Learned but lively, even whimsical ... McWilliams writes with extra zest ... Not an encyclopedic volume, but an opinionated, irreverent parsing of currency’s charms. It could not possibly be comprehensive...but it is idiosyncratic and interesting.
McWilliams admits that he is not a solitary writer but a chatty one, someone who writes by bouncing ideas off others to help wrestle masses of facts, figures and disjointed ideas into an overall story that is not simply convincing and coherent but entertaining and compelling too. In Money, his best and most important book yet, he succeeds brilliantly ... Profound ... Vivid descriptions ... A fabulous read but its real importance lies in the questions it raises about the future shape of our societies.
Enjoyable and insightful ... [A] clear conceptual map then enables McWilliams to spin a coherent global history of money out of an exceptionally colourful and wide-ranging set of yarns ... McWilliams’s book is a hugely ambitious and very readable history of money, whose appeal will run well beyond just monetary cranks like me.
The argument doesn’t altogether convince, but McWilliams...does know how to write. His book is well researched and crammed full of anecdotes that help bring a dry subject to life ... There are other – slightly nit-picking – criticisms ... That said, there is much to enjoy – for the lay reader as well as the economist. The book’s flaws are comfortably outweighed by its strengths: not least the fact that McWilliams clearly had a lot of fun writing it.
McWilliams provides enlightening particulars about how political figures through time, such as Roman Emperor Vespasian and radical French Bishop Talleyrand, became pioneers in monetary policy through the issuance of credit and government-backed bonds. A scholarly work worth more than a single read.
