"In the spring of 1934, Virginia Woolf sketched an affectionate three-page "biographical fantasy" of her great friend, John Maynard Keynes, attempting to encompass no less than 25 themes, which she jotted down at its opening: "Politics. Art. Dancing. Letters. Economics. Youth. The Future. Glands. Genealogies. Atlantis. Mortality. Religion. Cambridge. Eton. The Drama. Society. Truth. Pigs. Sussex. The History of England. America. Optimism. Stammer....

"The riveting third edition of this New York Times bestselling title expands its focus to China, exposes corruption on an international scale, and offers much-needed solutions. Extensively updated, this edition features fourteen new chapters, including a new introduction and conclusion. The book brings the story of economic hit men (EHMs) up-to-date and focuses on China's EHM strategy. EHMs are highly paid professionals who use development loans to...

"In Maverick, Jason Riley explores the life and ideas of Thomas Sowell, one of America's most influential and trenchant Black social critics and conservative intellectuals alive today. Riley offers an introduction to Sowell's ideas, from race and inequality to politics, economics, and education. Riley considers Sowell's own history alongside the moments and movements that shaped his thinking"--

Nicholas Phillipson's intellectual biography of Adam Smith shows that Smith saw himself as philosopher rather than an economist. Phillipson shows Smith's famous works were a part of a larger scheme to establish a "Science of Man," which was to encompass law, history, and aesthetics as well as economics and ethics. Phillipson explains Adam Smith's part in the rapidly changing intellectual and commercial cultures of Glasgow and Edinburgh at the time...

"Barack Obama, father of the American president, was part of Africa's "independence generation" and in 1959 it seemed his star would shine brightly. He came to the U.S. from Kenya and was given a university scholarship. While in the Hawaii, he met Ann Dunham in 1961, and his son Barack was born. He left his young family to gain a master's degree from Harvard. After that, Obama's life became progressively more complicated. He was a brilliant economist,...

"Worldly Philosopher chronicles the times and writings of Albert O. Hirschman, one of the twentieth century's most original and provocative thinkers. In this gripping biography, Jeremy Adelman tells the story of a man shaped by modern horrors and hopes, a worldly intellectual who fought for and wrote in defense of the values of tolerance and change. Born in Berlin in 1915, Hirschman grew up amid the promise and turmoil of the Weimar era, but fled...

Thomas Robert Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population was an immediate succès de scandale when it appeared in 1798. Arguing that nature is niggardly and that societies, both human and animal, tend to overstep the limits of natural resources in "perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery," he found himself attacked on all sides -- by Romantic poets, utopian thinkers, and the religious establishment. Though Malthus has never disappeared,...