Summer Reading

I have added a couple of recent books to my reading list in the right-hand column.  I've finished two books in the last couple of weeks that I highly recommend.

The first is Amity Shlaes excellent history of the great depression, The Forgotten Man.  This is very well written economic history, which sounds almost oxymoronic but it isn't in this case.  It's definitely revisionist history - FDR does not come off as the insightful economic savior that he is commonly viewed as.  It's amazing how feckless the political leadership of both parties was in dealing with a 10 year long crisis - and how much worse their actions made the crisis.  Lots of information that I had not been aware of.  Whether you agree with all of Shlaes conclusions or not I highly recommend this important book.

The second book is Walter Isaacson's biography of Albert Einstein.  Handles the science well for the general reader but even more so integrates the discussion of the science - and the scientist - into the whole person.  And Einstein was more than just the prototype of the absent-minded scientist.  Quite a bit of interesting information that was new to me - for example, did you realize that Einstein's Nobel Prize in Physics was not for his work on relativity?  I certainly didn't.