AN EMPIRE OF WEALTH:
THE EPIC HISTORY OF AMERICAN ECONOMIC POWER
“Fantastic, sweeping and absorbingly informative history of how America grew from a precarious wilderness economy four centuries ago to the unprecedented economic colossus it is today.”
Steve Forbes, Forbes Magazine
“Gordon has written the best one-volume economic history of the United States in a long time and, perhaps, ever. Highly readable and fact-filled, it's basically optimistic.”
Robert J. Samuelson, Newsweek
“Those seeking an introduction to the general history of American economic power will find few better places to start.”
Publishers Weekly
“Fast-moving, concise, and always lucid history. . . . Must reading for the ideologues and demagogues of our day. Maybe they would absorb a sense of perspective on the historic creators of America's pre-eminence.”
Harold Evans in the New York Sun
“[Gordon] is a master of the economic anecdote, of telling how people built a complicated world by solving the problem in front of their noses. He is also a master of brevity, which is handy when trying to lever an epic story into a book small enough for the public to read.”
Seattle Times
“Superb”
The Wall Street Journal
“He presents even the least vivid economic history, such as the late 19th-century debate over the gold standard, in a fascinating manner. . . . This remarkably detailed and interesting book is highly recommended.”
Library Journal
“[C]olorful, entertaining history of the American economy, . . . he presents the essential ideas and innovations that have propelled the American economy since its earliest days, and illustrates them with striking examples. He has produced the written equivalent of a PBS "American Experience" documentary, a gaudy cavalcade of facts, outsize personalities and fascinating inventions that moves along at a brisk clip.”
New York Times
“Solid raw material with plenty of value added. Just the thing for economics wonks, then, but lively enough to make for good airplane reading.”
Kirkus
“...an important new book . . . . This is a book that take seriously, as economic forces, the popular newspaper, the whale hunt, the ice trade, central heating, and household help. It sets out the story not merely of how the economy changed, but how Americans' lives changed. Thus it is, too, the story of the telegraph, the telephone, and the Internet; the steamship, the railroad, and the automobile; the GI Bill, the Wagner Act, and the Marshall Plan; but mostly it is the story of how a nation's life was transformed by ingenuity and entrepreneurship, whether belonging to Andrew Carnegie or, in his own way, Samuel Gompers.”
Boston Globe
“Absorbing popular history . . . Gordon is a knowledgeable and relentlessly optimistic chronicler, relating with great panache how America's turn toward liberty, growth and innovation produced wonders of synergy. . . . An Empire of Wealth offers a Promethean narrative of America's rise to economic dominance. Gordon's account is both highly readable and enlightening.”
Washington Post
“In An Empire of Wealth, he has taken an ambitious and illuminating look at just how the United States metamorphosed from a forested, sparsely populated continent into the great and wealthy nation that it is today, the world's one true superpower. In so doing, he has given us a small treasure in itself.”
Philadelphia Inquirer
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