Greek Gods and Monsters (Paperback)
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Instant Guides
Greek Gods and Monsters
Archives: Titles
The Highest Perfection
The Highest Perfection (Hardback)
A History of De La Rue
Peter Pugh
De La Rue, a company celebrating its 200th anniversary in 2013, and Portals, which will be 300 years old in 2012, both have magnificent histories of which they can be proud. