White House) where players and staff could indulge in drugs, alcohol, violence and a seemingly endless supply of willing women was an open secret. The near fatal DUI accident of right tackle Erik Williams and other car crashes involving players were hushed up with assistance from a compliant and dependent media. A caravan of limos ferrying "skanks" for the enjoyment of players and their guests (better to bring known women than chance the dangers of women found in clubs and hotels) to Tempe, Arizona for Super Bowl XXX. What could anyone say? Owner Jerry Jones had included his own party vehicle in the caravan...a six bed tour bus that had once been owned by Whitney Houston. The Cowboys were consumed and controlled by their giant egos and addictions.



All this excess could be forgiven, overlooked and hushed up until the Cowboys committed the unpardonable sin. The Dallas Cowboys quit winning and began to look foolish. The Cowboys began to show the effects of partying, bad coaching, foolish management decisions and lack of leadership and were being beaten on the field. Author Jeff Pearlman returns with yet another book of sports heroes gone bad: Boys Will be Boys, the Glory Days and Party Nights of the Dallas Cowboys Dynasty. Following the ascent of the 1990's Dallas Cowboys team, from the acquisition by Jerry Jones to the multiple Super Bowl appearances to the drug use, whoring, suicide attempts and lawlessness that was an open secret in the Metroplex, Pearlman holds nothing back. There are moments of good behavior, humor and community service, but they are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the excesses practiced by many on the team. What sets this book apart is Pearlman's meticulous research; the hours spent talking to players, ex-players, law enforcement, front office and coaching staff. It would be easy to lay out all the misdeeds of the Cowboys squads (and coaching staff) under coaches Jimmy Johnson and Barry Switzer. Rather than vilify the players, Pearlman tracks the decline and end of the "anything goes" Cowboys. He is quick to point out factors and backgrounds that might have predisposed some of the behaviors. He also acknowledges the press' part in turning a blind eye in order to get scoops and party with the players. From the top of the Cowboy food chain Pearlman dissects the choices and is very blunt in his appraisals of players and staff (finally someone outs John Blake as a waste of space and divisive in the locker room). The out of control organization was in danger of destroying the legacy left by previous owners, coaches and players as well as destroying thier own futures. While Pearlman gives an accounting of misdeeds he also gives room for a bittersweet epilogue, the induction into the Football Hall of Fame of Michael Irvin. This is a must for any true Cowboy fan who can appreciate the complexity of today's football machine and wants the Cowboys to succeed once again.

Editorial Review:

The New York Times bestselling author of The Bad Guys Won! chronicles the rise and fall of the Dallas Cowboys of the 1990s---the storied three-time Super Bowl champions and the most beloved, despised, and unforgettable dynasty in NFL history.

A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present (P.S.)

Howard Zinn

Amazon Price: $12.89 List Price: $18.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Harper Perennial Modern Classics Amazon Marketplace: 195 new & used starting at $10.00

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 649 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

real history 5 out of 5 stars.
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Howard Zinn was one of my favorite professors at university. This book presents with unflinching candor events that really happened in our history. And he is never boring!

Mind-altering Substance! 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This book is a classic, yet remains remarkably prescient, as politicians and corrupted individuals try to give us twisted and racist versions of history. Zinn gives enlightening details about the United States both on a grand and small scale; indeed, he remains the preeminent historian in the United States: his ability to reveal uncomfortable truths about inequality , oppression, and how history has actually transpired are extremely important for understanding not only history but the current problems we all face.

This easily digestible book (I'm not saying it tastes good)is a must-have for all literate people on the planet!

Editorial Review:

Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People's History of the United States is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of -- and in the words of -- America's women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers.

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Listening Is an Act of Love: A Celebration of American Life from the StoryCorps Project

Dave Isay

Amazon Price: $15.72 List Price: $24.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Penguin Press HC, The Amazon Marketplace: 94 new & used starting at $5.00

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Total reviews: 43 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Drawn from the work of StoryCorps, the largest and most ambitious oral history project in American history, comes this tapestry of the stories Americans have been sharing from their lives to leave behind to their loved ones.

In its two permanent public recording booths in New York City, at Grand Central and at Ground Zero, and its two mobile booths touring the country, StoryCorps, the most ambitious oral history project in American history, has collected the memories of people from all fifty states and every imaginable walk of life, background, identity group, age, and state of mind-more than ten-thousand in all. It is a wondrous nationwide celebration of our shared humanity, capturing for posterity the stories that define us and bond us together. In small towns and big cities, from Indian reservations in the Pacific Northwest to army bases in North Carolina, StoryCorps has brought people together to share the treasures of their lives in story.

