Scott Nearing was one of the most influential thinkers of the homestead movement. His book Living the Good Life, written with his wife Helen in 1954, marked a critical development in the concept of a sustainable lifestyle. The Nearings’ promotion of living simply from the land was no post-WWII American anti-consumerism fad. Instead, it was the…
Category: Reviews
Reviews of books, articles, and the like
Neighborhoods and the Great American City
Chicago is a big and complicated city. As a newcomer, I read widely to get a better understanding of my new home. The staff at the Unabridged Bookstore, an independent in the Lakeview neighborhood, has organized a section filled with Chicago books, ranging from the coffee table variety to academic monographs. On that shelf with a…
Humans and Imaginary Vulcans
Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow is an important book, well deserving of its Wikipedia page. Kahneman, along with his late partner Amos Tversky, won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences even though the pair are psychologists. They have a genius for creative experimentation. The book is a high-level summation of their research, along with…
Does Failing Mean Failure?
What does a failing school look like? Ron Berler’s latest book, Raising the Curve: A Year Inside One of American’s 45,000 Failing Public Schools is an in-depth attempt to answer that deceptively simply question. Berler, a seasoned journalist who has written on youth issues for The Chicago Tribune and many magazines, embedded himself in the Brookside Elementary…
Rendering The Abstract Accessible – Economic Theories Made Clear
Appearing informed about contemporary affairs requires familiarity with economics. Being informed, especially understanding current political debates, demands real grounding in macroeconomic policy. Economics today is more than an influential discipline. Leading economists – Paul Krugman, Jeffrey Sachs, Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglizt and Larry Summers – are public intellectuals and thought leaders. Many of the big political…
Making the Unfamiliar Familiar – Many Thanks to Will Gompertz
One of the job requirements of a provost is the ability to communicate with faculty across the disciplines and sound moderately intelligent and informed. You cannot present as more informed than the faculty – that simply shuts down conversation and fosters resentment (see Larry Summers at Harvard). One the other hand, if you don’t know…
Decline in the 1970s – A Pivotal Decade
Judith Stein’s Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies makes for depressing reading. Her narrative counters Whiggish histories of continuous progress with a sobering account of economic decline. It is a chronicle of poor decisions, written from the vantage point of a post-industrial United States with fractious politics and a…