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Filled with Pratchett's usual sharp wit, keen social commentary, and sagacious observations, Making Money is another highly anticipated volume in the internationally bestselling Discworld canon.
Reprieved confidence trickster Moist von Lipwig, who reorganized the Ankh-Morpork Post Office in 2004's Going Postal, turns his attention to the Royal Mint in this splendid Discworld adventure. It seems that the aristocratic families who run the mint are running it into the ground, and benevolent despot Lord Vetinari thinks Moist can do better. Despite his fondness for money, Moist doesn't want the job, but since he has recently become the guardian of the mint's majority shareholder (an elderly terrier) and snubbing Vetinari's offer would activate an Assassins Guild contract, he reluctantly accepts. Pratchett throws in a mad scientist with a working economic model, disappearing gold reserves and an army of golems, once more using the Disc as an educational and entertaining mirror of human squabbles and flaws (Oct.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationAfter more than two dozen Discworld™ outings, Pratchett is finally writing in chapters! And what lovely chapters they are, fully reminiscent of those from a Victorian novel, with headings presaging the events following and illustrations at the beginning of each. Apart from this stylistic change, the book continues the laugh-out-loud Discworld™ series, reprising characters from the earlier Going Postalwith cameos from some of the Ankh-Morpork regulars. The plot? Ankh-Morpork is moving away from gold (or "goldish") currency into the brave new world of paper money. Moist von Lipwig, Postmaster General, is serving as Master of the Mint, second only in command to the canine Mr. Fusspot, chairman of the Royal Bank. Meanwhile, Lord Vetinari is being "single white femaled" by a man with more money than sense, and Lipwig's main squeeze, Miss Dearheart, is not content to let sleeping golems lie. Highly enjoyable, fast-paced, and funny; recommended for all fiction and sf collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ6/15/07.]-Amy Watts, Univ. of Georgia Lib., Athens
But I think Pratchett also suffers the fate of lots of comic writers until they're very dead -- highfalutin' folks just don't take them seriously. This is probably best viewed, however, as a mixed curse. I stumbled upon a dissertation on Pratchett online (at the University of Plymouth in England; since it's for an undergraduate degree, it's more like an American senior thesis). Seeing Pratchett analyzed in terms of Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, et al., roused from me a bilious blend of incredulity, despair, hilarity, and pity. Like Wodehouse and Waugh before him, Pratchett's prose demonstrates the agility and brio of ordinary English; applying postmodern French theory to it seems sadly tone-deaf.
Beginning in 1983 with The Colour of Magic, Pratchett has been our Dante to Discworld, the realm he has invented and continues to explore. His Discworld books total more than 40, ranging from full-length novels to a toddler's tale, Where's My Cow. It is, as its name suggests, not a sphere but a flat disc, transported through space on the backs of four elephants, who in turn are carried on the back of a giant turtle. Astrozoologists have not yet been able to determine the turtle's sex, a question which may have some bearing in testing the hypothesis that the turtle is moving purposefully towards a cosmic mating place: the theory known, of course, as the Big Bang. The Disc's geography and peoples are various: dwarfs underground; silicon-based life forms like trolls in the chilly mountains; the desert continent of Klatch, home to the pyramid-building country of Djelibeybi; the vampires and surgically innovative Igors of Uberwald; the witches of Lancre; and various peripatetics such as the deeply unfortunate wizard Rincewind and the antique but formidable hero Cohen the Barbarian.
Much of the population of the Disc beats a path to the city of Ankh-Morpork -- filthy, corrupt, and irresistible. They're lured by money and jobs but also by the possibility of changing the state they were born into. The captain of the City Watch, Sam Vimes, has the tough job of policing the practical multiculturalism that results. In dwarf society, for instance, the default cultural assumption is that all dwarfs are male (it helps that they all have beards). One of Vimes's dwarf recruits, Cheery Longbottom by name, gradually sports mini-skirted armor, earrings, and the name Cheri. Vimes might have to fight against some of his own prejudices -- he tends to distrust vampires, even ones who have taken the Pledge -- but the Watch now usefully contains a werewolf, a zombie, a golem, and various trolls and dwarfs, including the six-foot-tall Carrot Ironfoundersson. Pratchett's approval is clear, but he is an equal-opportunity mocker of P.C. silliness. Take the Campaign for Equal Heights: "The point was that since dwarfs were on average two-thirds the height of humans, the Post Office, as a responsible authority, should employ one and one-third dwarfs for every human employee. The Post Office must reach out to the dwarf community." (Thinks our hero: "It's reach down.")
