Product Description

Incorporating myth, history and contemporary investigation, Bernstein tells the story of how human beings have become intoxicated, obsessed, enriched, impoverished, humbled and proud for the sake of gold. From the past to the future, Bernstein's portrayal of gold is intimately linked to the character of humankind.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #110117 in Books
• Published on: 2004-11-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

Amazon.com Review
In the first chapter of his book The Power of Gold, Peter Bernstein quotes the immortal words of King Ferdinand of Spain, who once declared: "Get gold, humanely if possible, but at all hazards--get gold." As ensuing chapters reveal, man's obsession with finding, keeping, selling, and evaluating gold has rarely been a humane adventure and has always been a hazardous one. Digging deeply into history's treasury of torrid tales and complicated deals, Bernstein examines gold's lure with an economist's passion for quantification, a historian's eye for detail, and a sociologist's feel for its consequence.

Useless as a metal for most practical purposes, gold originally held value as decoration and adornment for the wealthy ancients. Later, it was minted and used as coins by the Lydians in 635 B.C. That, Bernstein goes on to reveal, put gold on a path from the concrete to the abstract, from evidence of wealth to the standard behind wealth in other forms, and finally to the tenuous place it holds in today's virtual world of credit cards and computer chips. Along the way lie wild stories of lives destroyed, fortunes won and quickly lost, and values transformed: the massacre by the Spanish invader Pizarro, whose small band of men decimated the formidable army of Emperor Atahualpa, "the Inca," through more duplicity than military skill; the roller-coaster ride of the 1890s, when the rippling impact of the Baring Brothers bank crisis in Britain sent the isolated United States into an economic meltdown; and the surplus of the Gold Coast natives of Timbuktu, who willingly traded their gold for much-needed salt, ounce for ounce.

Bernstein is a great storyteller. His accounts of mythological, ancient, and recent history ooze with odd and entertaining details that bring each successive tale of obsession to life. If not for his skill, the sheer volume of events collected here--presented more anecdotally than systematically--would be overwhelming. In the end, though, it is Bernstein's fascination with the power of gold to entangle and entrap its possessors, and its ultimate ability to change the course of entire eras and civilizations, that makes his book as fascinating as it is informative. A dense but entertaining read. --S. Ketchum

From Publishers Weekly
"[T]he quest for gold" has been "gluttonous," says Bernstein, tracing the metal's impact on human myth and history: gold has inspired art, battles, conquests and discoveries, including Columbus's trip to the New World, where he hoped to secure enough gold to buy back the Holy Sepulcher from the Muslims. Bernstein makes clear the metal's virtues: it's so malleable that one ounce can be stretched into a 50-foot wire or pounded into 100 square feet, and it lasts forever (4,500-year-old Egyptian dental work, he notes, is good enough for today's mouths). Bernstein's gift for storytellingAwith just the right touch of acerbic wit (on the myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece, he summarizes, "The story does not have a happy ending, because Jason was a compulsive social climber")Aand his presentation of the paradox of how and why such a soft and simple metal has been afforded such value help make this work a winning account of human obsession, comprehensive, entertaining and enlightening. A knowledge of economics might help during the last third of the book, when Bernstein moves from ancient times to modern day and describes the economic chaos that followed WWI. By then gold was no longer the domain of legend; it had become a commodity, the standard against which powerful nations measure their wealth. But Bernstein, author of the bestselling Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, livens up his intricate economic discussion with tales such as the one about the Harvard Business School professor who got into trouble with his dean for withdrawing his gold from the Harvard Trust Company during a gold standard-related panic in 1933. As the title promises, Bernstein does deliver a page-turning history of the not-so-heavy metal and its influence on people through the ages. $250,000 ad/promo; first serial to Worth. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
A master historian at the peak of his art here recounts the timeless story of our obsession with gold. Mixing myth, legend, and historical fact, Bernstein (Against the Gods presents an enthralling look at the people, places, and events that have evoked desperation and frustration in human behavior. Starting with a broad palette of colorful characters, Pharaoh Hatshepsut, King Midas, Alexander the Great, Emperor Justinian, the Inca Emperor Atahualpa, Martin Luther, Kublai Khan, Sir Isaac Newton, and Charles De Gaulle, the author recounts the sequence of events that led to gold becoming the international monetary standard in the 19th Century only to fall to obscurity amid the collapse of the Bretton Woods System in 1971. At its root, this is the story of people so blinded in their pursuit of gold that they could not comprehend the difference between useless metal and real wealth. Recommended for both public and academic libraries.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Intersting anecdotes
And an intersting read, but basically no more than a damnation of Gold itself.
The author delights, toward the end of the book , how wonderful it is to have been liberated from the shackles of the yellow metal. But one can't help but wonder if he sees the irony in the statement. The book itself is a collection of historical lessons that show the very same pattern he praises. Hard currency , perverted to fractional , inevitably fiat. The result is always the same. Massive increase in currency and punishing inflationary consequences. The author offers absolutely no argument as to why it should end differently this time. In fact , the author's tone is almost condescending as he reviews the history of Gold as money. Oh! Our generation and our economists and leaders are just ever so much smarter than their predecessors! Metal-backed currencies are characterized by the author as some quaint, antiquated ideal that constrained mankind. Yet I note in almost all cases where civilization deviated from the practice , the reason was War , and the consequence was inflation , speculation and eventually ruination. To see people, especially economists , ignore history , certainly a history as oft-repeated and essentially resulting in the same effect, is cringe-inducing.
The brave new world of Gold-as-jewlery and jewelry only remains to be seen. The price of both Gold and Silver have outperformed almost all other asset classes since the publication of the book , and there are rumblings of going back to a monetization of Silver in Mexico as I type.
It is easy for the economist to see, in hindsight, the folly of mankind. But I'll wager that Human nature has not changed as much as the author thinks. There is no mathematical formula for them to use to determine the "value" of Gold , and so I think they are confused, skeptical and mistrusting of it. I'll offer a single number for them though , based on history. Positive one. That is the correlation coefficient between the price of Gold... and fear. Bad times will come again as they inevitably do , and Gold and Silver will again see value as both a store of wealth, protection against inflation, and method of transacting commerce.

