James Riley

In this hilarious fractured fairy tale series from New York Times bestselling author James Riley, Jack, and "punk princess" May must navigate twists and turns unlike anything you've seen before Jack lives in a fantasy world. Really. He's the son of the infamous Jack who stole the magic beans from the giant, and he's working hard to restore his family's reputation. He finds the perfect opportunity when a "princess" lands in front of him, apparently from the land of Punk, as her Punk Princess sweatshirt implies. May is from our world, and she's utterly confused to find herself in the midst of the fairy tale characters she has read about. But Jack and May have more in common than they realize--and together, they embark on a hilarious and wild adventre in this highly accessible, modern middle grade fantasy novel.

During the eighteenth century European governments began systematically using an international credit structure whose centre was the Amsterdam capital market. This book reconstructs that system and surveys its principal effects on the European and especially the Dutch economies. Eighteenth-century states borrowed chiefly to finance wars and, increasingly toward the century's end, debts from earlier wars. Military and naval spending and debt service together consumed up to eighty percent of peacetime revenues and more in war. Borrowing on international markets stabilised previously disruptive deficit financing techniques and moderated the economic consequences of sharply irregular war spending. This development however, eased the problems of war-making more than it developed national economies or enhanced prosperity. The Dutch, heretofore seen as having squandered the advantage of cheap credit, actually faced the difficult problem of finding productive uses for their savings at satisfactory returns.

Previously published: New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1965. First published in 1817 under title: An authentic narrative of the loss of the American brig Commerce.

This book is a collage of human experiences made from overlapping pieces and woven together by themes of crises, revolution, and change, aiming to raise issues that people in the twentieth-century world tried to address.