Reviewed: Land of Promise: An Economic History of The United States, by Michael Lind (Harper, 592 pp., $29.99). America is fickle. Or at least our economic history is. According to Michael Lind, author of Land of Promise, we can’t make up our minds about the role of the federal government in the economy, and the result […]

Read more

Reviewed: Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady, by Kate Summerscale (Bloomsbury, 320 pp., $26). We associate Victorians with plenty of moral codes and few women’s rights. But as Kate Summerscale meticulously documents in Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace, there was more afoot in the era than its rigid outward manners would suggest. At […]

Read more

Reviewed: Metro: A Story of Cairo by Magdy El Shafee (Metropolitan Books, 112 pp., $20). Magdy El Shafee is a Libyan-born Egyptian comics artist. In 2008, his first graphic novel, Metro: A Story of Cairo, was published in Egypt. It recounts the fictional adventures of a down-on-his-luck, quasi-superheroic software designer who angrily roams the streets and subway (the Metro) of Cairo. The […]

Read more

Equities analyst Barry Ritholtz wasn’t buying Facebook or its initial public offering. In a May 22 blog post, he described Mark Zuckerberg as an arrogant, 28-year-old man-child and said that the social network “went public more or less unlawfully over the past two years, allowing 1000s (or more) of outside investors to acquire substantial stakes […]

Read more

Reviewed: The Passion of Bradley Manning, by Chase Madar (OR Books, 167 pp., $15). Bradley Manning could not possibly have known, when referring to the hundreds of thousands of classified defense documents he ostensibly slipped to WikiLeaks, how true it was when he allegedly said, “It’s almost bookworthy in itself, how this played.” But Chase Madar’s The Passion of […]

Read more