October 4, 2009
FROM MY BOOKSHELF: Money–Ascendance and Dependence
By LeRoy Lawson Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (New York: Penguin Group, 2008). Thomas Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution””And How It Can Renew America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). My individual retirement account had plummeted by 40 percent when I read Niall Ferguson”s brilliantly timed The Ascent of Money. If there was any comfort to be culled from the Harvard history professor”s lectures to a nation of newly or nearly bankrupt investors, it was in the old adage “misery loves company.” This reader wasn”t the