In Listening Is an Act of Love, Dave Isay selects the most remarkable stories from the entire astonishing pool of memories. He arranges them thematically to form a mosaic of American life and binds them together with the history and principles of the StoryCorps project. The voices here connect us to a broad range of real people whose lives are filled with ordinary, extraordinary things-joy, sadness, courage, meaning, despair, good work and bad work, good times and hard times.

To read this book is to be reminded how wildly varied and interesting Americans really are, how resistant to easy categorization and caricatures. Above all, this book is a way to honor the gift of meaning that each participant in StoryCorps has made, out of the raw stuff of his or her life, to the people who come after. In a very real sense, we are our history, individually and collectively, as Listening Is an Act of Love so powerfully reminds us.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Jared Diamond

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 407 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

As Turgid As Gray Oatmeal (It won't let me give it less than 5, 1 STAR 1 STAR) 5 out of 5 stars.
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Unreadable, though Jared Diamond is brilliant, his rambling often monotonous descriptions of ancient civilization are hard to follow due to the unceasingly clunky prose style. It doesn't help that the first chapter is about Montana, AHH!

Editorial Review:

In his runaway bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond brilliantly examined the circumstances that allowed Western civilizations to dominate much of the world. Now he probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to fall into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates? Using a vast historical and geographical perspective ranging from Easter Island and the Maya to Viking Greenland and modern Montana, Diamond traces a fundamental pattern of environmental catastrophe—one whose warning signs can be seen in our modern world and that we ignore at our peril. Blending the most recent scientific advances into a narrative that is impossible to put down, Collapse exposes the deepest mysteries of the past even as it offers hope for the future.

American Rifle: A Biography

Alexander Rose

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Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

George Washington insisted that his portrait be painted with one. Daniel Boone created a legend with one. Abraham Lincoln shot them on the White House lawn. And Teddy Roosevelt had his specially customized.

Now, in this first-of-its-kind book, historian Alexander Rose delivers a colorful, engrossing biography of an American icon: the rifle. Drawing on the words of soldiers, inventors, and presidents, based on extensive new research, and encompassing the Revolution to the present day, American Rifle is a balanced, wonderfully entertaining history of this most essential firearm and its place in American culture.

In the eighteenth century American soldiers discovered that they no longer had to fight in Europe’s time-honored way. With the evolution of the famed “Kentucky” Rifle—a weapon slow to load but devastatingly accurate in the hands of a master—a new era of warfare dawned, heralding the birth of the American individualist in battle.

In this spirited narrative, Alexander Rose reveals the hidden connections between the rifle’s development and our nation’s history. We witness the high-stakes international competition to produce the most potent gunpowder . . . how the mysterious arts of metallurgy, gunsmithing, and mass production played vital roles in the creation of American economic supremacy . . . and the ways in which bitter infighting between rival arms makers shaped diplomacy and influenced the most momentous decisions in American history. And we learn why advances in rifle technology and ammunition triggered revolutions in military tactics, how ballistics tests—frequently bizarre—were secretly conducted, and which firearms determined the course of entire wars.

From physics to geopolitics, from frontiersmen to the birth of the National Rifle Association, from the battles of the Revolution to the war in Iraq, American Rifle is a must read for history buffs, gun collectors, soldiers—and anyone who seeks to understand the dynamic relationship between the rifle and this nation’s history.

How the States Got Their Shapes

Mark Stein

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Total reviews: 41 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Why does Oklahoma have that panhandle? Did someone make a mistake?

We are so familiar with the map of the United States that our state borders seem as much a part of nature as mountains and rivers. Even the oddities—the entire state of Maryland(!)—have become so engrained that our map might as well be a giant jigsaw puzzle designed by Divine Providence. But that's where the real mystery begins. Every edge of the familiar wooden jigsaw pieces of our childhood represents a revealing moment of history and of, well, humans drawing lines in the sand.

How the States Got Their Shapes is the first book to tackle why our state lines are where they are. Here are the stories behind the stories, right down to the tiny northward jog at the eastern end of Tennessee and the teeny-tiny (and little known) parts of Delaware that are not attached to Delaware but to New Jersey.

How the States Got Their Shapes examines:

• Why West Virginia has a finger creeping up the side of Pennsylvania
• Why Michigan has an upper peninsula that isn't attached to Michigan
• Why some Hawaiian islands are not Hawaii
• Why Texas and California are so outsized, especially when so many Midwestern states are nearly identical in size

Packed with fun oddities and trivia, this entertaining guide also reveals the major fault lines of American history, from ideological intrigues and religious intolerance to major territorial acquisitions. Adding the fresh lens of local geographic disputes, military skirmishes, and land grabs, Mark Stein shows how the seemingly haphazard puzzle pieces of our nation fit together perfectly.

