Money. Rhino. The long green. It is "the most important thing in
the world" (George Bernard Shaw). It is "power, freedom, a cushion,
the root of all evil, the sum of blessings" (Carl Sandburg). It is
"the alienated essence of man's work and existence" (Karl Marx). It
is a medium of exchange, a measure of value, a standard of deferred
payment. It is "better than poverty, if only for financial reasons"
(Woody Allen). It is "the final enemy that will never be subdued"
(Samuel Butler).
Few things occupy as central a place in our lives as money, and few
provoke such intense and varied response. Now in an entertaining
and also thought-provoking book, Kevin Jackson brings together
reflections on money by some of the most brilliant minds who ever
lived, drawing on such writers as Dante and Chaucer, Shakespeare
and Milton, Dostoevsky and Dickens, Mark Twain and Jane Austen,
Edith Wharton and Henry James, and such thinkers as Max Weber,
Thorstein Veblen, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes.
Here is an all-encompassing look at the bottom line of human
life--wealth and poverty, lending and borrowing, money heavens and
money hells. There are colorful scenes from fiction--Silas Marner
alone at night bathing his hands in gold and silver, Captain Ahab
nailing a doubloon to the Pequot's mast, three hooligans in
Chaucer's "The Pardoner's Tale" finding death in a sack of coins.
We find Polonius's advice "neither a borrower nor a lender be" side
by side with Panurge's comic paeon to debt ("a thing most precious
and dainty, of great use and antiquity") and Charles Lamb's
memorable portrait of the debtor ("What a careless, even deportment
hath your borrower What rosy gills What a beautiful reliance on
Providence doth he manifest"). There are telling portraits of the
money binge of the 1980s, in excerpts from Michael Lewis's Liar's
Poker and Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, and harrowing
descriptions of the Great Crash of 1929 and the German
hyperinflation of the early 1920s, where at one point a dollar was
worth a trillion marks. And perhaps most important, there are many
thoughtful observations on money, such as Adam Smith's comment that
"with the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of
riches consists in the parade of riches." Or Roger Scruton's point
that without money transactions are limited to barter and gifts,
but with it "exchange multiplies quietly and peacefully to
infinity." Or Alexander Pope's caustic remark that "we may see the
small value God has for riches, by the people he gives them
to."
By looking at money from so many different perspectives, through
the eyes of writers and poets, philosophers and economists,
financiers and politicians, The Oxford Book of Money offers us a
deeper appreciation of what money is, what it can do, what it is
really worth. By turns insightful, amusing, and intriguing, it will
help readers to reexamine what money means to them and rethink its
value in their lives.
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