Pratchett frequently revisits characters or has them make guest appearances in books starring other characters, but he impressively avoids what I think of as Angela Thirkell Syndrome. Thirkell, building on Trollope, for over 20 years wrote a long series of novels set in Barsetshire. By the last phase of her writing life, any character ever mentioned seems to be reintroduced with the result that there's no room for any plot at all. Pratchett is a gifted plotter and stylist, rivaling Wodehouse. Pratchett is, in fact, frequently compared to Wodehouse, to the greater glory of both of them. They're both thankfully fecund masters of social comedy with flashes of farce who always perform near the top of their game, which is very high indeed. I, for one, experience comic buildup in both of them to the point where my occasional smirks and giggles turn to hoots and shrieks; then I'm overtaken by a prolonged jag of silent laughter until tears spring from my eyes and I fall off the sofa. Both men have an almost surreal range of allusion. And their brief experiences of Real Life in legit but odd jobs -- Wodehouse at the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, Pratchett doing PR for the Central Electricity Generating Board -- seem to have either matched or fitted them to appreciate the absurd.
But while Wodehouse sets his novels in what seem like real places, really they take place in a sort of Never-neverland. Evelyn Waugh pointed out that Wodehouse's characters are not nostalgic Edwardian throwbacks at all but rather "creations of pure fancy." Pratchett's fantasy world and characters (including dwarfs and trolls, golems and vampires, witches and werewolves) are almost the opposite: they look and sound made up but in fact have almost everything to do with our world, from small wars in far-off places to pole-dancing parlors down the street. In the 1920s, Wodehouse was published in the Soviet Union; his depictions of gormless drones like Bertie Wooster and his friends Gussy Fink-Nottle, Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps, and Pongo Twistleton-Twistleton consistently outwitted by man-of-the-people Jeeves were taken as stringent satire portending the victory of the proletariat. They weren't. But Pratchett's novels really do have satirical targets. Particularly in his more recent novels, Pratchett takes on various institutions (army, police, post office, university, communications systems, organized religion) to see how in the world -- any world -- they came to be and even, sort of, work.
Making Money takes on the banking industry and the institution of paper money. Thus far, Ankh-Morpork has operated on the gold standard-goldish anyway. Now Lord Vetinari, the humanitarian despot of Ankh-Morpork, dragoons Moist von Lipwig to reform the Royal Bank: "The city bleeds, Mr. Lipwig, and you are the clot I need." As a forcibly reformed con artist who has previously overhauled the post office, Moist is perfectly qualified to oversee what might just be a glorified shell-game. As he puts it when someone protests that he's in too much of a hurry, "[P]eople don't like change. But make the change happen fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another." Besides his native craftiness, Moist is partly aided by the Glooper, a Rube Goldberg/Hammer Horror quasi-computer invented by Hubert -- "Hubert's an economist. That's like an alchemist, but less messy." The Glooper, claims Hubert, simulates "quite complex transactions. We can change the starting conditions, too, to learn the rules inherent in the system. For example, we can find out what happens if you halve the labor force in the city, by the adjustment of a few valves, rather than going out into the streets and killing people." Less messy, indeed.
And how does the banking system work anyway? Perhaps a fantasy writer is professionally equipped to understand the kind of magic that underpins it. Many of Pratchett's novels deal with issues of faith and belief. In a passage from Hogfather (whose title character is a Father Christmas?type figure) that is achieving classic-quote status, Death (you know, the skeletal guy with a scythe) tries to explain the values of fantasy to his mostly human granddaughter, Susan:
"You're saying humans need...fantasies to make life bearable."Pratchett's satires bite, but unlike the unreformed vampires from Uberwald he doesn't usually go for the jugular. I think of Pratchett as a catch-and-release satirist. He considers human venalities, whether large or small, fair game, but after all, if they were gone, what would be left? Pratchett seems content -- or at least resigned -- to be frustrated and amused with the human condition. This I can say: His writing -- and his heart -- are pure goldish. --Alexandra MullenNO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers?"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH WITH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE WERE SOME SORT OF RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes. But people have got to believe that or what's the point?"
