Follow the money never seemed more appropriate than in these tumultuous times. Few writers following the trail of lucre can match the alacrity or savvy of British historian Niall Ferguson. In The Ascent of Money, this feisty Scot shows that finance has always operated as the dominant backstory in human history. He demonstrates his theories by describing how the rise of the Dutch Republic (and the Enlightenment) were aided by the advent of the world's first modern bond market and how Italian bankers and Arabic mathematicians made the Renaissance possible. Ferguson's ambitious, provocative revisionist histories are always stimulating reads.