Merchants, Power, and the Rise The transformations that America went through in order to become a capitalist country were very significant and are sometimes looked past. However, in the book Land of Desire, the author, William Leach extensivelygoes into many of those things. There were many things that went into thisranging from specific poeple and incidents to outside places and things. Leachshows each individual ordeal and explains the personal effect that it had on theindustry, as well as how society accepted, or in some cases condemned suchthings. All of this comes from his own education and understanding of thesituation. He shows the drift into a capitalistic country as being a gradualchange in one thing that then led to another, and to another, and so on. Not tomention that many, many things took part in it. And that if such things hadnot occurred, we would not be the country that we are today.There isn't a whole lot of information on William Leach, but he doesappear to be a very well-thought out man. This is not his only historical bookand he's also done other things, including the book True Love and PerfectUnion: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society, and editing The WonderfulWizard of Oz. That specifically shows up a number of times in Land of Desire. He refers to L. Frank Baum (the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz)throughout the book, as well as to the book itself. Other than that, though,there's not much else I know about him, too bad it's not exactly the mosthelpful information as far as why he thinks the way he does.Leach broke the book up into 5 major parts. The first being the prefaceand the introduction. These two parts laid out the main ideas of the book. After that, Leach went into the three main sections of the book, which end upbeing the three main steps in the transformation into capitalism. The firstentitled Strategies of Enticement, went into a little bit of history, as well as thefirst recogni...