MY POINT EXACTLY.
Alexandra Mullen left a life as an academic in Victorian literature to return to her roots as a general reader. She now writes for The Hudson Review (where she is also an Advisory Editor), The New Criterion, and The Wall Street Journal.
Sir Terry Pratchett's many honors include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Printz Honor, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, Britain's Carnegie Medal, the American Library Association's Margaret A. Edwards Award for lasting contribution to young adult literature, and the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. His books have sold more than 75 million copies worldwide. Knighted for his "services to literature," Sir Terry lives in England with his wife and many cats.
Beloved British writer Pratchett first jump-started his career while working as a journalist for Bucks Free Press during the '60s. As luck would have it, one of his assignments was an interview with Peter Bander van Duren, a representative of a small press called Colin Smythe Limited. Pratchett took advantage of his meeting with Bander van Duren to pitch a weird story about a battle set in the pile of a frayed carpet. Bander van Duren bit, and in 1971 Pratchett's very first novel, The Carpet People, was published, setting the tone for a career characterized by wacky flights of fancy and sly humor.
Pratchett's take on fantasy fiction is quite unlike that of anyone else working in the genre. The kinds of sword-and-dragon tales popularized by fellow Brits like J.R.R. Tolkein and C. S. Lewis have traditionally been characterized by their extreme self-seriousness. However, Pratchett has retooled Middle Earth and Narnia with gleeful goofiness, using his Discworld as a means to poke fun at fantasy. As Pratchett explained to Locus Magazine, "Discworld started as an antidote to bad fantasy, because there was a big explosion of fantasy in the late '70s, an awful lot of it was highly derivative, and people weren't bringing new things to it."
In 1983, Pratchett unveiled Discworld with The Color of Magic. Since then, he has added installments to the absurdly hilarious saga at the average rate of one book per year. Influenced by moderately current affairs, he has often used the series to subtly satirize aspects of the real world; the results have inspired critics to rapturous praise. ("The most breathtaking display of comic invention since PG Wodehouse," raved The Times of London.) He occasionally ventures outside the series with standalone novels like the Johnny Maxwell Trilogy, a sci fi adventure sequence for young readers, or Good Omens, his bestselling collaboration with graphic novelist Neil Gaiman.
Sadly, in 2008 fans received the devastating news that Pratchett had been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's. He has described his own reaction as "fairly philosophical" and says he plans to continue writing so long as he is able.
Discworld is not just the subject of a bestselling series of novels. It has also inspired a series of computer games in which players play the role of the hapless wizard Rincewind.
A few fun outtakes from our interview with Pratchett:
"I became a journalist at 17. A few hours later I saw my first dead body, which was somewhat…colourful. That's when I learned you can go on throwing up after you run out of things to throw up."
"The only superstition I have is that I must start a new book on the same day that I finish the last one, even if it's just a few notes in a file. I dread not having work in progress.
"I grow as many of our vegetables as I can, because my granddad was a professional gardener and it's in the blood. Grew really good chilies this year.
"I'm not really good at fun-to-know, human interest stuff. We're not ‘celebrities', whose life itself is a performance. Good or bad or ugly, we are our words. They're what people meet.
Waiting in darkness – A bargain sealed – The hanging man – Golem with a blue dress – Crime and punishment – A chance to make real money – The chain of gold-ish – No unkindness to bears – Mr Bent keeps time
THEY LAY IN THE DARK, guarding. There was no way of measuring the passage of time, nor any inclination to measure it. There was a time when they had not been here, and there would be a time, presumably, when they would, once more, not be here. They would be somewhere else. This time in between was immaterial.
But some had shattered and some, the younger ones, had gone silent.
The weight was increasing.
Something must be done.
One of them raised his mind in song.
It was a hard bargain, but hard on whom? That was the question. And Mr Blister the lawyer wasn’t getting an answer. He would have liked an answer. When parties are interested in unprepossessing land, it might pay for smaller parties to buy up any neighbouring plots, just in case the party of the first part had heard something, possibly at a party.
