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For some years now James Buchan has been
obsessed with money. Not obsessed with making money, however,
but with understanding "the strangeness of money"
and making sense of the many meanings that money has for
people. His obsession led him to amass a huge collection
of banknotes -- riyals and dinars, dollars and marks, zlotys,
rubles, rupees, shekels, sucres, pesos, francs, and pounds;
and it prompted him to write this brilliant and fascinating
book.
In Buchan's view, money is civilization's
greatest invention. All manner of things can be called money,
and almost every culture has given money an ideal existence.
Even so, Buchan points out, "money, which we see and
hold every day, is diabolically hard to comprehend in words."
It is this very elusiveness that is at the root of money's
power to seduce. As Buchan explains, money is "frozen
desire" -- and because money can fulfill any mortal
purpose, for many people the pursuit of money becomes the
point of life.
In a learned and elegant survey, Buchan
illuminates the many different views of money across the
centuries. Money was a subject in Homer and Herodotus. The
Gospels glitter with money. The New World was colonized
by men in search of money. The Age of Faith was followed
by our present Age of Money, which, like the Age of Faith,
is bound to end; and it was fear of the end that led to
widespread panic after the stock market crashed in 1929
and 1987.
"Men and women chase money as energetically
as they chase one another," Buchan points out. In Frozen
Desire, the chase never fails to entertain. Whether
or not money is humanity's greatest invention, its meanings
reveal a great deal about human nature; in showing us what
we think of money, James Buchan shows us who we are.
James Buchan's other books include The
Golden Plough (1995), which won the Guardian Fiction
Prize, and High Latitudes (1996). A former correspondent
for the Financial Times, he lives in London.
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