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A Grand Pursuit: A History Of Economic Genius (2000)

by Sylvia Nasar(Favorite Author)

3.73 of 5 Votes: 5

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English

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review 1: From the onset, I looked forward to reading this book by Sylvia Nasar - the author of A Beautiful Mind, a biography of Nobel Prize-winning economist and mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr - and who also happens to be the daughter of a German mother and Uzbek father. Having been born Uzbekistan and trained in economics in Germany, I might have possibly been predisposed to take delight in perusing the treatise. If so, I was not disappointed. The author does a good job of depicting the history of economic thought - based on the lives of selected economists whose names one can anticipate to encounter in most economics textbooks - in an accessible way to the reader. She chronicles in great detail the link between the breakthroughs in economic thinking and the personal and profe... moressional lives of the economists that led them to those eminent ideas. It is very revealing to see how these great minds were influenced into their thinking by their surroundings and major historical events that they had to witness first hand. There are plenty of surprising and yet facts that one does not learn in the more obscured economics textbooks.All in all, the author has done a great job of gathering ample research into one concise volume that both economists and non-specialist readers can equally enjoy.
review 2: Maybe I bought this for the wrong reasons - I didn't know much about the big names in Economics and wanted to know about their ideas. I got a tiny bit of that. What I didn't care about, and what the book is heavily focused on, is the personal lives of famous economists. In a few cases like Keynes and Marx, those personal lives are interesting, but by and large, reading about economists' marriages is duller than the dullest Econ textbook. less

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