But it was hard to see what there was to know.
He gave the woman on the other side of his desk a suitably concerned smile.
‘You understand,Miss Dearheart, that this area is subject to dwarf mining law? That means all metals and metal ore are owned by the Low King of the dwarfs. You will have to pay him a considerable royalty on any that you remove. Not that there will be any, I’m bound to say. It is said to be sand and silt all the way down, and apparently it is a very long way down.’
He waited for any kind of reaction from the woman opposite, but she just stared at him. Blue smoke from her cigarette spiralled towards the office ceiling.
‘Then there is the matter of antiquities,’ said the lawyer, watching as much of her expression as could be seen through the haze. ‘The Low King has decreed that all jewellery, armour, ancient items classified as Devices, weaponry, pots, scrolls or bones extracted by you from the land in question will also be subject to a tax or confiscation.’
Miss Dearheart paused as if to compare the litany against an internal list, stubbed out her cigarette and said: ‘Is there any reason to believe that there are any of these things there?’
‘None whatsoever,’ said the lawyer, with a wry smile. ‘Everyone knows that we are dealing with a barren waste, but the King is insuring against “what everyone knows” being wrong. It so often is.’
‘He is asking a lot of money for a very short lease!’
‘Which you are willing to pay. This makes dwarfs nervous, you see. It’s very unusual for a dwarf to part with land, even for a few years. I gather he needs the money because of all this Koom Valley business.’
‘I’m paying the sum demanded!’
‘Quite so, quite so. But I—’
‘Will he honour the contract?’
‘To the letter. That at least is certain. Dwarfs are sticklers in such matters. All you need to do is sign and, regrettably, pay.’
Miss Dearheart reached into her bag and placed a thick sheet of paper on the table. ‘This is a banker’s note for five thousand dollars, drawn on the Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork.’
The lawyer smiled. ‘A name to trust,’ he said, and added: ‘traditionally, at least. Do sign where I’ve put the crosses, will you?’
He watched carefully as she signed, and she got the impression he was holding his breath.
‘There,’ she said, pushing the contract across the desk.
‘Perhaps you could assuage my curiosity, madam?’ he said. ‘Since the ink is drying on the lease?’
Miss Dearheart glanced around the room, as if the heavy old bookcases concealed a multitude of ears. ‘Can you keep a secret, Mr Blister?’
‘Oh, indeed, madam. Indeed!’
She looked around conspiratorially. ‘Even so, this should be said quietly,’ she hissed.
He nodded hopefully, leaned forward, and for the first time for many years felt a woman’s breath in his ear:
‘So can I,’ she said.
That was nearly three weeks ago . . .
Some of the things you could learn up a drainpipe at night were surprising. For example, people paid attention to small sounds – the click of a window catch, the clink of a lockpick – more than they did to big sounds, like a brick falling into the street or even (for this was, after all, Ankh-Morpork) a scream.
These were loud sounds which were therefore public sounds, which in turn meant they were everyone’s problem and, therefore, not mine. But small sounds were nearby and suggested such things as stealth betrayed, and so were pressing and personal.
Therefore, he tried not to make little noises.
Below him the coach yard of the Central Post Office buzzed like an overturned hive. They’d got the turntable working really well now. The overnight coaches were arriving and the new Uberwald Flyer was gleaming in the lamplight. Everything was going right, which was, to the night-time climber, why everything was going wrong.
The climber thrust a brick key into soft mortar, shifted his weight, moved his foo—
Damn pigeon! It flew up in panic, his other foot slipped, his fingers lost their grip on the drainpipe, and when the world had stopped churning he was owing the postponement of his meeting with the distant cobbles to his hold on a brick key which was, let’s face it, nothing more than a long flat nail with a t-piece grip.
And you can’t bluff a wall, he thought. If you swing you might Making Money get your hand and foot on the pipe, or the key might come out.
Oh . . . kay . . .
He had more keys and a small hammer. Could he knock one in without losing his grip on the other?
Above him the pigeon joined its colleagues on a higher ledge.
The climber thrust the nail into the mortar with as much force as he dared, pulled the hammer out of his pocket and, as the Flyer departed below with a clattering and jingling, hit the nail one massive blow.
