MixedThe Financial TimesThe book is a history told with the focus on the way networks and hierarchies shaped events. This approach is engaging but not always helpful. It is unclear that we gain much by describing Pizarro’s conquistadors and their allies as a network opposing Atahualpa’s hierarchical Inca society. When it does work, however, it works well ... No book written by a historian of Ferguson’s gifts is likely to disappoint, but The Square and the Tower does have one obvious weakness: it’s not at all clear that the author takes his own premise seriously.
Michael Lewis
RaveThe Financial TimesAll this is well known to anyone who has read Kahneman himself or popularisations of his work, so what does Lewis add? He’s a far better writer than most, meaning that even the familiar is fresh. And there is a great deal here that feels new. Lewis has done his homework; he has evidently talked to the right people — with the inevitable omission of the much-missed Tversky — and he knows how to tell a story simply, powerfully and with an eye for the telling detail ... By writing less about behavioural economics Lewis gives Kahneman and Tversky’s ideas room to breathe ... vivid, original and hard to forget.
