This volume, a collection of essays and broadcasts by Ayman Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden, does the Al Qaeda leaders no favors. Whatever their capacities as terrorists, Dr. Zawahiri tends toward the wordy and Mr. bin Laden is inordinately proud Read More
Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence, by Tim Parks. W.W. Norton & Company/Atlas Books, 273 pages, $22.95. The Medici bank, which was founded in Florence in 1397, was one of the most powerful business enterprises of the Renaissance years in Italy. It operated branches all over Western Europe, financing the cloth and Read More
Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence , by Tim Parks. W.W. Norton & Company/Atlas Books, 273 pages, $22.95.
The Medici bank, which was founded in Florence in 1397, was one of the most powerful business enterprises of the Renaissance years in Italy . It operated branches Read More
Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence , by Tim Parks. W.W. Norton & Company/Atlas Books, 273 pages, $22.95.
The Medici bank, which was founded in Florence in 1397, was one of the most powerful business enterprises of the Renaissance years in Italy . It operated branches all over Western Europe , Read More
Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence, by Tim Parks. W.W. Norton & Company/Atlas Books, 273 pages, $22.95.
The Medici bank, which was founded in Florence in 1397, was one of the most powerful business enterprises of the Renaissance years in Italy. It operated branches all over Western Europe, financing the cloth and luxury Read MoreMedici Money: Banking, Metaphysics and Art in Fifteenth-Century
Florence , by Tim Parks. W.W. Norton & Company/Atlas Books, 273 pages, $22.95. The Medici bank, which was founded in Florence in 1397, was one of the most powerful business enterprises of the Renaissance years in Italy . It operated branches all over Western Europe , financing Read MoreMedici Money: Banking, Metaphysics and Art in Fifteenth-Century
Florence , by Tim Parks. W.W. Norton & Company/Atlas Books, 273 pages, $22.95. The Medici bank, which was founded in Florence in 1397, was one of the most powerful business enterprises of the Renaissance years in Italy . It operated branches all over Western Europe , financing Read MoreThe Roads to Modernity: The British, French and American Enlightenments , by Gertrude Himmelfarb. Alfred A. Knopf, 272 pages, $25.
Europe and North America in the second half of the 18th century thought of themselves as enlightened. Images of light and enlightenment sparkle through the philosophy, the sermons, the journalism, even the commercial prospectuses of Read MoreThe Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal, by M. Mitchell Waldrop. Viking, 528 pages, $27.95.
J.C.R. who? We all know something of computing history, of the mathematical philosophers John von Neumann and Alan Turing, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Digital Equipment Corporation, the Pentagon in the 1960's, Xerox PARC, Steve Jobs, Read MoreIn 1881, raising capital on the strength of his name alone, Villard took control of the Northern Pacific Railroad.
Villard: The Life and Times of an American Titan , by Alexandra Villard de Borchgrave and John Cullen. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 414 pages, $30. When F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "There are no second acts in American lives," Read MoreMaestro: Greenspan's Fed and the American Boom , by Bob Woodward. Simon & Schuster, 270 pages, $25.
Like Saddam Hussein, Alan Greenspan has the knack of outlasting U.S. Presidents. Appointed chairman of the board of the governors of the Federal Reserve in 1987, Mr. Greenspan has seen out Ronald Reagan and George Bush, and will Read MoreWhen Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management , by Roger Lowenstein. Random House, 264 pages, $26.95.
The story of Long-Term Capital Management, the Greenwich, Conn., investment firm that lost $4.5 billion dollars in six months of 1998, is as good as any to be found in the annals of American financial markets. Read MoreUnspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture , by John Conroy. Alfred A. Knopf, 304 pages, $26.
If the Abner Louima case had anything to teach New York, it was that the practice of torture, which an enlightened age and society were supposed to have abolished, was alive and well in 1997 in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Read MoreThe Working Life: The Promise and Betrayal of Modern Work , by Joanne B. Ciulla. Times Books, 266 pages, $25.
For something that most of us do, or want to do, work is not easy to write sense about. Work is our chief connection to the world around us. Work tells us what to do each Read MoreThe Plot to Get Bill Gates: An Irreverent Investigation of the World's Richest Man … and the People Who Hate Him , by Gary Rivlin. Times Books, 360 pages, $25.
The first of the world's millionaires was most likely the Scotsman John Law, who held an exclusive concession to the French territory of Louisiana and Read More
