Frozen Desire: The Psychology of Money

Hopping through what seems to be the entire canon of Western thought, from Herodotus to Hegel, Machiavelli to Marx, Cervantes to Henry Adams, Buchan presents a highly opinionated, literate and witty study of money and its usually pernicious impact on our culture. Part economic treatise, part literary concordance, part autobiography, this well-written, thought-provoking book is not easy to categorize. Buchan's obsession with money began in 1978, when he was working on the Saudi Times newspaper, making a salary of 10,000 Saudi Arabian riyals, in exchange for ""a month's labour, boredom and misery."" Isolated and lacking any particular purpose, except a desire to acquire money, he was shamed and inspired, by a passage from Adam Smith, to better himself, not by saving money but by embarking on an intellectual quest: to penetrate the mystery of money, not so much by studying economics, but imaginative literature and the real-life machinations of politicians and bankers. Beginning with antiquity, Buchan finds deep misgivings about the notion of money evidenced in the works of Aristotle and Plato. From there, he looks to images of the 30 pieces of silver; the invention of double-entry bookkeeping by Luca Pacioli; money as motivator in the age of conquest; the ever more abstract tools by which profit is made; and the increasingly conceptual value of money separate from what it can actually buy. In his search for the meaning of money, Buchan travels the centuries up to the 1980s, giving a glittering grace and spirit to lucre. (Oct.)