All Posts
Collected reviews from decades of reading — organized by subject and written for clarity, context, and long-term reference.
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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…
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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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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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