Originally published in 1935, this book charts the revolution from a banking to an industrial conception of currency which took place between 1922 and 1932. Having failed to stabilise the purchasing power of gold, General Strong stabilised the purchasing power of the dollar, an idea which was revived on an international scale by the Ottawa Conference of 1932. The stabilisation of purchasing power, independently of gold, was subsequently adopted as the keystone of British currency policy.

Originally published in 1935, this book charts the revolution from a banking to an industrial conception of currency which took place between 1922 and 1932. Having failed to stabilise the purchasing power of gold, General Strong stabilised the purchasing power of the dollar, an idea which was revived on an international scale by the Ottawa Conference of 1932. The stabilisation of purchasing power, independently of gold, was subsequently adopted as the keystone of British currency policy.

Originally published in 1931, this book was written at a time when the utility and value of gold was under great scrutiny. Global financial circles were discussing the necessity of reducing the price of gold, pressing for the return of Britain to a gold standard and imposing a managed currency. Against a background of post-war monetary and financial dislocations, the author argues that the unique monetary quality of gold is its liquidity, and its universal acceptability as a natural form of money throughout the world.

Originally published in 1931, this book was written at a time when the utility and value of gold was under great scrutiny. Global financial circles were discussing the necessity of reducing the price of gold, pressing for the return of Britain to a gold standard and imposing a managed currency. Against a background of post-war monetary and financial dislocations, the author argues that the unique monetary quality of gold is its liquidity, and its universal acceptability as a natural form of money throughout the world.

Valérie André is one of the great military aviators of the twentieth century. She was the first woman to fly a helicopter in combat and one of the first three helicopter medevac pilots. Flying more than 150 helicopter rescue missions during the French war in Indochina (including at Dien Bien Phu), and parachuting into the field twice, André was a trailblazer, a pioneer of flying helicopters in combat and an innovator of battlefield medicine, who risked her life to treat the wounded, whether they were French or Vietnamese, whether they were friend, civilian, or foe. Aviation historian Charles Morgan Evans tells her story with verve and pathos. André was born in Strasbourg, France, in 1922. From an early age, she wanted to fly, but as a woman, she faced challenges. While boys could receive government-funded flight lessons, André had to pay for hers by tutoring. During World War II, she left Strasbourg against German prohibitions in order to study medicine in Paris, where she completed her studies under threat of arrest by the Gestapo. Assigned to an army hospital in Saigon in French Indochina in the late 1940s, André trained as a neurosurgeon, performing one hundred procedures per month. When the French medical corps developed mobile surgical units to be air-dropped into military outposts, she quickly volunteered, and then when the service acquired a few primitive helicopters, she volunteered for that, which meant learning to fly helicopters in combat. Flying through bullets and bombs, fatigue, parasitic illness, and mechanical issues with the helicopters— not to mention the French army’s prejudice against a female pilot and surgeon—André nonetheless became a legend in Indochina. The Vietnamese called her “the woman who comes down from the sky” and “Mrs. Ventilator.” On one day in December 1951, she flew her chopper into the teeth of antiaircraft fire to a besieged base, where she performed emergency brain surgeries, then flew the wounded to hospitals in Hanoi, two at a time. After Indochina, she continued to be an innovator in military aviation and medicine as well as an advocate for women’s integration into the French military. In the early 1960s, she flew another 236 missions in Algeria. In 1975, she became the first female general in the French army, and at her retirement, she had flown nearly 500 combat missions, logged 4,000 hours in helicopters, and won the Croix de Guerre five times, the Cross of Military Valor twice, and the Grand Cross of the National Order of Merit. André, who just turned ninety-nine, is still alive and lives near Paris, and this book is based on a series of author interviews with her and comprehensive research in other sources.

Challenge to Venus has its settings in the ancient hill-town of Varenna in Italy in 1957 when the book was first published. Against the background of a closely knit Italian society, into which Fiammeta Alerani was born, it tells the story of her encounter with a visiting Englishman; of their conflict of temperament, tradition and upbringing; of their surrender to each other, and of the diverging loves which are the result of that experience. Fiammeta, like Psyche who was called a rival of Venus, has extreme beauty. In spite of the heat of her blood, it is in her proud nature to believe that she is the mistress of her own impulse and exempt from the consequences of human frailty, as a goddess might be. The Englishman has a different pride -the pride of being 'ordinary', of never allowing himself to 'go in off the deep end', and of supposing that by this means he can make life conform to design. With unstressed irony, the lovers are presented neither as hero and heroine to be actually uncritically admired nor as fools to be despised, but as normal creatures who fall in the ambush of the senses. Their story carries a step further, in the form of tragic-comedy, one of the author's basic themes - that fate implacably drives man and woman to self knowledge and the acceptance of their limitations. In the province of love as in the province of power, that form of pride which the Greeks called hubris draws down retribution upon itself. No one is exempt. No one is permitted to rival the gods. From the original edition, Macmillan & Co LTD, UK, 1957 ]+++++++++++++++++ MORGAN, CHARLES LANGBRIDGE (1894-1958), drama critic, novelist, playwright. He was trained in the Royal Navy but resigned in 1913 to lead a literary life, though he returned to serve in the navy during both World Wars. He entered Brasenose College, Oxford and joined the staff of The Times, becoming its principal drama critic, (1926-39). Contributed weekly articles on the London theatre to the New York Times. He received many honorary degrees; was elected president of the English Association, 1953-54, and of the International Literary Congress for Authors, 1954-56. He produced a continuous sequence of literary masterpieces. His novels and plays were particularly artistic, of profound significance, and of great and varied narrative power. Portrait in a Mirror (1929) was awarded the Femina-Vie Heureuse prize; The Fountain (1932) the Hawthornden prize; and The Voyage (1940) the James Tait Black memorial book prize. A dramatised version of The River Line (1949) was produced at the Edinburgh Festival in 1952. His final two novels, A Breeze of Morning (1951), about an adult love affair witnessed by a young boy and Challenge to Venus (1957), some of the themes of The Fountain are now published again under the Rediscovered Books series of Jorge Pinto Books, Inc.