Payback
Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth
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- 9,99 €
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- 9,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
'A fascinating, freewheeling examination of ideas of debt, balance and revenge in history, society and literature - Atwood has again struck upon our most current anxieties' The Times
'A stimulating, learned, and stylish read from an eminent author writing from a heartfelt perspective ... very provocative' Conrad Black
In this wide-ranging history of debt Margaret Atwood investigates its many meanings through the ages, from ancient times to the current global financial meltdown. Many of us wonder: how could we have let such a collapse happen? How old or inevitable is this human pattern of debt?
From the earliest days of finance in ancient Babylon to the modern machinations of the World Bank, the acclaimed author of The Handmaid's Tale turns her incisive eye onto one of humanity's oldest ideas.
Imaginative, topical and insightful, Payback urges us to reconsider our ideas of ownership and debt - before it is too late.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Atwood's book is a weird but wonderful m lange of personal reminiscences, literary walkabout, moral preachment, timely political argument, economic history and theological query, all bound together with wry wit and careful though casual-seeming research. "Every debt comes with a date on which payment is due," Atwood observes on this conversational stroll, from the homely and familiar "notion of fairness" and "notion of equivalent values" in Kingsley's Water Babies to the thornier connection between debt and sin, memory and redemption in Aeschylus's Eumenides. "Any debt involves a story line," Atwood points out as she leads the reader into "the nineteenth century debt as plot really rages through the fictional pages," and ruin is financial for men, but sexual for women. Things get even darker on "the shadow side" where "the nastier forms of debt and credit" debtors' prisons, loan sharks and rebellions abide. Atwood is encyclopedic in her range, following threads wherever they lead credit cards and computer programs, Sin Eaters, Saint Nicholas, Star Trek, the history of pawnshops and of taxation, Elmore Leonard's Get Shorty and Dante's Divine Comedy, Christ and Faust and a consistently captivating storyteller.
