Category: Pop History

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…

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…

Doris Kearns Goodwin is one of the most distinguished presidential historians of the past fifty years. Her extended profiles of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson have all been best sellers; some have even won the Pulitzer Prize. In “Leadership in Turbulent Times” (2018), Goodwin seems to traverse from the Harvard history…

A century ago “Teapot Dome” made headlines from coast to coast for almost a decade.  Today, only the most dedicated political junkies remember what it was all about.  In “The Teapot Dome Scandal: How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House and Tried to Steal the Country” (2008) Laton McCartney seeks to bring the largest…

The best part about writing a memoir is you get to be the hero of your own story. And believe me, Bill Browder is the hero of “Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice” (2013). But is Browder a hero? Some hedge fund titan cum fearless Galahad…

The word “Krakatoa ” has become synonymous with almost unthinkable natural disaster, an extinction level event locally, if not globally. Simon Winchester, an increasingly successful British pop historian, delivers a lively, albeit highly discursive account of the great eruption in “Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883” (2003). Krakatoa, a small volcanic island…

George Orwell’s debut novel, “Burmese Days” (1934), is one of my all-time favorites. Orwell brilliantly captures the class obsessed and condescending superiority of late Imperial Britain. The vain and dashing cavalry officer, Lieutenant Verrall, is surely one of the more execrable characters in twentieth century fiction. He is also a spot-on caricature of the type…

There is no bigger topic on the global stage today than climate change. The primary culprit causing today’s climate crisis is hydrocarbon emissions, a process that kicked off a century and a half ago with the Second Industrial Revolution. But there was something about this widely accepted narrative that has always troubled me and it…

What if Adam Smith (invisible hand) and Charles Darwin (evolution) had a baby? The offspring might be pretty amazing: intelligent, dynamic, innovative, problem-solving. At least that’s what British science writer Matt Ridley argues in “The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves” (2011). First, Ridley wants you to know that being an optimist is long been lonely,…