Nos
publications
- Exposé
- Univers
- Articles
- Critique Littéraire
- The Next Decade - critiqué par Remi Maloney
- The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers - critiqué par James McKeough
- The Big Short - critiqué par Marie-Michelle Dumas
- Critique littéraire par John Shingler: The Age of Wonder
- Critique littéraire par John Shingler: The Ascent of Money
- Critique littéraire par John Shingler: Lords of Finance
- Critique littéraire par John Shingler: Billions of Entrepreneurs
- Prix et reconnaissance
Critique Littéraire
12/22/11
The Next Decade - critiqué par Remi Maloney
The Next Decade, par George Friedman, Doubleday, 2011, 272 pp., $20.00
Le propriétaire et PDG de STRATFOR, George Friedman, entreprend la tâche ambitieuse de projeter les événements à venir dans la prochaine décennie. Pourquoi les hypothèses de Friedman vaudraient-elles plus que les prédictions de la page d’astrologie du Financial Times ? La réponse repose dans une sagesse trop souvent ignorée par les commentateurs politiques : afin de savoir où on va, il faut comprendre où on est et comment on y est arrivé.
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10/25/11
The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers - critiqué par James McKeough
The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers, par Richard McGregor, Harper Collins; 1St Edition, 320 pp., 2010, $27.99
Sous la plume de Richard McGregor, correspondant du Financial Times à Pékin au cours de la dernière décennie, The Party offre un cadre solide pour comprendre le système qui fait tourner la Chine, le Parti communiste chinois (PCC).
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03/04/11
The Big Short - critiqué par Marie-Michelle Dumas
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday machine, par Michael Lewis, W. W. Norton & Company; 1St Edition edition, 266 pp., 2010, $27.95
The Big Short n’est pas simplement un livre de plus sur la dernière crise financière. C’est plutôt une histoire bien écrite au sujet des erreurs de jugement, des signaux manqués et des mauvaises decisions qui y ont conduit.
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04/01/10
Critique littéraire par John Shingler: The Age of Wonder
Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, London, Harper Press, 2008. pp., xxi, 554.
What an extraordinarily beautiful book this is, filled with insights and information, pulsating with energy and charged with hope for humanity. It is, above all, a profoundly optimistic book. It revels in the accomplishments of the past and celebrates human ingenuity and creativity. Holmes appears to have read everything related to his subject: original texts, unpublished sources and the massive secondary literature. This is a magisterial work which belongs on the shelf of all of those who want to understand the foundations of the modern world, above all the scientific achievements, and dangers, of the past two centuries. It can be read and reread with increasing pleasure and an expanded understanding of the giants on whose shoulders we stand.
06/01/09
Critique littéraire par John Shingler: The Ascent of Money
The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, by Niall Ferguson. NY. Penguin Press, 2008. 442 pp. $29.95.
The title of The Ascent of Money, we should note, is a deliberate reference to the famed television series, The Ascent of Man, written and narrated by the late Jacob Bronowski. In that work Bronowski addressed the place of human beings, and their evolution, in the framework of natural history. Bronowski’s series on human beings had a substantial influence on the young Ferguson, who is trying in The Ascent to do the same thing for money, that highly contested and much debated human invention and artefact that Bronowski did for the original inventors, human beings. I would claim that Ferguson succeeds.
12/01/08
Critique littéraire par John Shingler: Lords of Finance
Liaquat Ahamed. Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, New York. Penguin Press, 2008. 564 pp. $32.95.
The key to understanding Ahamed’s excellent book is to recognize that its leitmotiv is that history is best seen as a succession of decisions taken by leading actors; it is not a process subject to impersonal forces that impel individuals and groups ineluctably in one direction or another. The essence of this world view is captured in the epigraph to Lords of Finance, “Read no history – nothing but biography, for that is life without theory”, a provocative aphorism taken from Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Contarini Fleming. I think many people, however much they may claim to subscribe to some theory, whether it be dialectical materialism or the efficient market hypothesis, in practice basically agree with Ahamed’s proposition that leadership does indeed matter. Why else the fierce competition for office and for control of governments or corporate bodies or political parties?
06/01/08
Critique littéraire par John Shingler: Billions of Entrepreneurs
Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India are Reshaping Their Futures and Yours, by Tarun Khanna, Boston, Harvard Business School Press, 353 pp., 2007, $29.95
Tarun Khanna compares China’s and India’s separate pasts and their dissimilar passages to modernity, and then explores the world that they are both directing and making. I am filled with admiration for Khanna’s energy, enthusiasm and entrepreneurship. Indeed, his work, Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India are Reshaping Their Futures – And Yours, is in an instance of his topic; Tarun Khanna himself is an example of what he is writing about.
