Jane Gleeson-White
Auteur van Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance
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Fotografie: Allen and Unwin Media Centre
Werken van Jane Gleeson-White
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Algemene kennis
- Gangbare naam
- Gleeson-White, Jane
- Geboortedatum
- 1965
- Geslacht
- female
- Nationaliteit
- Australia
- Woonplaatsen
- Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
- Opleiding
- University of New South Wales
University of Sydney (BA (Hons) and BEc) - Beroepen
- Writer
Blogger
Editor - Korte biografie
- Jane Gleeson-White is a writer with degrees in economics and literature. Jane was an intern at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice and worked in publishing in Australia and the UK for 15 years. She has edited fiction and non-fiction including Christos Tsiolkas’s internationally acclaimed prize-winning The Slap and Dead Europe, Luke Davies’ cult bestseller Candy and Meg Stewart’s prize-winning Far From a Still Life: Margaret Olley. From 2010 to 2012 Jane was the fiction editor of Overland magazine.
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Fascinating. One of the most interesting books I’ve read in a while. Takes a seemingly dry topic: bookkeeping and shows how one innovation in bookkeeping—double entry— most likely made capitalism possible, the destruction of our natural world inevitable, and the potential salvation of our world tenable. Just a remarkable journey. Luca Picioli is the polymath hero who in renaissance Venice was the first to explain Arabic numbers and double entry bookkeeping to the masses. The sweep of this book is amazing. It touches on the history of math, commerce, book history, the Industrial Age, and climate change. Just an incredible scope for a mere 250 pages. Wow. We’re in trouble. We better hope the powers that be let us use double entry to account in REAL terms the health and wealth of nations.… (meer)
Somewhat interesting but the author does skip around the timeline a bit. Going back and forth and repeating certain facts like we would not be able to understand it if it wasn't repeated. Towards the end it does become a bit of a rant about how we need to find a way to take natural resources and quality of life into account. But basically no one has found a better way to balance the books since 15th century Venice.
Can't really recommend this book. A few interesting facts here and there. She spends time on the Renaissance and on Pacioli's background. There's a quick gloss on what double-entry bookkeeping/accounting is and how it works. She then discusses how it changed in 1800s. Then on to accounting scandals then & now. Last was a lot about GDP, GNP, National Systems of Accounts and how they are inadequate. For all the time and attention she spends on this last part, she makes no effort at all to show how this is tied to double-entry accounting.… (meer)
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Statistieken
- Werken
- 6
- Leden
- 398
- Populariteit
- #60,946
- Waardering
- 3.7
- Besprekingen
- 10
- ISBNs
- 25
- Talen
- 2
Some other volumes on this subject get it ever so slightly wrong; Gleeson-White rises above them in that regard. First of all, her love of Australian history is evident - what other book recommends Christopher Brennan and John Shaw Neilsen and Lesbia Harford and Banjo?
Second, she avoids politics; indeed one cannot tell her politics at the end of the book more than one could at the beginning, and what a relief! While I enjoyed Carl Reinecke's recent [b:Books That Made Us: The Companion to the ABC TV Series|59145276|Books That Made Us The Companion to the ABC TV Series|Carl Reinecke|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1633492204l/59145276._SY75_.jpg|93269646], it was exhausting to constantly be told that every book written before the year 2000 was imperialist, racist, sexist, and so on, with little context or, god forbid, recommendation. People who read aren't fools, and Gleeson-White clearly appreciates that readers can do that legwork for themselves, can interrogate a text sensibly to separate the historical context from the core, and decide for themselves if it remains relevant. She's here to present the writers and their texts, explaining why each work is celebrated and what remains of worth. She's not insensitive to Australia's history of injustice, and chronicles works by Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Eve Langley' s The Pea Pickers, Xavier Herbert's Capricornia and Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore alongside other works that engaged with this injustice contemporarily. But that's not the core point, nor should it be.
Third and finally, I think this is the only book of its type that avoids the age-old trap of immediacy. That's not a judgement on the others, including my beloved [a:Geoffrey Dutton|329598|Geoffrey Dutton|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png], but there is always that final section of "books from the last 20 years" which bewilders people who discover the book a generation later. Inevitably some of the highlights are missing while some of the texts chosen have vanished so thoroughly into the abyss. Instead, this work (published in the late 2000s) stops at Tim Winton's 1991 novel Cloudstreet, that rare book that is unanimously deemed a classic, but also symbolically the end of an era, a novel that seemed so modern and all-encompassing in 1991 but also (from this vantage point) has a 20th century viewpoint to how it approaches race, gender, ability, and so on. It will be for future volumes to determine what the classics are from more recent years - and it will be for all readers to decide which of the classics herein remain, for them, stories that speak of, and to, Australia.
Joy.… (meer)