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Recent Reviews
James Traub
Positive The New York Times Book Review A brisk, engaging biography of Humphrey with an urgent underlying message for today’s liberals.
Ben S Bernanke
Positive The New York Times Book Review ... light on personal anecdotes and devoted to substantive judgments. This exercise of historical assessment from a central participant is one that more policymakers should probably try. It allows readers to make judgments along with Bernanke and think about what lessons today’s policymakers — who are once again battling inflation — might take ... Even in his restrained style, Bernanke offers criticisms ... The one area where the book would have benefited from more introspection is economic inequality, which Bernanke largely dismisses as beyond the Fed’s mandate. Although he is correct that the central bank cannot solve the problem, it does have relevant tools, like its influence over financial markets, bank regulation and the housing sector. Instead, by treating stagnant working-class living standards as a sideshow, the Fed has contributed to the rise of populist anger that Bernanke laments ... Even with these caveats, 21st Century Monetary Policy tells a success story, and deservedly so ... Anybody reading his book today, during the Covid-19 pandemic, may notice that its message applies to more than monetary policy ... intended to help future generations of economic policymakers, and it probably will. But they are not the only ones who would benefit from thinking about its lessons.
Nicholas Lemann
Positive The New York Times Book Review Lemann has a skill for making grand stories about American life feel human ... One of the pleasures of this book is its accessible, succinct history of modern finance. He did it in two earlier books, The Promised Land, his 1991 account of the great black migration, and The Big Test, about the SAT and meritocracy, which was published in 1999. Anyone who read those books when they appeared would have been better prepared for some of the political and cultural debates that followed. I suspect the same will be true of Transaction Man, given the present focus on economic inequality and corporate America’s role in creating it.
Michael Lewis
Rave The New York Times Book Review [Lewis] immerses himself in big ideas — about finance, technology, sports and, ultimately, the human condition — and then explains them to readers with sophistication and clarity. But he is also a vastly better raconteur than most other writers playing the explication game. You laugh when you read his books. You see his protagonists in three dimensions — deeply likable, but also flawed, just like most of your friends and family ... the full message of Kahneman and Tversky’s work, I think, is more subtle than it often seems — and even more important in the new political world than the old. The human species is fantastically complex and often doesn’t know what it is doing. The search for a better understanding of our behavior is vital.