news archive
March 2023
Posted 03.15.23: A starred review from Booklist for These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs—and Wrecks—America by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner: "Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Morgenson, along with research-consultancy managing director Rosner, uncover the 30-year history of private equity and its impact on American lives. Private-equity firms, the authors contend, buy companies and load them with debt while bleeding them of assets. The firms then sell the companies to new owners at a substantial profit for themselves while the companies go bankrupt.... Readers will be drawn into the duo's storytelling, and even those who aren't financially savvy will be able to grasp the topic. It's a must-read for all for help in understanding a different side of capitalism."
January 2023
Posted 01.20.23: "A professional historian's product through and through, sharply focused on its period and supported by amazingly detailed endnotes, plus a huge bibliography. Mr. Kagan's account is probably the most comprehensive, and most impressive, recent analysis we have of how Americans regarded the outside world and its own place in it during those four critical decades."—Paul Kennedy, The Wall Street Journal, on The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900-1941 by Robert Kagan