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Unlike most novelists of financial high life, Author Stead gives the complex details of shady transactions, banking manipulations, stock transfers, wheat deals, makes brilliant sense of gigantic currency speculations, of how the Bertillons make millions in bear operations on Kreuger stocks. Combined with her Hogarthian humor, brilliant vocabulary, high-keyed imagination, the result is one of the most savage satires on "the principle of money" since Balzac.
Readers may find Author Stead's deals and characters incredible. But they will have to admit that they are the nearest thing in modern fiction to the even more incredible deals and characters of an Ivan Kreuger, a Loewenstein, a Hatry, a Sam Insull.
The Author. Tall, stark-faced Christina Stead is an unusual novelist, with an unusual background. A third-generation Australian, the oldest daughter of an ichthyologist, she began her business career in Sydney; in 1928 went to London. Since then, while writing The Salzburg Tales, Seven Poor Men of Sydney, The Beauties and Furies, she has worked all over Europe and in the U. S., her jobs ranging from demonstrator in an experimental psychology laboratory to clerical work in grain firms and financial houses. Her main study for five years was the financial techniques described in House of All Nations. Housework, fine embroidery, natural history are her hobbies. She now lives in the country, near Easton, Pa., is at work on another long book, a "modern Arabian Nights."