Author: Tim Graczewski
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Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World (2016) by Adam Grant
Wharton professor Adam Grant has carved out a respectable niche in the space between academic behavioral economics and pop business management. I had heard him on various podcasts over the years, but I had never read any of his material. I found “Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World” (2016) to be pretty disappointing. My disappointment…
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The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire (2013) by Neil Irwin
For many years Ben Bernanke was an economics professor at Princeton University with an academic focus on the Great Depression. He was plucked from obscurity by the Bush administration and made chairman of the Federal Reserve in February 2006. A short 18-months later the subprime mortgage crisis hit. Bernanke and his peers at the Bank…
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Essays on the Great Depression (2000) by Ben Bernanke
Ben Bernanke has had a remarkable career. For two decades he was a tenured professor of economics at Princeton where he specialized in the study of the Great Depression. And then from 2006 to 2014 he was chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank where he guided the American (and global) economy through the worst financial…
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The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran (1988) by Said Amir Arjomand
Said Amir Arjomand has been a professor of sociology at Stony Brook University on Long Island for over forty years. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1980 just as his homeland was making its violent and chaotic transition from monarchy to theocracy. “The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in…
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The Reckoning (1986) by David Halberstam
David Halberstam’s “The Reckoning” first came out in 1986. That summer my middle school friends and I went to see the movie “Gung Ho,” starring Michael Keaton. It was a comedy about a failing auto plant in Detroit taken over by an upstart and hyper efficient Japanese automaker. Perhaps the only memorable thing about the…
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The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (1980) by Drew McCoy
It was commonly assumed in Revolutionary America that a republican form of government could only survive in an extraordinary society of distinctly moral and independent people. The political economy of the nation played a central role in either fostering or destroying that morality and independence. Hamiltonian Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans each had clear and sharply…
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Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic (2019) by Gordon Wood
Gordon S. Wood is an American institution. He is one of the most influential historians of early America that has ever lived. In “Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic,” the third volume in the epic Oxford History of the United States, Wood explores the tumultuous decades between the ratification of the Constitution…
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Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know (2019) by Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell has had tremendous commercial success following a relatively simple formula: Ask an interesting question and then provide an unusual or unorthodox response through a variety of colorful vignettes. Many of his books have become mega hits (Blink, The Tipping Point, Outliers) and I have become a huge fan. Thus, I was surprised when…
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The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000) by Kenneth Pomeranz
Serious people have been trying to explain the genesis of the Industrial Revolution since the days of Max Weber and Karl Marx or later by Arnold Toynbee, who coined the term in 1884. However, it is only relatively recently that it has emerged as something of a cottage industry in academia. “The Great Divergence: China,…
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