The latest best seller from critic Mark Steyn offers an “invaluable” window into the mindset of the contemporary Right, said Mark Adomanis in Salon​.com. “Steyn’s wit and pen are sharp” as he lays America’s decline at the feet of Big Government. But even on symptoms he considers critical—like the comparative fertility rates of the U.S. and the Arab world—he’s so selective about the facts he cites that readers who don’t know better “will end up with an extremely distorted view” of which trends are real.
Debt: The First 5,000 Years
by David Graeber
(Melville House, $32)
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David’s Graeber’s “exceedingly timely” history spotlights a provocative idea, said Gillian Tett in the Financial Times. Graeber, an anthropologist, argues that debt, not barter, was humanity’s original vehicle for exchanging goods and services. But in previous cultures, the powerful seemed always to recognize that debts occasionally had to be wiped clean to avert social explosions. Graeber’s subtle suggestion might not yet be echoing in today’s financial capitals, “but I suspect it will soon hit the radar.”
The Quest
by Daniel Yergin
(Penguin, $38)
Reading all 800-plus pages of Daniel Yergin’s new work “consumes a fair bit of energy,” said The Economist. But the author of 1990’s The Prize has moved beyond the history of oil to investigate every effort being made to meet the world’s growing thirst for energy. Yergin frets more about global warming than fossil-fuel depletion, and “finds at least some cheer” in the progress of solar and wind technologies. As a reference resource, his comprehensive survey “will be hard to beat.”
The Grand Pursuit
by Sylvia Nasar
(Simon & Schuster, $35)
Even Sylvia Nasar isn’t quite brilliant enough to create a perfect page-turner out of the history of modern economics, said Steven Pearlstein in The Washington Post. But by spotlighting the field’s great thinkers as they observe industrialization’s effects, she creates “sweeping” drama out of the evolution from Karl Marx’s pessimism to John Maynard Keynes’s optimism. It’s a welcome reminder that humanity has done far better for itself since 1840 than many would have predicted.
