PositiveThe Wall Street JournalEverybody loves a shaggy dog story. A good one should be long and implausible but still on the edge of possibility. The chronicle at the heart of Eric Rutkow’s The Longest Line on the Map seems to qualify ... Mr. Rutkow diligently—rather too diligently perhaps—chronicles every conference over the years, every agreement, every promise of money.
Paul Volcker, Christine Harper
PositiveThe AtlanticNot a tell-all book ... There is not much of a personal nature in the book, and yet, unwittingly, it paints an accurate personal portrait. The picture that emerges is of a man of granitic integrity, committed to what he perceives as wise policies—committed, that is, to what he calls The Verities: stable prices, sound finance, and good government.
Richard Rhodes
RaveThe Wall Street JournalHe offers a riveting account of humanity’s 400-year quest to bend the natural world to its own purposes, for good or ill ... an easy canter through industrial history, enlivened by anecdote and unexpected detail ... He finishes by making a powerful case for regenerating the nuclear power industry ... Mr. Rhodes has scored another masterpiece, so it’s not churlish to regret a couple of omissions. On the American side in the Age of Steam was Oliver Evans, who as much as Trevithick deserves mention for the high-pressure steam engine; and the steamboats based on Henry Shreve’s designs for shallow Western rivers were as important in America as Stephenson’s locomotives were in Britain. Finally, Mr. Rhodes makes little mention of the British machine-tool makers—above all, Henry Maudslay—who created indispensable precision tools. Still, there’s more than enough energetic exposition in Energy: A Human History for anyone who cares to learn how and why we are now so richly empowered.
Diana B. Henriques
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewIn making her case for the importance of the 1987 crash, Henriques has produced a valuable and unfailingly interesting account of a crucial two-decade period in Wall Street history — when markets made a full-bore transition from serving individual investors to a system dominated by giant corporations, mostly trading for themselves, and competing by means of arcane computer algorithms and spectacular processing speeds … Henriques gives us a gripping, almost minute-by-minute account of the weeks that followed, including the posturings, the denials and the panics, as well as the ‘web of trust, pluck and improvisation’ that pulled the markets through … Henriques has produced a highly intelligent and perceptive analysis of an important transitional era in modern finance. She is quite right that the quant-driven market complexities of the 1980s finally caused a real crash in 2007-8.
