Liaquat Ahamed’s Lords of Finance is a history of early 20th century central banking. Individuals (all ten of them) who are passionately interested in the subject will doubtless find this title compelling. However, a good writer can turn the most unlikely material into pure gold, and Mr. Ahamed’s great achievement is his success in making Lords of Finance fascinating to the rest of us. That’s fortunate because the subtitle actually ought to be "Why did the Great Depression happen?"

The narrative primarily revolves around four men, the individuals who ran the central banks of Britain, France, Germany, and the United States in the 1920s and 30s. Most of its focus is on the economic effects of the first World War.

By almost any standard World War I was the most catastrophic event in modern history. This includes World War II which, while larger, could not have happened if World War I had not destroyed the the political, economic, and social structures that existed before 1914.

Much of Lords of Finance outlines the decade-long efforts of the western world’s central bankers and political leaders to undo the financial devastation of the war – concentrating on three aspects, in particular. One was the destruction of the pre-1914 gold standard. Another was the running sore of war debts and German reparations. The final problem was the vast economic distortion the war caused by triggering the abrupt rise of a new financial superpower – the United States.

Ending, as we know, with the Great Depression and a Second World War, this is not a story with a happy ending. The point of the book is how the twin calamities of the 30s and 40s largely flowed from decisions made and policies implemented between 1914 and 1929. As the author writes, "For many years people believed – even today many continue to do so – that an economic cataclysm of the magnitude of the Great Depression could have only been the result of mysterious and inexorable tectonic forces that governments were somehow powerless to resist." However, "I maintain that the Great Depression was not some act of God," rather, it was a result of "the most dramatic sequence of collective blunders ever made by financial officials."

Making such a claim stick is a tall order, and to make it, a book needs to be well-documented and convincingly written. Lords of Finance is just that. It’s also fascinating to read.

Joe McHugh – Administration Office

There are many authors who successfully capture a sense of place alongside their creation of character. James Herriot is one such author. Herriot’s Yorkshire Dales are as well-rendered as the Brontes’ Yorkshire Moors or Dickensian London. Herriot, a British country vet from the 1940s on, recounts his professional experience in four remarkable volumes of biographical anecdotes, of which All Creatures Great and Small is the first.

Herriot was clearly a good vet, but found his true calling as a storyteller. At the outset, his is a world of cold and dark, muck and effort, and of veterinary medicine little changed for generations. Horses had only recently been superseded by tractors. Roads were narrow and unlit. Animals were often kept in outbuildings a long distance from the farmhouse itself. Herriot’s daily work was frequently a struggle with the elements, the animals, and the limitations of veterinary science at the time. These stories range widely in scope. Herriot worked with pets, as well as farm animals, so he shifts easily from the cow-byre to Mrs Pumphrey’s drawing room, where her dog, Tricky-Woo, demands attention.

Herriot draws his human characters as comprehensively as the animals — we get to know his wife Helen; his colleagues, Siegfried and Tristan; and his hard-partying friend Granville Bennett as they collaborate on cases, compete for the attention of Darrowby’s young ladies, and live side-by-side in Skeldale House. The third book of the quartet, All Things Wise and Wonderful, details Herriot’s World War Two service in the Royal Air Force, as well as includes many of his classic vet stories and some life-changing family moments.

Audio versions of the books are available, many read by Christopher Timothy, who played Herriot in the long-running BBC television series, All Creatures Great and Small. Check out All Creatures Great and Small today, and take a trip to the Yorkshire Dales of the mid-twentieth century in the company of James Herriot.

John Jewitt – Savage Branch

Following up on her grandmother’s family stories, film-maker Ann Marie Fleming embarks on an extended and global search for the truth about her family, their history, and their experiences during the mid-twentieth century. She first showcased her findings in a documentary film, and in 2007, published The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam, an “illustrated memoir” that is a remarkable hybrid of non-fiction, graphic novel, and exhibit catalog. Fleming’s family story has a touch of mystery, a dash of romance, lots of celebrity, and drama that is ideally suited to this unconventional presentation.

Throughout the book, Fleming interlaces her own story of research and discovery with the extraordinary biography of Long Tack Sam. Mini-comics present various family stories about Sam, his early life, and how he received his training as a magician and acrobat in China. Photo-journal sections provide biographies of Sam’s surviving contemporaries and Fleming’s principal informants. Old photographs, handbills, and posters show Sam at work and at the height of his celebrity as a vaudeville star in New York City in the early 1920s.

