Brzezinski’s Second Chance

Being an author can be a very cushy job once you’ve got a good reputation and money for research assistants.
Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Second Chance examines how three post-Cold War American Presidents handled America’s role as the world’s only superpower.  Brzezinski’s own policy prescriptions in the book are mostly vague and general; when they are specific they [...]

The Bottomless Well

This 2005 book by a physicist and a Manhattan Institute fellow puts forward some shocking claims on the dust jacket: energy supply is infinite, more energy-efficient technology will never lower energy demand, energy waste is virtuous, and gasoline prices will matter less and less.
On closer examination, these claims are either wrong or turn out to [...]

The Strange Death of American Liberalism

The Strange Death of American Liberalism by H.W. Brands purports to explain why LBJ-style liberalism no longer has any real influence on American governace.
He is right to note that its influence has faded away.  No matter how many times Bill Clinton is labelled a tax-and-spend liberal, the facts remain that he balanced the budget, reformed [...]

The World Though Einstein-Colored Glasses

Just read Albert Einstein’s The World As I See It. The book, published in German in 1933 and in English a year later, was Einstein’s first publication directed at a general audience. The first half is devoted to science, both to an explanation of Einstein’s work and a record of his thoughts on the [...]

Guns of August, Pity of War

I’ve been delving into histories of the First World War. I recently finished two books by popular historians, Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August and Niall Ferguson’s Pity Of War. Though the first covers only the first month of the war, and the second examines several topics over the time frame of the [...]

Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom

This has been, I think, the most popular book written about economics in the 20th century. Having read many thicker and more obscure tomes on the subject, I figured it was time to give Friedman a try.
As the title might suggest, the book is full of both economics and political philosophy. Its overriding [...]

Arthur Conan Doyle- Historian

The man remembered for Sherlock Holmes was not only a novelist, but a contemporary historian as well.
Searching for a good history of WWI in the Widener Library, I stumbled across his 5-volume his of the war. I decided to see whether his writing ability carried over to this new field.
One might expect that a [...]

The Making of an Economist

Recently finished The Making of an Economist, Redux by David Colander.  The book summarizes surveys and interviews with economics graduate students at some of the top US schools.
Some of its surprising findings:
Most Econ grad students are startlingly ignorant of basic, economics-101 principles.  When questions like “What is GDP?” and “How might the economy be affected [...]

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman
This book belongs to a genre which once enthralled me, but now seems to be simple-minded, naive, and doomed to impotence. The genre is that of the prophet of American Democracy. The prophet sees (imagines?) that there are principles [...]