Brockhouse Cooper

12/22/11
The Next Decade -- reviewed by Remi Maloney

The Next Decade, by George Friedman, Doubleday, 2011, 272 pp., $20.00

STRATFOR owner and CEO George Friedman takes on the ambitious task of projecting what will happen in the next decade. You might wonder how Friedman’s hypotheses are any better than the Financial Times astrology page. The answer lies in a wisdom too often ignored by many political commentators: to know where you will go, you have to understand where you are and how you got there.

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10/25/11
The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers - reviewed by James McKeough

The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers, by Richard McGregor, Harper Collins; 1St Edition, 320 pp., 2010, $27.99

Written by Richard McGregor, a Beijing-based, Financial Times corre­spondent for the last decade, The Party provides a sound frame­work for understanding what’s been called China’s ‘operating system’: the Communist Party of China, or CPC.

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05/20/11
Keynes: the return of the Master - reviewed by Alex Bellefleur

Keynes: the Return of the Master, by Robert Skidelsky, Penguin Books 2010, 227 pp., $26.95

After many years in the intellectual wilderness, Keynes is back - and back in a big way. His ideas are now in vogue in political circles that, in the past, would not have paid much attention to his economic policy recommendations.

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03/04/11
The Big Short -- reviewed by Marie-Michelle Dumas

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday machine, by Michael Lewis, W. W. Norton & Company; 1St Edition edition, 266 pp., 2010, $27.95

The Big Short is not just another book about the recent financial crisis. Rather, it’s a finely written story about the misjudgements, missed signals and ill-fated decisions that led to it.

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07/09/10
Review by John Shingler: From Higher Aims to Hired Hands

Rakesh Khurana, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession, Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 531pp., 2007. 

Until the late 19th century, and even beyond, training for commerce was by way of apprenticeship, informal rather than formal, and it started often enough in the early teen years. During the 20th century this approach was abandoned and replaced, not just by formal, compulsory, general education, but by a specifically business education all the way to, and including, a doctoral degree. What happened?

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04/01/10
Review by John Shingler: The Age of Wonder

Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, London, Harper Press, 2008. pp., xxi, 554.

What an extraordinarily beautiful book this is, filled with insights and information, pulsating with energy and charged with hope for humanity. It is, above all, a profoundly optimistic book. It revels in the accomplishments of the past and celebrates human ingenuity and creativity. Holmes appears to have read everything related to his subject: original texts, unpublished sources and the massive secondary literature. This is a magisterial work which belongs on the shelf of all of those who want to understand the foundations of the modern world, above all the scientific achievements, and dangers, of the past two centuries. It can be read and reread with increasing pleasure and an expanded understanding of the giants on whose shoulders we stand.

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06/01/09
Review by John Shingler: The Ascent of Money

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, by Niall Ferguson. NY. Penguin Press, 2008. 442 pp. $29.95.

The title of The Ascent of Money, we should note, is a deliberate reference to the famed television series, The Ascent of Man, written and narrated by the late Jacob Bronowski.  In that work Bronowski addressed the place of human beings, and their evolution, in the framework of natural history.  Bronowski’s series on human beings had a substantial influence on the young Ferguson, who is trying in The Ascent to do the same thing for money, that highly contested and much debated human invention and artefact that Bronowski did for the original inventors, human beings.  I would claim that Ferguson succeeds.

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12/01/08
Review by John Shingler: Lords of Finance

Liaquat Ahamed. Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, New York. Penguin Press, 2008. 564 pp. $32.95.

The key to understanding Ahamed’s excellent book is to recognize that its leitmotiv is that history is best seen as a succession of decisions taken by leading actors; it is not a process subject to impersonal forces that impel individuals and groups ineluctably in one direction or another. The essence of this world view is captured in the epigraph to Lords of Finance, “Read no history – nothing but biography, for that is life without theory”, a provocative aphorism taken from Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Contarini Fleming.   I think many people, however much they may claim to subscribe to some theory, whether it be dialectical materialism or the efficient market hypothesis, in practice basically agree with Ahamed’s proposition that leadership does indeed matter.  Why else the fierce competition for office and for control of governments or corporate bodies or political parties?

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06/01/08
Review by John Shingler: Billions of Entrepreneurs

Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India are Reshaping Their Futures and Yours, by Tarun Khanna, Boston, Harvard Business School Press, 353 pp., 2007, $29.95

Tarun Khanna compares China’s and India’s separate pasts and their dissimilar passages to modernity, and then explores the world that they are both directing and making.  I am filled with admiration for Khanna’s energy, enthusiasm and entrepreneurship.  Indeed, his work, Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India are Reshaping Their Futures – And Yours, is in an instance of his topic; Tarun Khanna himself is an example of what he is writing about.

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