Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
George Eliot’s Middlemarch & Jane Austen’s Emma seen through the prism of Himmelfarb:
Lydgate fails in his moral ambition to do “good small work for Middlemarch, and great work for the world,” because he is inadequate to the small world in which he finds himself, whereas Dorothea is fulfilled as a moral being precisely because she is content to do good work in her small world, thus for the world as a whole. (33) (bold added)
The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World, by John O’Sullivan; Regnery, 448 pages.
Cross-posted at Albion’s Seedlings
John O’Sullivan is a journalist with a fine sense of history. Thus it is appropriate that he should write a book about a time, and a set of people, who are now crossing the threshold between being the subject of journalism, to being the subject of history. Of the three — Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and John Paul II — two belong now to the ages, and Lady Thatcher has become less and less active as health issues reduce her speaking schedule. The students who will be entering university this year were born in 1988 — Reagan’s last year in office — and were two when Margaret Thatcher left government. They were sixteen when the white smoke heralding John Paul II’s successor issued forth over the Sistine Chapel; if they were not Catholics, and were incurious about current events, they might have barely registered his passing.
Das, Gurcharan, India Unbound: The Social and Economic Revolution from Independence to the Global Information Age, Penguin, New Delhi, 2002. ppbk edition.
[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]
Recently, a friend with Gujarati origins returned from visiting his relatives in northwest India and brought me several books on the Indian economic renaissance. This particular book is part biography, part business tutorial, while effectively illustrating the dramatic challenges faced by India over the last century. Gurcharan Das is a former CEO of Proctor & Gamble India, sometime columnist for the Times of India and frequent commentator on Indian economic affairs. Educated in India and the US, and spending his formative business years in many countries, he’s the perfect intermediary for the general reader. After taking early retirement, he switched his focus to business consulting. That varied background has made a big difference to the quality of India Unbound. His experience bridges the generations, bridges East and West, and reflects experience with many facets of the Indian economy. It is a well-written book, a bit dated by the very rapid change in both India and the global economy (his Foreign Affairs article is a wonderful update), but all-in-all this book is an excellent introduction to India’s past, present, and potential future.
Ward, Peter, Out of Thin Air: Dinosaurs, Birds, And Earth’s Ancient Atmosphere, John Henry Press, 2006. 282 pp.
Out of Thin Air takes the reader on a wide-ranging journey through the earth sciences, melding cosmology, the geological and climatological history of Earth, and the story of the evolution of life on Earth. It’s a unique reading experience because it proposes a theoretical change-of-perspective so profound and so recent that the author is hustling (with a large number of scientific colleagues) to publish scientific articles which outline the implications of the new information and re-assess many assumptions about the ancient past. Out of Thin Air is a snapshot of science on the run. What it lacks in conclusiveness it restores with the excitement of iconoclasm and the possible revision of decades-old assumptions.
The book opens with the haunting image of mountain climbers dying of hypoxia near the top of Mount Everest as Tibetan bar-headed geese migrate overhead without apparent danger. How are birds able to survive flight at such high altitudes during such tremendous migratory exertions? Clearly, bird physiology is different in some profound way from that of mammals and reptiles. What are the ancient roots of this difference and does it have anything to do with the apparent dinosaurian origins of modern birds?
Iklé, Fred C., Annihilation from Within: The Ultimate Threat to Nations
[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]
Recently, Jay Manifold posted a review of this book which included an insightful summary and an extended discussion of the impact that science and technology will have on the survival of the nation-state.
A brief synopsis of this book:
In contrast with Jay Manifold, I’d like to take a cultural approach to Iklé’s long essay. I found myself struck both by Iklé’s valuable insights (which will be familiar to anyone following discussion of Fourth Generation Warfare), and his bizarrely academic attitude to American culture and politics (when assessed from the perspective of Anglosphere exceptionalism).