The Oxford Book of Money

Money. Rhino. The long green. It is "the most important thing in the world" (George Bernard Shaw). It is "the alienated essence of man's work and existence" (Karl Marx). It is a medium of exchange, a measure of value, a standard of deferred payment. It is "better than poverty, if only for financial reasons" (Woody Allen).
Few things occupy as central a place in our lives as money, and few provoke such intense and varied response. Now in an entertaining and thought-provoking book, Kevin Jackson brings together reflections on money by some of the most brilliant minds who ever lived, drawing on such writers as Dante and Chaucer, Dostoevsky and Dickens, Mark Twain and Jane Austen, and such thinkers as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes. Here is an all-encompassing look at the bottom line of human life--wealth and poverty, lending and borrowing, money heavens and money hells. By looking at money from many different perspectives, whether through colorful scenes from fiction or telling portraits of eras past, The Oxford Book of Money offers us a deeper appreciation of what money is, what it can do, what it is really worth. By turns insightful, amusing, and intriguing, it will help readers to reexamine what money means to them and rethink its value in their lives.