The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America

David Hadju

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Subjects -> Comics & Graphic Novels -> History & Price Guides
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> 20th Century -> 1945 - Present
Subjects -> History -> Historical Study -> Social History

Editorial Review:

In the years between World War II and the emergence of television as a mass medium, American popular culture as we know it was first created in the pulpy, boldly illustrated pages of comic books. But no sooner had this new culture emerged than it was beaten down by church groups and a McCarthyish Congress.

In The Ten-Cent Plague, David Hadju reveals how comics, years before the rock and roll revolution, brought on a clash between postwar children and their prewar parents. Created by outsiders from the tenements, garish, shameless, and often shocking, comics became the targets of a raging generational culture divide. They were burned in public bonfires, outlawed in certain cities, and nearly destroyed by the televised hearings orchestrated by Congress. The Ten-Cent Plague radically revises common notions of popular culture and the divide between "high" and "low" art.

Boom!: Talking About the Sixties: What Happened, How It Shaped Today, Lessons for Tomorrow

Tom Brokaw

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Total reviews: 95 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In Boom!, Tom Brokaw, one of America’s premier journalists and the acclaimed author of The Greatest Generation, gives us an epic portrait of another defining era in America: the tumultuous Sixties. The voices and stories of both famous people and ordinary citizens come together in this “virtual reunion” as Brokaw takes us on a memorable journey through a remarkable time, exploring how individuals and the national mood were affected by a controversial era and showing how the aftershocks of the Sixties continue to resound in our lives today. In the reflections of a generation, Brokaw also discovers lessons that might guide us in the years ahead. Race, politics, war, feminism, popular culture, and music are all delved into here. Brokaw explores how members of this generation have gone on to bring activism and a Sixties mindset into individual entrepreneurship , as we hear stories of how this formative decade has shaped our perspectives on business, the environment, politics, family, and our national existence. Remarkable in its insights, wonderfully written and reported, this revealing book lets us join in these frank conversations about America then, now, and tomorrow.

Bonus DVD: Excerpt From 1968 with Tom Brokaw, A History Channel special


Praise for Boom!

“Tom Brokaw does an excellent job of capturing an exciting, controversial period in American history and Boom! is a worthy addition to his growing canon.”–New York Post

“[Tom Brokaw] approaches this magnum opus with warmth, curiosity and conviction, the same attributes that worked so well for his Greatest Generation.”
–The New York Times

“[A] verbal scrapbook of the Sixties . . . [Boom! shows] that the era’s core issues–racism, women’s rights, a nation-dividing war–remain central today, and that the values boomers championed haven’t yet gone bust.”
–People (four stars)

“Packed with memorable people, places, events . . . A ‘virtual reunion’ of 1960s folks telling what they did back then, where they’ve been since and how they assess that tumultuous decade.”
–Chicago Tribune

“Genuinely fascinating recollections . . . plenty of memorable anecdotes.”
–The Wall Street Journal

The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870-1914

David McCullough

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Total reviews: 133 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The building of the Panama Canal was one of the most grandiose, dramatic, and sweeping adventures of all time. Spanning nearly half a century, from its beginnings by a France in pursuit of glory to its completion by the United States on the eve of World War I, it enlisted men, nations, and money on a scale never before seen. Apart from the great wars, it was the largest, costliest single effort ever mounted anywhere on earth, and it affected the lives of tens of thousands of people throughout the world. Here in all its heartbreak and eventual triumph the epic adventure is brought vividly alive by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of such books as The Johnstown Flood, The Great Bridge, Truman, and John Adams.

Filled with vivid detail and incident, The Path Between the Seas is not only a fact-filled account of an unprecedented engineering feat; it is also the story of the people who were caught up in it -- some to win fame and fortune, others to have their reputations and even their lives destroyed. For many it was the adventure of a lifetime, an adventure whose like will never be seen again. Out of it came a revolution, the birth of a new nation, the conquest of yellow fever, and the expansion of American power.

Told from many viewpoints, this is an account drawn from previously unpublished and undiscovered sources, from interviews with actual participants and their families, from material gathered in Paris, Bogotá, Panama, the Canal Zone, and Washington. It is a canvas filled with memorable people: Ferdinand de Lesseps and his son Charles, trying to repeat de Lesseps's Suez triumph; Jules Verne; Paul Gauguin; Gustave Eiffel; A. T. Mahan and Richard Harding Davis; Senator Mark Hanna; Secretary of State John Hay; the incredible Philippe Bunau-Varilla, "the man who invented Panama"; Dr. William Gorgas; the forgotten American engineer hero John Stevens; Colonel George Washington Goethals; and, above all, Theodore Roosevelt, who "took Panama" in 1903 and left his indelible stamp on the canal.

As informative as it is fascinating, The Path Between the Seas is history told in the grand manner. With novelistic urgency it presents one of the great stories of all time in an account that will remain definitive for many years to come.

With two detailed maps and more than eighty photographs.