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America's Dream Palace
Yale University Press
May 2008
On Sale: April 22, 2008
208 pages ISBN: 0300117558 EAN: 9780300117554 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Wall Street: no other place on earth is so singularly
identified with money and the power of money. And no other
American institution has inspired such deep moral,
cultural, and political ambivalence. Is the Street an
unbreachable bulwark defending commercial order? Or is it a
center of mad ambition? This book recounts the colorful history of America’s love-
hate relationship with Wall Street. Steve Fraser frames his
fascinating analysis around the roles of four iconic Wall
Street types—the aristocrat, the confidence man, the hero,
and the immoralist—all recurring figures who yield
surprising insights about how the nation has wrestled, and
still wrestles, with fundamental questions of wealth and
work, democracy and elitism, greed and salvation. Spanning
the years from the first Wall Street panic of 1792 to the
dot.com bubble-and-bust and Enron scandals of our own time,
the book is full of stories and portraits of such larger-
than-life figures as J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt,
and Michael Milken. Fraser considers the conflicting
attitudes of ordinary Americans toward the Street and
concludes with a brief rumination on the recent notion of
Wall Street as a haven for Everyman.
No awards found for this book.
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