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I get asked a lot, "What's a good book about economics?" Seriously, I do. And while you may think that says something sad about my life, think about the people who are asking.
My own study of economics started with "Economics in One Lesson" by Henry Hazlitt (1946), which is still a fine introduction, though it was written in the 1940s and covers a lot of specific economic fallacies that we don't hear much any more. If you want something more substantial, you might pick up a couple of readable college textbooks, "The Economic Way of Thinking" by Paul Heyne (1963), or "Economics: Private and Public Choice" (1976) by James D. Gwartney and Richard L. Stroup. For the serious student with a lot of time, there's "Human Action" by Ludwig von Mises (1949) and "Man, Economy, and State" by Murray Rothbard (1962). Or for something a little more fun, you could try the works of some modern-day Hazlitts: "The Armchair Economist" by Steven Landsburg (1993), "Hidden Order" by David Friedman (1997), or "The Undercover Economist" by Tim Harford (2005).
But increasingly, I've decided that the best answer to the question "What's the best book to start learning economics?" is "Eat the Rich" by P.J. O'Rourke (1998). P.J. is not an economist, as the aforementioned gentlemen are, but he plays one very well. And he's hilarious, which means your niece might actually read the book.
On page 1, P.J. starts with the right question: "Why do some places prosper and thrive while others just suck?" Supply-and-demand curves are all well and good, but what we really want to know is how not to be mired in poverty. He writes that he tried returning to his college economics texts but quickly remembered why he hated them at the time — though he does attempt, for instance, to explain comparative advantage in terms of John Grisham and Courtney Love. Instead he decided to visit economically successful and unsuccessful societies and try to figure out what makes them work or not work. So he headed off to Sweden, Hong Kong, Albania, Cuba, Tanzania, Russia, China, and Wall Street.
In Tanzania he gapes at the magnificent natural beauty and the appalling human poverty. Why is Tanzania so poor? he asks people, and he gets a variety of answers. One answer, he notes, is that Tanzania is actually not poor by the standards of human history; it has a life expectancy about that of the United States in 1920, which is a lot better than humans enjoyed in 1720, or 1220, or 20. But, he finally concludes, the real answer is the collective ujamaa policies pursued by the sainted postcolonial leader Julius Nyerere. The answer is "ujamaa — they planned it. They planned it, and we paid for it. Rich countries underwrote Tanzanian economic idiocy."
From Tanzania, P.J. moves on to Hong Kong, where he finds "the best contemporary example of laissez-faire. . . . The British colonial government turned Hong Kong into an economic miracle by doing nothing."
Your niece could do worse than to take a semester-long course on political economy in which the texts were two O'Rourke books, "Eat the Rich" and "Parliament of Whores" (1992).
— David Boaz
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Summer is the perfect time to visit London. Except, you don't really want to go there, do you? Not only is the exchange rate against you, but there is also that hideous London Eye disfiguring the skyline. I say we cease travel till they pull it down.
But that's not to say that you can't experience London, anyway. Better yet, you can experience it at four pivotal moments in its history, through the books of Liza Picard. In "Elizabeth's London" (2003) she presents a well-drawn portrait of two towns, London and Westminster, converging to become the most important and powerful city in Europe. The presence of the Virgin Queen permeates the pages as the era's most recognizable symbol — but Picard's gift is her ability to bring to life the day-to-day existence of Elizabeth's subjects. We can see the finer shadings of their education, their amusements, their medicines, their repasts, and the clothing and styles that filled their busy streets. We read about their trades, their crimes, and their religious beliefs — lovingly detailed from original sources, with humorous asides befitting the very British voice of the author.
Elizabeth died without issue in 1603. Turmoil followed, culminating in regicide and a brief flirtation with parliamentary rule. Soon, however, Charles II, the son of the murdered king, was back from exile to claim the throne. Picard undertakes the next era in "Restoration London" (1997). It is fascinating to see what changed and what didn't in the almost 60 years between Elizabeth's Golden Age and the reign of Charles II. My favorite passage in this book is a weekly Bill of Mortality from 1665. Among the various causes of death it includes this one: "Killed by a fall from the Belfry at Alhallows the Great — only one casualty [that week]." New building codes — enacted in the aftermath of the great fire of 1666 — changed the face of the city to the now-familiar flat-faced brick. Fashions, of course, fluctuated with the whims of Paris, and there were some new Christian sects in town, but everyday life for the hoi polloi stayed much the same. Samuel Pepys' journal accounts of his life as an up-and-coming Londoner are priceless.
