Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative 

By Jennifer Burns 
592 pages
Published: Nov. 2023

I’ve just begun reading this book – another part of the Milton Friedman binge I’ve been on. So far, I’m very happy with it and would recommend it without hesitation to anyone who wants to understand how and why Friedman’s version of free-market capitalism has been so influential in the public conversation about government and economics that has been going on for more than 50 years.

Had I not already begun to study Friedman, I’m not sure if I would have been able to fully appreciate what a terrific job Jennifer Burns did with this biography. It’s not only comprehensive and detailed, it answers lots of questions I was asking myself as a late-in-life fan of this amazing man.

Critical Reception 

An Economist Best Book of 2023… one of The New York Times’ 33 Nonfiction Books to Read This Fall… named a most anticipated fall book by the Chicago Tribune and Bloomberg… finalist for the 2024 Hayek Book Prize.

Click here to read an extensive review of the book by David. R. Henderson in the Summer 2024 Cato Institute newsletter.

Click here and here to watch two interesting discussions with Jennifer Burns about Friedman and her book.

How the Mind Works

By Steven Pinker
660 pages
Published: 1997

How the Mind Works by the Canadian/American cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker is one of those rare nonfiction books that I can’t get enough of.

Like Sapiens by Yuval Harari, it is an engaging and accessible investigation into everything one thinks about when thinking about the human mind: awareness, intelligence, emotion, vision, consciousness, and self-consciousness. Pinker presents a convincing theory about what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and ponder the mysteries of life.

Pinker’s primary perspective is evolutionary biology, but his erudition is much broader than that, which provides the reader with many rich and interesting ways to understand how our brains work, including philosophical, economic, and social schools of thought. Thus, he gets into such subjects as feminism and “the meaning of life.”

His stance on evolution is nuanced. He explains the basics well and refutes the common misunderstandings. He rehabilitates some unfashionable ideas (e.g., that the mind works like a computer and that human nature was shaped by natural selection), and challenges fashionable ones (e.g., that passionate emotions are irrational, that parents socialize their children, and that nature is good and modern society corrupting).

Critical Reception 

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize… a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1997… featured in Time magazine, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Nature, Science, Lingua Franca, and Science Times… front-page reviews in The Washington Post, Book World, The Boston Globe, and the San Diego Union Book Review.

“This is the best book I’ve read all year!” – Michael Masterson

Einstein in Time and Space: A Life in 99 Particles 

By Samual Graydon
368 pages
Published: Sept. 2023

This my third attempt to understand Einstein – his life and his work. I bought the book because I’d read that it wasn’t a terribly lengthy (as so many bios are) and that, because it was written as a series of vignettes, it is easy to consume. And Einstein in Time and Space did not disappoint.

We all know that Einstein was a genius, that he was eccentric, and that the only subject he managed to earn good grades in was mathematics. But until I began reading Einstein in Time and Space, I had little idea about how complex and interesting his life was.

He was, as one reviewer summarized, “the curious child, the rebellious student, the serial adulterer, the wily prankster, the loyal friend, the civil-rights defender, the intellect unsurpassed in his time….”

Italy in a Wineglass: The Taste of History

By Marc Millon
336 pages
Published: May 2024

I wanted to read Italy in a Wineglass because I am always eager to learn about wine and it was strongly recommended in a magazine I was perusing in my doctor’s waiting room.

I expected it to be relatively short, entertaining, and informative. It was… and much more. Far from simply the guide to Italian wine that I expected, it is also a travel memoir and deep dive into Italian history, starting with the Greeks, Etruscans, and Phoenicians, then moving through Roman antiquity, early Christianity, the fall of the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages, the Florentine Renaissance, the promise of Italian unification, and the two World Wars, and continuing into the present day.

I’m only about a third of the way through. I’m treating it as a bathroom book, reading one chapter at a time – and so far, I’m liking it a lot.

You can listen to the audio version of Italy in a Wineglass, for free, here.

The Wealth of Shadows

By Graham Moore
384 pages
Published: May 21, 2024

One of two books selected for the September meeting of The Mules, The Wealth of Shadows was a terrific read from start to finish.

Briefly, it’s the story of an ordinary man who joins a secret mission to bring down the Nazi war machine by crashing their economy. It is billed, correctly, as a novel, but is a largely factual account of the largely secret economic battle that took place between Maynard Keynes, the British economist who was credited with saving England from financial ruin in the resolution of WWI, and Harry Dexter White, a lower-level American economist and possible Russian spy, over which currency would dominate the world after WWII.

There are many reasons to recommend this book.

Firstly, it’s a thriller, a page-turner about brilliant and ruthless economists whose understanding of the role of economics in war was as different as it was profound.

Second, it is a fundamentally accurate accounting of what went on behind the scenes in the US, America, Germany, and Russia that made WWII inevitable.

Third, it is an accessible treatise on the difference between Keynesian economic theory and that of Milton Friedman – still the two most influential philosophies of how government should and shouldn’t involve itself with free enterprise.

And finally – and this was a bonus for me – it is an in-depth account of the origins and tactics of the Cold War.

I read The Wealth of Shadows just after watching The Octopus Murders, a documentary about the shenanigans behind the 1985-87 Iran-Contra scandal, which was also, at one level, an account of the economics of war. And towards the end of my reading, I was invited to join a clandestine discussion group comprised of Austrian economists, free market advocates, Libertarian philosophers, and what sounds to me like spies and secret operatives that meet virtually every month to explore the people and policies that have been responsible for most of the military and economic conflicts that have plagued the US since the end of WWI.

Had I not watched that documentary and read The Wealth of Shadows, I would not have been prepared to grasp the pace and depth of the conversations in the two meetings I have attended so far.

Click here to watch a video of Graham Moore talking about his book.

A Walk in the Woods 

By Bill Bryson
274 pages
Published: 1998

Bill Bryson is a writer custom-made for busy readers with ADD – like me.

You can pick up one of his books and spend an hour or so learning about history or geography or science, have a completely pleasant time doing so, and then put the book aside and come back to it later.

I began A Walk in the Woods at least 10 years ago. I’ve dipped into it a half-dozen times, and I’m not done yet. Because Bryson writes in vignettes, I’ve always been satisfied with however many pages I could consume in a sitting, without feeling an urgency to finish.

A Walk in the Woods chronicles his attempt to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail during the spring and summer of 1996. On a thematic level, it’s an exploration into the contrasts and connections between the wilderness and civilization. And although it’s rich in details and descriptions, it is much more a smart and funny personal journal than a travel guide.

The Myths of Happiness 

By Sonja Lyubomirsky
320 pages 
Published: Jan. 1, 2012

I found nothing in this book that seemed new. Nor anything that surprised me.

But for a book – and especially a self-help book – to be worth reading, the content doesn’t need to be new and different. It is enough sometimes to provide a better and/or deeper understanding of the problems analyzed and the solutions suggested. And even when that isn’t done, the book can still merit a read (a quick but purposeful read) if the advice itself is something you know but need to be reminded of.

The weakness of The Myths of Happiness was clear to me after the first several pages. I might have put it down, but, always interested in the subject of happiness, I did what I always do with a book like this: I read it quickly, at a speed of about 500 words a minute. Which means that I was able to go through the entire thing (at 250 words per page) in about three hours.

Given that modest investment of time, the book delivered. I found half a dozen suggestions in it that seemed promising. For example: Rather than recommending the common pop-psychology bromide of “Imagine you have just one week to live and you won’t see these people again…” Lyubomirsky recommends imagining that you are about to leave them for a long and indefinite span of time – a good twist, because it obviates the morbidity issue and is thus easier to imagine.