Praise for When America Roared "Trying to understand the 2020s? Look closely at the variety of American experience amid the 1980s economic boom. So argues journalist-professor Kaufman in this brisk portrait of executives, investors, and political crusaders whose influence remains strong. [A] history of a moment shaped by celebrity CEOs and discliplined politicos." -- Kirkus "This is an essential read: beautifully written, smartly argued, and thoroughly balanced. Just a few pages in, I realized that this was exactly the book I needed to understand our current moment." --Jonathan Eig, author of Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times bestseller King: A Life "Take a fascinating journey back to the roaring Eighties with Jonathan Kaufman. In When America Roared he brings the most interesting figures from the decade back to life in a superb narrative that is instructive about how we got to the present era." --Jill Abramson, author of Merchants of Truth "A superb guide to understanding how the world-changing events of the 1980s -- among them, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the rise of Reaganism, the triumph of capitalism globally -- formed the foundation of our present moment.
Jonathan Kaufman's thesis is a sobering, refreshing and well-crafted analysis about how we ended up where we are, whether we like it or not."-- William D. Cohan , New York Times bestselling author of The Last Tycoons and House of Cards Praise for The Last Kings of Shanghai "The Last Kings of Shanghai is not just a brilliant, well-researched, and highly readable book about China's past, it also reveals the contingencies and ironic twists of fate in China's modern history." --LA Review of Books "Engrossing . Kaufman is an old China hand based on stints with the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal, so he brings a reporter's eye for stories as a way of explaining so much more . It's a story that will excite readers." --Forbes "The Last Kings of Shanghai examines the little-known history of two extraordinary dynasties. In the end, if not in the beginning, they were, as Kaufman puts it, 'on the wrong side of history.
' But now, thanks to him, they are at least part of history." --The Boston Globe "A multigenerational epic of the Sassoon and Kadoorie dynasties, which rightly takes business out of the shadows and puts it at the heart of modern China's history . The author entertainingly contrasts the undisciplined Sassoons with the strict approach of Kadoorie and his sons Lawrence and Horace . The book is excellent too on China's tumultuous history . This work does a great service in putting business at the heart of a key development -- China's re-emergence." --Financial Times "Few histories have been written about the Sassoons and Kadoories in part because the families didn't welcome the attention . Kaufman visited an impressive roster of archives to uncover new details." --The Wall Street Journal "Illuminating .
It is surely not the end of the story." -- The Economist.