book review

Book Review: Philip Gefter’s Spectacular ‘Cocktails with George and Martha’

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It always interested Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane that while left-handed writers represent roughly 11 percent of the population, something like 40 percent of Cato’s staff wrote left-handed. Crane’s conclusion from the statistical oddity was that the left-handed aren’t mirror images of majority. They see the world differently, and seemingly in a libertarian fashion. […]

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Book Review: Samuel Graydon’s ‘Einstein In Time and Space’

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Laments about the state of education are arguably as old as education is, or close to it. And they’ve always been a waste of time. That’s because knowledge isn’t bestowed on us as much as it’s created. The Wright Brothers didn’t attend college, but it wouldn’t matter if they had. They invented aviation. And Jeff Bezos

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Book Review: Amor Towles Triumphs With ‘Table for Two’

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In his 2023 book The Art Thief, author Michael Finkel crucially observed (my book review here) that “art is the result of facing almost no survival pressure of all.” So true, and it raises an exciting question about the present and future of art: as an increasingly globalized division of labor comprised of man, machines, and

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The Late, Great David Lodge Helped Us to Relax, and Relax Some More

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I was first introduced to David Lodge’s endlessly great novels when a college girlfriend gave me her copy of Nice Work. The book was assigned to her in a senior-year English literature class at left-leaning University of Texas at Austin, and the fact that it was assigned existed as at least an anecdotal corrective of

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Book Review: Ron Manners’ ‘The Impatient Libertarian’

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They’re libertarians and they don’t know it. That’s long been the view of Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane. It’s what he expressed decades ago to recently passed Cato executive vice president David Boaz. Boaz was a conservative when he first met Crane, but Crane knew from their conversations that Boaz was a libertarian precisely

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Book Review: Tim Matheson’s ‘Damn Glad to Meet You’

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If you ever want to learn economics, just purchase books about entertainment and sports. It’s that simple. Considering antitrust alone, the whole profession could be put out of business by the memoirs and biographies written by actors and entertainment journalists. All of this came to mind while reading Tim Matheson’s (Animal House, Fletch, The

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Books: Harald Jahner’s ‘Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany’

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They “ate, slept, made love, raised children, and tried to keep body and soul together by finding ways to make a living.” Those were the words of the late, great Wall Street Journal deputy editorial page editor George Melloan in his excellent and essential 2016 Great Depression memoir, When the New Deal Came to Town. Melloan was describing life

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Book Review: Tevi Troy’s ‘The Power and the Money’

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Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the Washington Post in 2013 may not have been his best business acquisition, but it still arguably rates among his best acquisitions. Precisely due to Amazon’s stupendous growth borne of a remarkable business that much of the world can’t live without, the purchase of Washington, D.C.’s most important newspaper signaled a degree

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Book Review: CTA CEO Gary Shapiro’s ‘Pivot or Die’

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It’s always amusing to read about businesses said to possess so-called “monopoly” power in the U.S., or much more disturbingly, about accusations of “monopoly” power from the ankle biters inside the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission. By definition these accusations are made well after the fact. That is so simply because today’s

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