"Dr. Johnson's London" (2000) looks at the years 1750 to 1770, when George III still had his wits and lucky London had Dr. Johnson — 18th-century England's most important man of letters. Not only did Picard have the good doctor's recollections from which to draw; she was also blessed with the illustrations of William Hogarth, who turned an unflinching eye upon the squalor of the London poor, and whose line drawings (several of which she includes in this book) stand in contrast to the sumptuous drawing-room portraits more familiar to modern minds.
In "Victoria's London" (2005), Picard dives into the next great shift in London and the lives of its citizens. Will you enjoy as much as I did turning to the first chapter and seeing the title, "Smells"? The Thames stank; the streets stank; houses stank; people stank. The most important person of 19th-century England may very well have been Joseph Bazalgette, who saw the whole putrid mess and engineered the London Main Drainage System. Hooray! Another major change was the interest that the rapidly growing middle class began to take in the poor. Schools sprouted everywhere — some weeds, some roses — but all giving little pickpockets a place to while away the daylight hours.
The best of all worlds awaits you in the books of Liza Picard. London lives in its glory and strife and growth and renewal — without any of its literal stench and grime and disease. There is no London Eye to offend the tourist's sensibilities, and the whole 400-year journey can be owned forever for less than $100.
— Justine Olawsky
| Barbara Branden is
the author of the biography The Passion of Ayn Rand. |
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I have two books to recommend: "Watchers," by Dean Koontz, and "Golden Days," by Carolyn See (1986).
"Watchers" is Koontz at the top of his form — the matchless storyteller who knows how to make the hair stand up on the back of one's neck, the romantic who understands the courage required to love without conditions and without fear. It is the story of a government experiment in genetic engineering, an experiment which has produced two creatures — one murderous, the other benign — so opposite that only one of them can survive, and of the lonely recluse and the beautiful, lost woman whose lives become entwined with theirs and with each other. The suspense builds chapter by chapter, inexorably, to a final, spellbinding confrontation.
Typical of Koontz, this book refuses to present a simplified portrayal of good and evil; both good and evil are represented as complex, full of ambiguities and nuances. We may want to hate the evil creature, but in the end, we cannot . . . not quite. But we can love without reservation one of Koontz's best-drawn and most fascinating characters: Einstein, the golden retriever who has leaped the enormous gap between an animal who is highly intelligent and a being who is self-aware, and thus capable of rational judgment. Forget any animal in fiction that you ever have loved, and prepare to meet the unforgettable and noble Einstein — and to thrill at the prospect of finding another intelligent species to share our vast, cold universe. As Koontz writes: "What miracle could bring more joy, more sheer exuberance over the unanticipated wonders of life?"
I had a strange experience when I read See's "Golden Days." I was about halfway through the book, gripped and intrigued by it — yet wondering if I really liked it — when I suddenly started to cry. I don't mean that I had tears in my eyes; I mean that I was weeping, and I continued to do so, helplessly, until I had finished the book, constantly wiping fresh tears away so I could see the pages.
I thought at first that the book had hit some very personal chord in me, that perhaps something about my mood on that day or the recent events of my life had caused so powerful and unusual a reaction. I would wait a couple of weeks, I decided, when I would be more measured and objective in my reaction, and read it again.
Two weeks later, I reread "Golden Days" — with the identical reaction. And I realized that my tears were not tears of pain; they were like the tears one sheds while listening to music almost too beautiful to endure, the tears that come from a kind of exquisite agony.
This small marvel of a book, witty and wise and mad, is the story of a woman and of nuclear war — but it is unlike anything on either subject you have ever read. It is a fusion of exaltation in the midst of despair, of hope that falters but cannot be killed, of a well-earned cynicism together with a triumphant conviction of the glory of fallible and stumbling human beings. It is clear-eyed and realistic and unsentimental — and it is an anthem, a hymn to the human will to survive and prevail.
There are very few books about which one can say: after I read it, the world was never quite the same again. This little gem is one of those books.
