Gold: The Race For The World's Most Seductive Metal - Hardcover

Hart, Matthew

3.51

435 ratings by Goodreads

9780670065882: Gold: The Race For The World's Most Seductive Metal

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670065889 ISBN 13: 9780670065882

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2013

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Since the 2008 financial crisis, the price of gold has skyrocketed from around $800 an ounce in August of that year to a peak of about $1700 an ounce. Fortunes have been made, and this has kicked off an unprecedented gold-mining and prospecting boom around the world. From armed illegal miners holed up in South African mines—where theft is estimated at $1 billion a year—to the hugely successful workings of Canada’s Barrick Gold to China’s determined efforts to become a major gold player, Matthew Hart takes readers on a journey around the world and through history to tell the story of how gold became the world’s most precious commodity. He highlights its dramatic, tempestuous history and the behind-the-scenes intrigue of the current boom. The controversial rollercoaster narrative reveals what experts are saying about the profound changes underway in the gold market and the outlook for the future.

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About the Author:

MATTHEW HART is a veteran journalist and writer. He has been a staff reporter for newspapers, radio, and television, was an editor for CBC-TV’s flagship The National, and has written for two IMAX films and numerous documentaries and TV specials. His journalism can be found in The Atlantic Monthly, Granta, Toronto Life, The Financial Post, The Times of London, The Globe and Mail, and many other newspapers and magazines. He is the author of seven books, including Diamond: The History of a Cold-Blooded Love Affair and The Irish Game: A True Story of Crime and Art, winner of the Arthur Ellis Award for best non-fiction crime book of the year. Hart lives in New York.

Review:

“From deep within the gold mines of South Africa and China to corporate boardrooms, from miners and thieves to body guards and gold traders, Hart (Diamond, 2001) offers a fascinating look at the geology, geopolitics, and economics of gold.” (Booklist)

“With remarkable clarity, Hart reveals our historical and economic relationship with this beguiling metal... Hart’s deceptively breezy book examines a simple mineral that the human mind has transformed into something so much more complicated.” (Publishers Weekly (starred))

“In his absorbing book Gold, Matthew Hart looks at the precious metal both as a mineral ... and as an idea that has evolved in dizzyingly strange ways through the millenniums.” (Columbus Dispatch)

“[A]n impressionistic portrait of an industry that blends history, science, colorful character sketches, and lively firsthand accounts of the author’s travels” (The Daily Beast)

“[E]ngaging and rollicking” (Forumblog.com)

"Gold does a splendid job of transporting readers from one defining moment in the history of gold to the next." (Mining.com)

"Hart’s book offers a compelling, stylish, and impressively researched portrait of the history and economics of a metal that has disrupted the world order while enriching some and ruining countless others... He is a talented storyteller." (Boston Globe)

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