BiblioVault - Books about Money

Land of Milk and Money

A Novel

Anthony Barcellos

Tagus Press, 2012

Land of Milk and Money tells the story of the Francisco family, Portuguese immigrants who build a prosperous California dairy farm. With their growing success, plans to return to the Old Country fall by the wayside, and the legacy of the older generation becomes a source of contention among descendants competing to inherit herds of cattle and tracts of farmland. As matriarch, Teresa had devoted her life to keeping the peace in her big family. But when she dies long-simmering resentments and feuds burst into the open—and into the courtroom. Teresa, however, had seen it all coming, and her will contains a few surprises.

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Lawyers, Swamps, and Money

U.S. Wetland Law, Policy, and Politics

Royal C. Gardner

Island Press, 2011

Lawyers, Swamps, and Money is an accessible, engaging guide to the complex set of laws governing America's wetlands. After explaining the importance of these critical natural areas, the book examines the evolution of federal law, principally the Clean Water Act, designed to protect them.

Readers will first learn the basics of administrative law: how agencies receive and exercise their authority, how they actually make laws, and how stakeholders can influence their behavior through the Executive Branch, Congress, the courts, and the media. These core concepts provide a base of knowledge for successive discussions of:

the geographic scope and activities covered by the Clean Water Act
the curious relationship between the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency
the goal of no net loss of wetlands
the role of entrepreneurial wetland mitigation banking
the tension between wetland mitigation bankers and in-lieu fee mitigation programs
wetland regulation and private property rights.

The book concludes with insightful policy recommendations to make wetlands law less ambiguous and more effective.
A prominent legal scholar and wetlands expert, professor Royal C. Gardner has a rare knack for describing landmark cases and key statutes with uncommon clarity and even humor. Students of environmental law and policy and natural resource professionals will gain the thorough understanding of administrative law needed to navigate wetlands policy-and they may even enjoy it.

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The Limits of Money

Three Perceptions of Our Most Comprehensive Value System

Simon Goudsmit

Eburon Academic Publishers, 2005

The Limits of Money examines money as a historical phenomenon and speculates on its future possibilities and limitations. The volume opens with a concise history of monetary systems and then examines how the advent of numbers transformed money into the main determinant of fiscal value. Simon Goudsmit concludes by looking at the tension between the power of financial incentives and the civic structures and behaviors needed to maintain Western democracy.

The Limits of Money is an intriguing and much-needed study of the role of money in daily life and human societies.

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Love, Money and Obligation

Transnational Marriage in a Northeastern Thai Village

Patcharin Lapanun

National University of Singapore Press, 2019

Globalization has opened up a flow of economic and cultural exchanges. While we often think about these concepts in terms of trade policies or international treaties, they also play out in more intimate spheres, such as transnational marriages.

Northeast Thailand has seen an increase in marriages between Thai women and farang (Western) men. Often the women are less well off and from rural areas in the country, while the men largely come from the United States and Europe and settle permanently in Thailand. These unions have created a new social class, with distinctive consumption patterns and lifestyles. And they are challenging gender relations and local perceptions of sexuality, marriage, and family.

In Love, Money and Obligation, Patcharin Lapanun offers an exploration of these marriages and their larger effect on Thai communities. Her interviews with women and men engaging in these transnational relationships highlight the complexities of the associations, as they are shaped by love, money, and gender obligations on the one hand and the dynamics of socio-cultural and historical contexts on the other. Her in-depth and even-handed examination highlights the importance of women’s agency and the strength and creativity of people seeking to forge meaningful lives in the processes of social transition and in the face of local and global encounters.

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