— Barbara Branden
| Ross Posnock teaches at Columbia University. His most recent book is Philip Roth's Rude Truth. |
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I want to recommend a dazzling, yet nearly forgotten work: Dorothy Baker's 1962 novel "Cassandra at the Wedding," a book that the New York Review of Books' stellar reprint series very commendably brought back into print in 2004. When Baker (1907–68) is remembered at all it is for her 1938 "Young Man with a Horn," a jazz novel famous in its day, thanks especially to the Kirk Douglas movie it later inspired. What dazzles about "Cassandra," her last book, is the voice that Baker brings to electric life on the page: the lyrical voice of a hyper-articulate, skittish, witty literary intellectual, the suicidally self-loathing Cassandra Edwards.
A half-hearted Berkeley grad student dutifully trudging through her dissertation, Cassandra has a tenuous hold on her life but is in full command of a gloriously caustic and piercing verbal energy, which Baker displays in abundance by devoting much of the novel to her interior monologues. We meet this charming narcissist just as she is finishing her grading of a stack of spring semester exams and setting off for the wedding of Judith, her obsessively loved and already intensely missed twin sister. Heading home for the event, Cassandra is heading as well toward a painful reckoning with the idˇe fixe of her precarious emotional existence: that she and Judith are perfect life partners who must never leave one another. Sabotage the wedding, or just not show up, or kill herself or the fiancˇ: such are the options Cassandra weighs in a panic that, with desperate suavity, she seeks to control even as it flares into violence.
The wedding will be at the home of their widowed and adored father, a former professor of philosophy who retired "unconventionally early" to devote his time to "mostly thinking, and drinking" and making notes for a book on Pyrrhonic skepticism. As if infected with his mordant sense of futility, Cassandra too, in effect, is toying with retiring early, haunted not only by the father's example but also by the death of her mother, a famous novelist whose career Cassandra uses to mock her own scholarly labors. Preferring to be a novelist herself "and have all those others writing their theses about me," she notes that "it's not easy for the child of a writer to become a writer. I don't see why; it just isn't. It's something about not wanting to be compared. And not wanting to measure up, or not measure up; or cash in either. It's not that I have anything against my mother. I loved her, I think, but my mother's only been dead three years . . . and I'd rather wait a decent interval and then try. Or not try. But first write the idiotic thesis and get the gap-stopping degree."
Without giving away what happens, I will say that one of the miracles of this novel is the unsentimental evocation of hermetic, intoxicating family love in its destructiveness and exhilaration, an achievement that brings inevitable comparison to the past master of this territory — J.D. Salinger. Baker, like her famous contemporary, is one of the few novelists capable of creating characters who are themselves possessed of distinctive and self-conscious literary sensibility. But Baker's sensitive English major is blessedly free of the annoying Salinger tics of whimsy and preciousness and slyly self-loathing self-promotion. In short, "Cassandra at the Wedding" is a novel of startling individuality. Of modest length but unrelenting emotional intensity, it is a book that will grip you and anyone else lucky enough to read it.
— Ross Posnock
| Andrew Ferguson is
managing editor of Liberty |
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Summer should afford the chance to tackle a lengthy classic or two, lingering over pages a few at a time between catnaps and sips of sweet iced bourbon. Such endeavors are, at present, out of fashion: who's got the energy to focus on all those words? So I recommend feasting your eyes instead on the panels and spreads of a good-sized graphic novel: they offer intrigue, suspense, and humor in greater abundance than the now-traditional "beach read," and they're also large enough to cover your face when the sun becomes too much.
Mystery: "From Hell" (1998) by Alan Moore. This is the masterpiece (so far) of a career that includes the creative peaks of "Watchmen," "Swamp Thing," and "Promethea." Moore put several dissertations' worth of research into reconstructing the London of 1888, the London in thrall to Jack the Ripper. Over it he laid a potent psychogeography (check out the coach-drawn tour of the city: those chilly churches! those obscene obelisks!) and a grand conspiracy including the royal family, the Freemasons, and five unfortunate whores. The art is suitably grim and gritty, and Moore's extended notes in the appendix are a rollicking read in their own right. If, on the other hand, you prefer your mysteries a little less occult or gory, try perhaps the British spy series "Queen and Country" (2002–) by Greg Rucka.
