Dominic Frisby regales readers with stories of mankind's pursuit of gold and how it shaped the destinies of notable figures in The Secret History of Gold: Myth, Money, Politics, and Power. Whether venturing to ancient gold mines in Macedonia or assessing the future of this "eternal metal" in the digital age, Frisby's entertaining narrative centers gold's enduring physical beauty and its dazzling impact on those who encounter it.
Someone who remains unimpressed by gold is Warren Buffett. He famously complained that the metal has "no utility" other than as wealth stored in a vault, which one has to pay people to guard; its industrial uses are few. As Frisby illustrates, gold's main purpose is to "display prosperity" in the form of jewelry or currency, a purpose that "transcends culture and time." Alexander the Great depleted his gold reserves to pay his armies, while a 2024 Daily Telegraph headline reported that Russia paid Iran in gold for "drones used in attacks on Ukraine."
A finance writer and comedian, Frisby (Bitcoin: The Future of Money?; Daylight Robbery: How Taxes Shaped Our Past and Will Change Our Future) is a gifted storyteller with a flair for the whimsical. Although troves of gold artifacts remain intact, many ancient treasures were melted down so it is entirely possible, Frisby posits, that our gold trinkets may have once "adorned the head of a pharaoh or the neck of a hominid hunter gatherer." This intriguing thought points to gold's indestructibility. Life is temporary but gold will outlast both humans and bitcoin (often called gold 2.0 or digital gold).
Scattered throughout this lively and informative book are examples of how mankind's attitude toward gold is governed not by logic but by emotion. It was a golden apple, after all, that led to the Trojan War, while gold's irresistible draw almost doomed the mythic King Midas. Literature associates gold with goodness in phrases such as "golden ages" and "hearts of gold."
It is, as Frisby posits, a "deeply political metal." While Frisby is a firm believer in "the discipline of the gold standard," he doesn't expect Western governments to surrender their power to create money at will. A cutting-edge use of gold comes from the Canadian company Totenpass, which has constructed a digital storage drive from solid gold to permanently store data.
Frisby's fourth book, the first comprehensive history of gold, offers readers a thorough and fascinating immersion into the ancient role and modern function of a metal globally revered for its gleaming beauty, stability, and opulence. --Shahina Piyarali
Shelf Talker: In this lively and informative book, a finance writer and comedian regales readers with stories of mankind's pursuit of gold, including its place in mythology and the digital age.