Publisher, Tantor Media (December 2008)

NOTE: RETAIL EDITIONS are packaged in attractive, compact cardboard or jewel-case shrink-wrapped boxes, with full-color art.

ALERT! YOUR CD PLAYER MUST BE MP3 COMPATIBLE! MP3 audiobooks on compact disc can be played on newer CD players that support MP3 technology and accept a 4.75" diameter disc, and on any personal computer that has Microsoft's Media Player or similar software.

Listen to a FREE audio clip.

"The author is a fluent interpreter.... He avoids the aridity of economics without skimping on details, offering lots of bang for the buck." ---Kirkus

"There is an ease to [Ferguson’s] prose that leaves this complicated subject interesting to and approachable by any general [listener]." ---Booklist Starred Review

"An admirably illuminating book." ---The Washington Post

"It shrewdly anticipates many aspects of the current financial crisis." ---The New York Times

"A timely history of money and finance from the advent of coins to J.P. Morgan Chase's takeover of Bear Stearns earlier this year." ---Library Journal

"A timely book that is indispensable [from] one of the greatest historians writing today." ---The Boston Globe

"Like sitting in on a really fab Oxford lecture." ---AudioFile

Niall Ferguson follows the money to tell the human story behind the evolution of finance, from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia to the latest upheavals on what he calls Planet Finance.

Bread, cash, dough, loot, moolah, readies, the wherewithal: Call it what you like, it matters. To Christians, love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it's the sinews of war. To revolutionaries, it's the chains of labor. But in The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson shows that finance is, in fact, the foundation of human progress. What's more, he reveals financial history as the essential back story behind all history.

Through Ferguson's expert lens, familiar historical landmarks appear in a new and sharper financial focus. Suddenly, the civilization of the Renaissance looks very different: a boom in the market for art and architecture made possible when Italian bankers adopted Arabic mathematics. The rise of the Dutch republic is reinterpreted as the triumph of the world's first modern bond market over insolvent Habsburg absolutism. And the origins of the French Revolution are traced back to a stock market bubble caused by a convicted Scot murderer.

With the clarity and verve for which he is known, Ferguson elucidates key financial institutions and concepts by showing where they came from. What is money? What do banks do? What's the difference between a stock and a bond? Why buy insurance or real estate? And what exactly does a hedge fund do?

This is history for the present. Ferguson travels to post-Katrina New Orleans to ask why the free market can't provide adequate protection against catastrophe. He also delves into the origins of the subprime mortgage crisis.

Perhaps most important, The Ascent of Money documents how a new financial revolution is propelling the world's biggest countries, India and China, from poverty to wealth in the space of a single generation---an economic transformation unprecedented in human history.

Yet the central lesson of the financial history is that sooner or later every bubble bursts---sooner or later the bearish sellers outnumber the bullish buyers; and sooner or later greed flips into fear. And that is why, whether you're scraping by or rolling in it, there's never been a better time to understand the ascent of money.

About the Author: Niall Ferguson is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University; the William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School; a senior research fellow of Jesus College, Oxford; and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford. The bestselling author of Paper and Iron, The House of Rothschild, The Pity of War, The Cash Nexus, Empire, Colossus, and The War of the World, he is also a contributing editor of the Financial Times. Since 2003, he has written and presented three highly successful television documentary series for British television: Empire, American Colossus, and, most recently, The War of the World. He and his family divide their time between the United Kingdom and the United States.

About the Performer: British-born Simon Prebble has built a successful career that spans the Atlantic. As a stage and television actor, he has played in everything from soaps to Shakespeare, but it is as a veteran narrator of over four hundred audiobooks that he has made his mark since coming to the United States in 1990. As one of AudioFile magazine's Golden Voices, Simon has received over twenty Earphones Awards and five Listen-Up Awards, and he has been a finalist fourteen times for an Audie Award, the audiobook industry's version of the Oscar. In 2006, Publishers Weekly named him Narrator of the Year.