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The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson
Can You Spare a Dime?
A review by Robert Skidelsky
1. The historian Alan Taylor used to say, mischievously, that the only point of history is history. The idea that one could use it to predict the future, still more to avoid past mistakes, was pure illusion. Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money, a history of financial innovation written as a television documentary as well as a book, offers a neat test of Taylor's theory. Ferguson can claim some powers of anticipation. History convinced him in 2006 that the good times could not last "indefinitely." This was an insight to which the Nobel Prize–winning mathematical economists who devised...
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks
This Is Your Disordered Brain on Music
A review by Doug Brown
Oliver Sacks has been a working neurologist for over 40 years. Thus, when he wants to use specific examples to illustrate a point, he has many at the tip of his pen to choose from. Note the subtitle: Tales of Music and the Brain. This is not a traditional nonfiction book about music and the brain like Levitin's This is Your Brain on Music; it is largely stories about people. The majority of the book consists of case histories of various patients Sacks has seen over the decades. Thus, Musicophilia is more about how the brain doesn't perceive music than about how it does; but often we learn how ...
Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent: Faith & Power in the New Russia by John Garrard
The Prop of the Knout
A review by Leon Aron
Goditsya -- molitsya, a ne goditsya -- gorshki pokryvat. "If it fits, then we'll pray to it. If it doesn't, then we'll cover pots with it." Vissarion Belinsky, the father of "social" literary criticism in Russia, cited this Russian saying about icons in 1847 in his lengthy retort to Gogol's Select Passages in the Correspondence with Friends, in which, among his other sins against the progressive credo of the day, the author of The Inspector General and Dead Souls admired the allegedly innate religiosity of the Russian people. Belinsky's contention seemed to be borne out after 1917 by the...
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Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture by Alan Sokal
Post Hoax, Ergo Propter Hoax
A review by Michael Bérubé
In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal played an elaborate trick on some unsuspecting humanists and social scientists -- namely, the editors of the leftist journal Social Text -- by submitting an essay filled with at least six kinds of nonsense. The editors didn't catch (or were willing to countenance) the nonsense and published the essay. In response, humanists and social scientists embarrassed (or outraged) by Sokal's hoax lashed out, sometimes in ways that made them look even worse than the editors; and Sokal found himself hailed by legions of fans and supporters who credited him with finally...
Thames: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd
River of Life
A review by Kathryn Shevelow
Of London's many pleasures, one of the most profound is a stroll along the south bank of the Thames on a warm summer evening, just as the long twilight begins to fade into night. Start at Westminster Bridge, where the Houses of Parliament cast their shimmering reflection onto the dark water's surface, and make your way east along the promenade crowded with theaters, museums, restaurants, shops and former riverine warehouses now transformed into blocks of fashionable flats. As you walk downriver, you pass more bridges -- postmodern Hungerford, utilitarian Waterloo, Victorian wrought iron...
The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia by Laura Miller
The Magician's Book Conjures the Magic of Narnia
A review by Mary Ann Gwinn
For a fellow who wrote fairy tales, C.S. Lewis stirred up a lot of fuss and bother. Millions of readers who devoured The Chronicles of Narnia as children or saw their film adaptations (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian) in the multiplexes know Lewis as the Oxford scholar who gave them a great imaginative gift -- seven books about the alternate world of Narnia and the children who navigate its wonders and terrors. Like his great old friend J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis, once described as "the best-read man of his generation," had another side -- he was a committed Christian...
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