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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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The Economist magazine recently held up “A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy” (2016) by Joel Mokyr as one of the three most outstanding books of all time in explaining the emergence of global capitalism. That’s pretty high praise. Mokyr’s writing is dense and scholarly, yet it remains remarkably lucid and accessible.…
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Normally I don’t pay much attention to the endorsements on the back cover of a book. “The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern Word, 1788-1800” (2007) by Jay Winik was an exception. Some of the most distinguished historians and biographers in the country lined up to heap lavish praise on this book:…
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You’d think there would be a lot of great books available about the democracy of ancient Athens, but you’d be wrong. Over the past few years, I have taken several excellent online courses on the subject, including one by Yale University’s Donald Kagan, the American doyen of classical studies. However, I’ve found that I struggle…
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The Iranian Revolution is a fascinating subject. I’ve wanted to learn more about the events of 1978-79 for a long time, but I couldn’t find any book that was generally recognized as the objective and definitive account. I decided to pick up “The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran”…
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I first discovered Robert Heilbroner’s “The Worldly Philosophers” (1953) when I was an undergraduate majoring in economics in the mid-1990s. I was captivated by its unique blend of history, biography, and economic theory. I wasn’t alone in my fascination. “The Worldly Philosophers” is the second most successful economic book in history behind only Paul Samuelson’s…
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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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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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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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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…
What's Tim Reading Now? 