The story of Sam and his family has an international dimension that makes it engaging on another level. Hailing from China, Sam travels first to Europe where he meets and marries his Austrian wife, Poldi, and then, during the First World War, moves on to the United States. Sam’s vaudeville career in New York takes a big hit from the rise of the motion picture, and eventually the family tours Australia, New Zealand, and China to find new audiences, while also performing an annual show in Hawaii. World War II and the Communist Revolution in China further disrupt the family, as they experience these global events first-hand.

Spanning the world more than once, this story is so much more than a glimpse into the heyday of magic and the theater between the wars. Prepare to be amazed by The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam!

John Jewitt – Savage Branch

Lisa See, best known for her novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, started out as a non-fiction author, telling the story of her own family in the magnificent On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family. Thanks to family stories and government records, See has a remarkable knowledge of her family and is able to comprehensively recreate the lives of her ancestors as far back as her great-great-grandfather. See’s family story is dynamic, vital and engaging. While many of our ancestors were working the same piece of land or living in the same town from generation to generation, See’s ancestors were building a series of successful businesses in California, traveling to visit relatives in China, and striving to build a foundation for future generations on “gold mountain.”

See begins her narrative with her great-great-grandfather Fong Dun Shun, an herbalist supporting the Chinese laborers working to construct the trans-continental railroad, and continues with the story of her great-grandfather, Fong See, and his arrival in the United States. Fong See established himself as a businessman in Sacramento, whose factory making undergarments for prostitutes was gradually transformed into a large import business bringing antiques and furnishings from China. The main instigator of this transformation was See’s great-grandmother, Letticie Pruett, a white woman born in Oregon in 1876, who set out for California on her own, and met Fong See while she was looking for work.

We spend a great deal of time with the children of Ticie and Fong See, the author’s great grandparents and great-great aunts and uncles. The “one hundred year odyssey” referred to in the subtitle is really that of Milton, Ray, Eddie, Benny and Sissee’s generation. These are the people who the reader follows from childhood to old age, through World War II, through the economic conditions of the mid-to-late twentieth century, and through the family negotiations around separations, business disagreements and accommodations with their father’s other family in China.

Although this is a family history, it is also a detailed social history of California and of the broader U.S. in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Working on these multiple levels, On Gold Mountain is an outstanding, rewarding and uniquely constructed work of non-fiction, notable both because See knows so much about her family, and because their experiences were so extraordinary.

John Jewitt – Savage Branch

It’s hard to imagine an America where you couldn’t travel due to a lack of technology. However, two hundred years ago, absent airplanes and railroads and with few roads worthy of the name, all the country really had for transport was a wealth of rivers. Unfortunately, rivers are easy enough to travel down but not very easy to travel in the opposite direction.

The solution? The steamboat, which this book claims as the "first great American invention." The history of steam power is a bit confusing. The steam engine itself, for instance, was mainly a British invention, while experiments with various sorts of steam-powered vessels go way back. What was developed in America was the first commercially viable steamboat. In the 19th century, along with the later development of canals and railroads, the steamboat made it possible to knit a fragmented agricultural republic into an industrial giant that spanned a continent.

As recounted in Steam, the development of the steamboat took some twenty years . Much of the book focuses on James Rumsey and John Fitch, who began the process and moved it significantly towards its eventual success. Their story is not a happy one. For a start, they were bitter rivals. Had they been able to cooperate they might have had a (slight) chance to share success. Absent cooperation, crippled by primitive technology and a lack of resources, the actual result was failure, insolvency, and obscurity for both.

Then came Robert Fulton who had the benefit of his predecessors’ experience and also some serious financial backing. Fulton’s achievement came with relative ease and was followed by both fame and fortune.

Residents of Howard County will find a good deal of regional interest in this book. For example, James Rumsey was born on the Eastern Shore and spent much of his adult life just up the Potomac in Shepherdstown, West Virginia.

Steam is both well-written and carefully researched. It tells the reader an important story about how the technological world we live in, which we often take very much for granted, came into existence.

Joe McHugh – Administration Office