Romance: "Blankets" (2003) by Craig Thompson. At first glance, this appears to be a coming-of-age, young-love story; but further examination reveals a penetrating look at the gradual refinement of the young artist who is the principal subject. Thompson's line drawing is beautiful and inventive, so much so that it's sometimes hard to concentrate on the story; still, there's plenty of love, heartbreak, angst, and genuine pathos to go around. Stories of the sort seen in mass-market paperback romance are rare in comics, which as a rule channel their readers' wish-fulfillment fantasies toward superhero tales. Certain works of Japanese manga provide romance, but since they don't completely cover the face while sleeping they cannot be considered true summer books. If you want more steam in your comics masterpiece, you might pick up one of the storylines of the punk-rock epic "Love and Rockets" (1981–96, 2001–) by Los Bros Hernandez. If, however, you prefer the type of antiromantic family drama that ends in alienation and small, shattered dreams, you're in luck: lock up the guns and the booze and curl up in a fetal position with Chris Ware's "Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Man on Earth" (2000).
Fantasy: "The Sandman" (1988–96) by Neil Gaiman. I figure any book featuring as characters Lucifer, William Shakespeare, and Norton I, Emperor of the United States of America, is probably worth a look. A meditation on story in the form of a 2,000-page epic about Morpheus, King of Dreams, "The Sandman" is a great work of literature, perhaps the best produced in the graphic medium during the past few decades. In structure it can only be compared to a work of scripture; in scope it switches from the individual to the cosmic without ever feeling forced. Readers who go in for science fiction may prefer the impeccable style of "Hellboy" (1993) by Mike Mignola, with its Nazi scientists, homunculi, and Lovecraftian gods. An all-ages pick now available in a single volume is Jeff Smith's weird and whimsical "Bone" (2005), which Disney has so far, thank God, failed to adapt to the screen.
Political thriller: "Transmetropolitan" (1997–2002) by Warren Ellis. Presenting the adventures of political journalist and professional horrible bastard Spider Jerusalem, "Transmet" extrapolates from the present day an extreme future America: crude, explicit, doped to the gills, but still recognizable and strangely lovable. Jerusalem is basically Hunter S. Thompson shifted forward a few centuries, and an inspiration to everyone who has dreamed of taking on (or at least pissing off) the corrupt state and its crooks by simply telling people the truth. Other works of quality are thin on the ground in this genre; like our political system, political intrigue can't seem to shake the spectre of 9/11. If that's what you're looking for, you'd be better off with Rick Veitch's well-executed allegory "Can't Get No" (2006). But if it's actual political journalism you want, check out the books of Joe Sacco, including "Palestine" and "Safe Area Gorazde" (2000, 2001).
— Andrew Ferguson
| Stephen Cox is editor of Liberty and
a professor of literature at the University of California San Diego. |
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I had a lonely childhood, so to me one of the most important things in the world is friendship. I also care a lot about certain things that other people would call political or "social" causes. But I deeply resent having friendship, caring, or even the proximity of other people thrust upon me. I don't care if it's Beethoven that my neighbor is blaring from his patio (as if it ever could be Beethoven); I resent the intrusion, anyway. I guess you could call this a typically libertarian character formation.
Now comes Liberty's own Scott Stein, with a novel on precisely this theme of self versus other: "Mean Martin Manning" (2007, beautifully produced by ENC Press). It's a story about a man who is regarded by the whole American nation as nasty, vicious, inhuman, and downright "mean," simply because he wants to exist by himself. He isn't a hero; he isn't a villain; he just wants to exist by himself. His antagonist is a caring social worker endowed with state power to "improve" her un-caring neighbors and perfect them into sociability. She is, in short, the devil incarnate.
There are few really good hardcore libertarian novels. This is one of them. Remember, I said "hardcore." And "good." "Good" doesn't mean "I agree with the message." "Good" doesn't mean "I like the hero." "Good" doesn't mean "This is an agreeable fantasy." "Good" means a lot more than that, and "Mean Martin Manning" is good. It's smart and it's funny. It's exactly as long as it ought to be. Its images, ideas, settings, and characters will linger in your memory far beyond this summer.
— Stephen Cox
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