Rating: 5/5 David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011). I really, really enjoyed this book. This is not a manifesto. It’s an honest-to-goodness anthropological history of money, debt, and everything that goes with it. What I love about the book is how it builds. After going through all...
Rating: 4/5 Frank Partnoy, Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Risk Corrupted the Financial Markets (Revised ed.) (New York: Public Affairs, 2009). Make no mistake, this is one daunting read. It is 450 pages of small print and excruciating detail, and the content is enough to make you just go mad with frustration. This...
Rating: 5/5 Wendell Berry, Imagination in Place (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press, 2010). I have read a fair bit of Wendell Berry lately, and I will soon be looking more closely at his fiction. This collection of essays is more autobiographical and is certainly more literary. The overall focus is on influence—how we...
Rating: 3/5 Juan Enriquez, The Untied States of America: Polarization, Fracturing, and Our Future (New York: Random House, 2005). As I read the book (and specifically, as I slogged through the insane typography) I wasn’t sure whether I should accuse him of genius or hubris. After finishing the book, I decided it’s...
Rating: 5/5 Wendell Berry, What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2010). I can’t say enough how much I enjoy Wendell Berry’s writing. At a technical level, his writing is beautiful. He uses plain language , and his arguments are clearly and logically laid out. At a content...
Rating: 5/5 Wendell Berry, Home Economics: Fourteen Essays by Wendell Berry (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987). One thing I love about editing is the opportunity to read so many different types of texts I would never normally pick up. Sometimes, even if the book I’m editing is not particularly interesting, I...
Rating: 3/5 Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History (A. Knopf Canada, 2002). If you like reading history, then you’ll enjoy the book. It’s well organized and clearly written—very accessible writing style. If history bores you, then the book will bore you. It is just what it says it is, a book on the history of salt...