The Money Plot by Frederick Kaufman

This book’s full title is The Money Plot: A History of Currency's Power to Enchant, Control, and Manipulate. A wild romp through mankind’s history with currency. It is how money is about storytelling. The book covers mostly a western story but it is enchanting.

It is fun to read for all the references and words I had to look up, like metonymy, catachresis and anagogical. It sort of comes down to money is what we say it is. And by the way, this is not an investment book. However, you might understand things like Bitcoin better. It is interesting that the reviews that are on the negative side all come from finance and views on the positive side do not. Just saying.

David E. Spiro does a great review of this book on New York Journal of Books. There is a good review also on Kirkus Reviews. Joel Schlesinger at Winnipeg Free Press does a great review. This is the best review as he seems to understand this book better than other reviewers.

A talk by Frederick Kaufman called The measure of all Things: Sustainability, is at Ted Talks. Nick Licata interviews Frederick Kaufman at Elliott Bay Book Company. The interview ends at around 35 minutes and then you start to get questions from the audience. It is worthwhile seeing this until the end although it is over an hour. Fred Kaufman is interviewed by Charlotte MacLeod on Investing New Network. This is a shorter (25 minutes) interesting interview and it is interesting as it is an investment approach rather than the approach on Elliot Bay Book Company which approaches the book from the English Literature angle.

Fred Kaufman does a presentation for Georgia Center for the Book. The presentation starts at 2:50 minutes and goes to 40 minutes. Then there are questions from the moderator, Joe Davich and questions sent in. This is a good video as Frederick Kaufman talks about the origins of money with illustrations from his computer.

An index of the books I have reviewed are on my website at Books. I have three blogs. The first talks only about specific stocks and is called Investment Talk . The second one contains information on mostly investing and is called Investing Economics Mostly. My last blog is for my book reviews and it is called Non-Fiction Mostly. Follow me on Twitter.