It went in. He dropped the hammer, hoping the sound of its impact would be masked by the general bustle, and grabbed the new hold before the hammer had hit the ground.
Oh . . . kay. And now I am . . . stuck?
The pipe was less than three feet away. Fine. This would work. Move both hands on to the new hold, swing gently, get his left hand around the pipe, and he could drag himself across the gap. Then it would be just—
The pigeon was nervous. For pigeons, it’s the ground state of being. It chose this point to lighten the load.
Oh . . . kay. Correction: two hands were now gripping the suddenly very slippery nail.
Damn.
And at this point, because nervousness runs through pigeons faster than a streaker through a convent, a gentle patter began.
There are times when ‘It does not get any better than this’ does not spring to mind.
And then a voice from below said: ‘Who’s up there?’
Thank you, hammer. They can’t possibly see me, he thought. People look up from the well-lit yard with their night vision in shreds. But so what? They know I’m here now.
Oh . . . kay.
‘All right, it’s a fair cop, guv,’ he called down.
‘A thief, eh?’ said the voice below.
‘Haven’t touched a thing, guv. Could do with a hand up, guv.’
‘Are you Thieves’ Guild? You’re using their lingo.’
‘Not me, guv. I always use the word guv, guv.’
He wasn’t able to look down very easily now, but sounds below indicated that ostlers and off-duty coachmen were strolling over. That was not going to be helpful. Coachmen met most of their thieves out on lonely roads, where the highwaymen seldom bothered to ask sissy questions like ‘Your money or your life?’ When one was caught, justice and vengeance were happily combined by means of a handy length of lead pipe.
There was a muttering beneath him, and it appeared that a consensus had been reached.
‘Right, Mister Post Office Robber,’ a cheery voice bellowed. ‘Here’s what we’re gonna do, okay? We’re gonna go into the building, right, and lower you a rope. Can’t say fairer’n that, right?’
‘Right, guv.’
It had been the wrong kind of cheery. It had been the cheery of the word ‘pal’ as in ‘You lookin’ at me, pal?’ The Guild of Thieves paid a twenty-dollar bounty fee for a non-accredited thief brought in alive, and there were oh, so many ways of still being alive when you were dragged in and poured out on the floor.
He looked up. The window of the Postmaster General’s apartment was right above him.
Oh . . . kay.
His hands and arms were numb and yet painful at the same time. He heard the rattle of the big freight elevator inside the building, the thud of a hatch being slapped back, the footsteps across the roof, felt the rope hit his arm.
‘Grab it or drop,’ said a voice as he flailed to grasp it. ‘It’s all the same in the long run.’ There was laughter in the dark.
The men heaved hard at the rope. The figure dangled in the air, then kicked out and swung back. Glass shattered, just below the guttering, and the rope came up empty.
The rescue party turned to one another.
‘All right, you two, front and back doors right now!’ said a aking Money coachman who was faster on the uptake. ‘Head him off! Go down in the elevator! The rest of you, we’ll squeeze him out, floor by floor!’
As they clattered back down the stairs and ran along the corridor a man in a dressing gown poked his head out of one of the rooms, stared at them in amazement, and then snapped: ‘Who the hell are you lot? Go on, get after him!’
‘Oh yeah? And who are you?’ said an ostler, slowing down and glaring at him.
‘He’s Mr Moist von Lipwick, he is!’ said a coachman at the back. ‘He’s the Postmaster General!’
‘Someone came crashing through the window, landed right between— I mean, nearly landed on me!’ shouted the man in the dressing gown. ‘He ran off down the corridor! Ten dollars a man if you catch him! And it’s Lipwig, actually!’
That would have re-started the stampede, but the ostler said, in a suspicious voice: ‘Here, say the word “guv”, will you?’
‘What are you on about?’ said the coachman.
‘He doesn’t half sound like that bloke,’ said the ostler. ‘And he’s out of breath!’
‘Are you stupid?’ said the coachman. ‘He’s the Postmaster! He’s got a bloody key! He’s got all the keys! Why the hell would he want to break into his own Post Office?’
‘I reckon we ought to take a look in that room,’ said the ostler.
