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Adapt
She's probably in the minority, but this reviewer winced a little on seeing that the most prominent accolade for Tim Harford on the cover of "Adapt" was "Britain's Malcolm Gladwell". Because her impression of the latter writer is that of a genius, unimaginatively retrofitting... 
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The Idea of Justice
A song that influenced this reviewer's musical tastes when she was quite young, by Laurie Anderson, has the lyric: "'Cause when love is gone / There's always justice / And when justice is gone / There's always force / . . . ". Thinking about this often led her to ponder if that...
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2nd February 2014 04:19 PM
by dropzone 
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League of Denial
The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth
A damning, well written, book about how the NFL tried for years to ignore or suppress the awareness of the concussion problems players were having
Fought disability claims of retired players by dragging out the process through various way hoping the players would die.
Forming a...
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22nd December 2013 12:53 AM
by Jules Galen
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Quiet
The power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking
"Someone is staring at you in 'Personal Growth'" is a line spoken by well-meaning Carrie Fisher to the unrequited Meg Ryan in 1980's chick-flick When Harry Met Sally. This reviewer remembers that, mostly because of how novel she thought it would be (at the time, she was fourteen) to have...
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30th October 2013 11:28 AM
by Francesca R
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The Upside of Irrationality
Dan Ariely quite likes writing about irrationality. Likes designing tests for it too, and outlining the results in non-technical form and the positing of explanations and theories. This book is almost the same as his previous one which this reviewer borrowed from a friend and read overnight a...
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28th October 2013 01:12 AM
by Francesca R
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Inequality Reexamined
A monograph rather than a book, and a rather dry, academic text to cover in a review. But this work from 1992 is actually one of the clearest expositions of Sen’s rather unique theory of social justice (Rawls with a twist, if you will) and—even more importantly—contains a model of evaluating...
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11th September 2013 12:25 PM
by Francesca R
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Why Nations Fail
The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty
Rather reminiscent of the excellent “Collapse” by Jared Diamond, but this work prefers to sweep away all points of Diamond’s thesis of why societies collapse—environmental damage, overpopulation, hostile (and friendly actually) neighbours—for the single determinant of extractive institutions....
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3rd September 2013 10:09 AM
by Francesca R
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Globalization and its Discontents
Not really about globalisation per se, Stiglitz instead has some highly rational "Washington Dissent" with the IMF/World Bank and its interventions in East Asia, Russia and Latin America in the late 1990s. Delivered with all the insider authority of a former Chief Economist and Nobel...
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The Price of Inequality
This reviewer had high hopes for this book--which advertised itself as an analysis of the causes of income/wealth inequality as well as of the economic and political impacts--and is written by a Nobel laureate.
It has none of the charts and estimation coefficients with which "The...
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Fault Lines
How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten The World Economy
This reviewer never read many books about the financial crisis of 2008 (and beyond). Having been up-close to it, and working on "Lehman Sunday" (14 Sept 08) netting out derivatives positions with that institution for her then employer (it worked out just fine), she was for a long time put...
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Civilization
The Six Killer Apps of Western Power
This reviewer always learns plenty from Niall Ferguson's books, but she feels that excessive effort is made to shape a thesis into an absorbing story, such that it usually ends up (to her) as so meticulous and precise as to strain credibility--beyond being one of several thousand...
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What Money Can't Buy
The Moral Limits of Markets
The opening intro to this book was deceptively pedestrian to this reviewer: providing a laundry-list of things money can buy (helpfully called commodities whenever the emphasis is supposed to be that it should not be able to)--none of which greatly surprised her or gave her instinctive cause...
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25th July 2013 03:04 PM
by Dr B
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