In this global history, economist David McWilliams charts the relationship between humans and money—from clay tablets in Mesopotamia to cryptocurrency in Silicon Valley.
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.
