From reading the Asian chapter, one would scarcely realize that much of Asia was effectively on a silver standard for hundreds of years, and that at least in China this situation was brought about because of repeated failures of paper money experiments. Asians learned through bitter experience that a natural commodity whose stock is beyond the control of politicians is essential for preserving purchasing power in the face of social upheavals.
Likewise, Bernstein's tale of the alleged deflationary tendencies of gold causing the Great Depression and eventually necessitating the fiat paper money we have today is utter nonsense. For one thing, prices were very stable during the heyday of the gold standard (and throughout much of the rest of history for that matter); far from being deflationary, numerous studies have documented that the purchasing power of gold has been extraordinarily stable over many centuries.
For another thing, the instability of the post-World War I financial system was strictly a banking phenomenon; both the expansion of the money stock in the 1920's and the rapid collapse of the money stock in the early 1930's was almost entirely due to the irresponsible manner in which central banks mismanaged the creation and destruction of money substitutes, especially bank and savings accounts.
Rather than stabilize the financial system by getting rid of fractional reserves, Franklin Roosevelt and his successors have chosen instead to continually bail it out by inflationary means. The institutionalization of inflation, not any monetary defects of gold itself, is the real reason why governments tried to minimize gold's monetary role during the 20th Century.
The sad truth is that our current ruling class has a vested interest in the continual depreciation of the dollar. It also has a vested interest in risking a hyperinflationary collapse of the global economy, replicating on a world-wide scale what happened to Germany in 1923 and to many other countries throughout the thousand-year history of the paper money fetish.
It is too bad that Bernstein's readers won't learn the real lessons of monetary history from him, otherwise they might learn to trust paper less and develop a healthy "obsession" with gold too.
The book is as much a sociological study as a financial treatise and readers looking for a strictly economic argument about the merits/demerits of a gold standard should probably look elesewhere. Having worked for a money management firm who was the largest owner of gold equities in the world, I am familiar with the obsession of the true believers and they will not be satisfied with this account. But true believers aside, perhaps the most powerful argument that Bernstein makes is a question - namely, why should the pace of human economic development be controlled by the vagaries of nature and changes in extraction technology.