White, Jane

Along the continuum leading from Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies to Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible, White’s enigmatic, unnerving parable evokes the uneasy volatility of its own permissive age. Book groups will appreciate Helen Hughes’s (German and film studies, Univ. of Surrey) scholarly afterword, which adds helpful context to White’s engrossing ambiguities.

With little mathematics or accounting described in its pages, this is not a technical work. The book instead explains how accounting, a natural human instinct, became a profession. Recommended for readers interested in the origins of modern accounting and how that history relates to the recent financial near collapse.