‘Really? Well, I reckon what Mr Lipwig does to get out of breath in his own room is his own affair,’ said the coachman, giving Moist a huge wink. ‘An’ I reckon ten dollars a man is running away from me ’cos of you being a tit. Sorry about this, sir,’ he said to Lipwig, ‘he’s new and he ain’t got no manners. We will now be leaving you, sir,’ he added, touching where he thought his forelock was, ‘with further apologies for any inconvenience which may have been caused. Now get cracking, you bastards!’
When they were out of sight Moist went back into his room and carefully bolted the door behind him.
Well, at least he had some skills. The slight hint that there was a woman in his room had definitely swung it. Anyway, he was the Postmaster General and he did have all the keys.
From the Hardcover edition.
Filled with Pratchett's usual sharp wit, keen social commentary, and sagacious observations, Making Money is another highly anticipated volume in the internationally bestselling Discworld canon.
LordofDucks
Posted March 31, 2012
Returning to the Discworld to follow the exploits of Moist von Lipwig for his second book (the first being Going Postal). Definitively worth the read.
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Posted August 15, 2011
Great followup to Going Postal
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Having read all of Pratchett's books, I wouldn't miss the new one. His delightful satire is smooth and in your face but occasionally a really good one sneaks in. This continues the character from Going Postal into banking.
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Posted February 26, 2009
As always, another Discworld installment is a welcome breath of fresh air and a chance to laugh at ourselves.
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Posted February 16, 2009
A continuation of the character from Going Postal. I liked him a bit better in that book but he is still a great character. As usual this book makes me laugh out loud.
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Posted May 24, 2008
While this may not be Pratchett's best book, any book featuring a guy named Moist von Lipwig gets my vote. A graduate student introduced me to Pratchett's Disc World novels, and I have read and reread them over and over. That was a bit redundant. Still the Disk World novels are so funny, refreshing and 'spot on' (forgive me) that I really owe that student for telling me about them. I always keep a Pratchett book on hand, especially if I'm reading something very literary, for the humor and sheer inventiveness. It amazes me that Pratchett has a 'handle' on so many diffuse subjects and can make them so entertaining. Let's face it, economics is fairly boring, but Pratchett can make it interesting and fun. Who else can do that?
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Posted February 26, 2008
Making Money was as usual for this author an outstanding read. I felt it started off a little too similar to the other title featuring the main character. But it quickly redeemed itself with new and sparkling characters that make you laugh. To anyone who is a Pratchett devotee, read on and enjoy as usual!
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Convicted con man Moist von Luwig was punished by being named the Ankh Morpork Postmaster General. To the shock of the stakeholders, he successfully reengineered the Ankh-Morpork Post Office from running like another government agency into an efficient effective customer oriented business. Shockingly mail is delivered on time to the right address at a phenomenal rate of accuracy.----------- He is so successful his superior Lord Vetinari offers Moist a new position that combines his experience as the head of a government bureaucracy with his money making skills as the head of the Royal Mint. Apparently hereditary and incest employment practices over hundreds of years has led to a situation in which the cost to make the money exceeds the value of the money made. However, if he accepts the position he will have an angry staff made up of inefficient, unproductive and mostly idle workers. However after GOING POSTAL, royally MAKING MONEY seems easy until someone steals the gold from the impenetrable vault of the Royal Bank.------------- This zany entertaining satirical sequel continues to lampoon the government bureaucracy, the executive branch leadership up to the White House, and Congressional fiefdom rulers. The story line spoofs the efficiency experts who insist on cutting employee waste while demanding more pork for their districts or promulgating the enforcement of the President¿s Management Agenda except for DOD and Homeland Security. The Royal Bank¿s Glooper Machine understands the global economy tenet is there is never enough money for the ultra wealthy whose taxes must be zero so that they can trickle down trickles to the working class to pay taxes. Moist is still at his effective best with the con, but his first inclination to make MORE MONEY is not enough as he must investigate who looted the treasury (beyond tax breaks) setting him up to take the fall though he is unsure of which agency.------------- Harriet Klausner
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Overview
Filled with Pratchett's usual sharp wit, keen social commentary, and sagacious observations, Making Money is another highly anticipated volume in the internationally ...