93rd out of 233 books
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78 voters
The Moneychangers
Upton Sinclair's disturbing novel about the Wall Street scare of 1907 portrays the tactics of greedy capitalists who organize the fall of a rival trust company, creating a crash in the stock market crash and a run on American banks. Ultimately thousands of jobs are lost, throwing the world into financial chaos. Newly designed and typeset in a modern 6-by-9-inch format by W...more
Paperback, 184 pages
Published
July 1st 2008
by Classic Books Library
(first published 1919)
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For being a book that is almost impossible to find, it's disturbingly appropriate for what is going on in the economy today. Rather than delving into the lives of immigrants and slaughtering critters - this book follows the uppercrust on Wall Street through the stockmarket crash in the early 1900's.
Sinclair's characters are tragic, as always - but it is what is going on in this book that is so interesting. The motives and the greed, and the power struggle that finally leads to a stock market cra...more
Sinclair's characters are tragic, as always - but it is what is going on in this book that is so interesting. The motives and the greed, and the power struggle that finally leads to a stock market cra...more
After discovering the work of Upton Sinclair in high school, I have only sparingly enjoyed his work spaced over intervals of several years. The Jungle was my first experience, but that expose of the Chicago meat-packing industry didn’t have the same effect on me that it did on President Theodore Roosevelt and many others. The former president became a vegetarian for a short amount of time. I kept on eating meat. Others refused to eat sausage or hot dogs after finding out what went into them and...more
What a powerful book based on the Panic of 1907. It is a well written quick read, and something I would have expected from Sinclair.
I'm not a banker, nor am I into high finance, but I understood the situation as it progressed through the pages. I went a time or two to research history to see if I could place real people into the characters, and I discovered soon enough that the President was, of course, Teddy Roosevelt and the major financier who "saved" the banks was J.P. Morgan.
The story is...more
I'm not a banker, nor am I into high finance, but I understood the situation as it progressed through the pages. I went a time or two to research history to see if I could place real people into the characters, and I discovered soon enough that the President was, of course, Teddy Roosevelt and the major financier who "saved" the banks was J.P. Morgan.
The story is...more
Mar 13, 2010
Patrick Sprunger
rated it
5 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
fiction,
read-in-2010
I find it chilling that the peril of institutions that could be both too big to fail and driven to ruin by disingenuous wreckers was known exactly 100 years prior to the bubble burst of 2008. The Moneychangers is eerie in its similarity to the economic snap that began the so called Great Recession. But it is not perfectly prophetic. Sinclair's target in 1908 was the trusts. In some ways these were the same robber barons as today, but the dynamic has notable differences. Sinclair's panic has a cl...more
Not bad - typical Sinclair with some fast action that isn't too detailed or confusing. The ending was a bit weird; not what I expected. But I can understand the book's recent uptick in popularity with the current perspective/opinion of Wall Street and the bankers by much of today's US population. Its sad that this is fiction but could easily be fact and it says something about Sinclair that he saw trends and things like this back when he wrote the book. Maybe he was ahead of his time? :)
Yikes. I knew we were in trouble. I don't think I knew we were in this much trouble.
Moral of the story? Become a lawyer. Don't play the stocks. Listen to your internal compass. Don't mess with power hungry money grubbers.
Done, done, and done.
Also, file in the small group of books not written by Harper Lee and/or John Grisham (they totally collaborated, right?) in which a lawyer is the most morally defensible character.
Moral of the story? Become a lawyer. Don't play the stocks. Listen to your internal compass. Don't mess with power hungry money grubbers.
Done, done, and done.
Also, file in the small group of books not written by Harper Lee and/or John Grisham (they totally collaborated, right?) in which a lawyer is the most morally defensible character.
Tenth of public-domain classics I never read from Project Gutenberg read on my iPod using iBooks software.
Lots of over-the-top descriptions of the obscenely rich New York Titans of
Oil, Steel, and Insurance circa 1908, as seen through the eyes of a lawyer with a conscience who enters their world. A sequel to The Metropolis.
Lots of over-the-top descriptions of the obscenely rich New York Titans of
Oil, Steel, and Insurance circa 1908, as seen through the eyes of a lawyer with a conscience who enters their world. A sequel to The Metropolis.
This book is so prophetic!
If you only changed nthe style of clothes, the formal way of talking then and called all the coaches, taxis, this book would be perfect for today.The shenanigans this CEO's of large corporations play where the littel guy lose all but the scoundral that started it all gets to resign with millions while tax dollars bail them out so they can give themselves more bonuses. Guess things never really change.
If you only changed nthe style of clothes, the formal way of talking then and called all the coaches, taxis, this book would be perfect for today.The shenanigans this CEO's of large corporations play where the littel guy lose all but the scoundral that started it all gets to resign with millions while tax dollars bail them out so they can give themselves more bonuses. Guess things never really change.
Unlike the Jungle & Oil, this book was much shorter and focused solely on those on the financial top. Sinclair tried to cram a lot of financial tricks/schemes into under 200 pages while spending little time with his characters (and there are a lot) so you never get invested into the story. BUT any book written in 1908 and calls the Crash is worth something. Bottom line, not much has changed in the world of high finance.
I have this book in my iBooks library for iPhone and read it with all of my otherwise will be wasted waiting time. It's so very smooth to read. I don't know a whole lot about finance but it wasn't an obstacle to prevent me from understanding the story. And it got me very interested in knowing more about it.
May 22, 2013
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Prolific American author who wrote over 90 books in many genres and was widely considered to be one of the best investigators advocating socialist views and supporting anarchist causes, he achieved considerable popularity in the first half of the 20th century.
He gained particular fame for his novel, The Jungle (1906), which dealt with conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry and caused a publ...more
More about Upton Sinclair...
He gained particular fame for his novel, The Jungle (1906), which dealt with conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry and caused a publ...more
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