Dense, somewhat boring but will probably endure
It appears from the obvious publisher-placed comments that I may be one of the few people who has actually READ this book. With his no-doubt legions of researchers, Peter Bernstein obviously has his facts at hand, and they are plentifully strewn throughout the book. But this is not a business book, it is a history book about the enduring lure of the element Au. It took me about a week to finish this, and I found much of it interesting. But overall, I thought that it read like a well-researched thesis that will probably stand the test of time. There are some truly fascinating stories in it, and it is well written, but don't expect this book to tell you how to find gold or how to make enough money to buy gold. It is what it is: the history of a metal that has never lost its lustre.

Gold as a Barbaric Relic of Greed for Adornment
Mr. Bernstein skeptically sees gold as overrated and as potentially harmful. Think of this book as "The Tragedy of Obsession with Gold" as the story line. As Mr. Bernstein puts it, "This book tells the story of how people have become intoxicated, obsessed, haunted, and humbled over pieces of metal called gold."

To make that point, the book begins with a story that Ruskin told about a man who is on a sinking ship with his gold. He gets the gold and jumps overboard, and drowns from the weight of the gold. Mr. Bernstein cites the analogy throughout the book for the fate that awaits those who are committed to their gold. The gold has them, rather than vice versa.

Mr. Bernstein does a nice job of creating an on-going story line to put the role of gold in perspective. Gold first makes its appearance as an adornment for religious or personal purposes. This application leads to gold becoming used as money. Then gold helps create trade that only money can provide. From the trade comes power, and that power expands influence. Then as the world economy outgrows the supply of gold as a monetary stock, gold becomes a brake on economic growth. At the end of the book, gold is again turning into an adornment having been cut loose from being a reserve for the monetary stock. In this context, the book is about the rise and fall of the gold-based empire. That tale is best captured in the story of how little the gold from the Americas helped Spain economically. If a shortage of gold as money can slow down economic growth, an excess of gold can create inflation in general prices. That's the essence of Mr. Bernstein's argument about gold as a mercantile asset.

Economic history is rarely so interestingly told, and Mr. Bernstein deserves a lot of credit for taking something that could have been dull and making it lively. He is an excellent story teller, and you will find what he has to say contains many new and interesting points.

I was fascinated by the number of times that the fate of countries was affected by gold. Ransoms paid in gold for French Kings beggered that country on more than one occasion. The failure of worldwide wheat crops allowed the U.S. economic expansion to continue after the Civil War, as the U.S. was threatened with a shortage of gold needed for industrial goods. The Byzantine Empire lived on much longer than it would otherwise have by being able to buy defenders with gold. The Arab expansion was aided by access to gold. After World War I, the gold standard contributed to the Depression.

Mr. Bernstein leaves us out on a limb about where our system of floating rate currencies will end. Without some form of global currency, we should see rapid distortions in economic results whenever such shifts in currency values occur. We are in the middle of one of those shifts right now between the dollar and the euro. Certainly, the universal government preference to debase the value of currencies will continue to plague us. Mr. Bernstein leaves us with no answer to the problem, except to be certain that returning to the strait-jacket of the gold standard is not it. I wonder if it is really that simple, or if we are facing a severe future disruption that will make gold look good by comparison. Certainly, a world currency seems inevitable, whatever its nature is.

Realizing that gold can be harmful, does it seem any less beautiful to you? I found that my aesthetic preference for gold was unaffected by reading this book. I think you can appreciate gold without being greedy for it. Perhaps that's the lesson here.

After you have finished enjoying this fun book, think about where else overreliance on something or some idea can be harmful. My favorite example is the desire to be popular. Most people will do foolish and harmful things that debase quality (much as they did with gold coins) to achieve popularity. One of my favorite examples is in a recent book where a CEO went on CNBC almost naked as a publicity stunt for his company's latest advertising campaign.

Enjoy all things in proper perspective and moderation!