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Collected reviews from decades of reading — organized by subject and written for clarity, context, and long-term reference.
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Full disclosure: I’m a big Amazon fan. I’ve been writing reviews on the site for over a decade. I’m a highly satisfied shareholder and avid Prime customer. I also happen to believe that Jeff Bezos is among the most visionary and accomplished entrepreneurs and chief executives of modern times. In “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos…
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At first blush, Reza Aslan – an Iranian émigré turned Born Again Christian turned Shia Muslim Creative Writing professor – isn’t the ideal candidate to write an historical narrative of Jesus of Nazareth. But he does it rather well, at least from my rather uninformed perspective. Aslan’s central thesis in “Zealot: The Life and Times…
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I thought this book was going to be right up my alley. My manager gave it to me as a Christmas gift this year (I hadn’t heard of it before). We are in the business of making small business accounting software and he knows that I’m an avid reader of history. Two of my all-time…
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In his 2000 bestseller “Development as Freedom” Pulitzer Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen made the uplifting argument that the cornerstone of international development ought to be the promotion and growth of human freedom. What his thesis notably lacked was evidence. It seems to me that evidence supporting Sen’s important hypothesis is precisely what Daron Acemoglu and…
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Written in the “olden days” of the Internet (i.e. late 1990s), Randy Komisar’s “The Monk and the Riddle” is a classic with a timeless message: there’s a fundamental difference between passion and drive. The latter is what propels type A personalities to succeed at anything they undertake. The former is more visceral and personal; it…
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“Did any other leader in the twentieth century do more to improve the lives of so many? Did any other twentieth-century leader have such a large and lasting influence on world history?” This is how Ezra Vogel concludes his massive 700-page tome, “Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China.” Indeed, who else in history has…
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Long before he was a controversial commentator on NPR and then FOX News, Juan Williams was a distinguished chronicler of the US Civil Rights era. “Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary” was published in 1998, a half-decade after the legendary civil rights lawyer (but rather forgettable Supreme Court justice, according to this book) passed away at age…
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The paperback edition of “The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty” was eagerly anticipated. Well, by me, at least. I have spent the past year reading broadly on the topic of economic development. Sachs’s 2005 bestseller, “The End of Poverty,” is by far the most optimistic and prescriptive of the lot. He…
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Author Gerald Gunther was one of the country’s most prominent twentieth century legal scholars. He authored the authoritative constitutional law textbook and was widely regarded as most deserving of a Supreme Court justiceship, if the criteria were purely based on merit and intellectual gravitas. Gunther clerked for Learned Hand on the Second Court of Appeals…
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