Michael Lewis can tell a story like no other. In fact, even before I finished reading his “The Big Short,” I wanted to work the book into every conversation I had. The story was that interesting and compelling. Anyone who can take the financial crisis of the last few years, find a story in it that centers around subprime mortgages and shorting the market (if you understand what that means and how to do it, you’re more than a step ahead of me and about anyone else I’ve mentioned it to over the last couple weeks), and then make it interesting to the lay reader deserves to be read. [cont…]
Book Review: “1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created” by Charles C. Mann
April 3, 2012 by
In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” But what happened next?
More than just the discovery of the new world that we call the Americas, Christopher Columbus set off globalization of ecology, trade, biology, and nationality beyond anything that preceded it, argues Charles Mann in “1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created.” The discovery of America did more than just uncover lands previously unseen or mapped by Europeans. It set adrift the then current order of the entire world. [cont…]
Book Review: “Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order” by Charles Hill
March 20, 2012 by
IIn Hill’s eye, fiction is more than just a story. In literature, we see the great ideas and forces that move history worked out, argued, and recorded. The “international world of states and their modern system is a literary realm,” he argues. “[I]t is where the greatest issues of the human condition are played out.” Nothing may come closer to a thesis for his opus. [cont…]
Book Review: “1421” by Gavin Menzies
March 2, 2012 by
On a scale of 1 to 10, this book is junk.
It’s rare that I would waste space blasting a book. Life is short and time is a scarce resource. I’d rather just drop a book unworthy of finishing and move on to a new one. This time, though, I think 1421 merits further explanation because of the sensational success it has experienced worldwide.
Simply put, 1421 is junk history posing as “real history.” [cont…]
5 Minute Book Review: “Drood” by Dan Simmons
February 8, 2012 by
“The Mystery of Edwin Drood” was Charles Dickens last novel, but he died before it could be finished. Dan Simmons picks up the mystery, not to solve and finish Dickens’ work, but to provide a back story, the real source of Drood. The result is a tale that is tragic, eerie, and mysterious.
Simmons starts out with heavy foreshadowing. Told in the voice of protagonist Wilkie Collins, friend and confidant of Charles Dickens, [cont…]
Review: “A Free-Market Monetary System” and “A Pretense of Knowledge” by Friedrich A. Hayak
February 7, 2012 by
I recently read the short brochure “A Free-Market Monetary System,” a compilation of Friedrich A. Hayak’s 1974 Nobel Prize speech “A Pretense of Knowledge” and a short essay on proposing a free-market monetary system (hence, the name, see?). Both are short, and neither waste any time proposing radical changes to what was then, and indeed what is still, the status quo in monetary and economic policy.
Both the essay and the speech are worth reading.
In “A Free Market Monetary System,” [cont…]
Book Review: “How to Read Literature Like a Professor” by Thomas C. Foster
January 26, 2012 by
It’s a rare day that I’m willing to give a full five out of five stars to a book. It’s rarer still that I’ll give the five stars, and then put it back on my bed-stand for continual reference in my future reading.
It’s just that kind of a book, and every bibliophile should read it. [cont…]
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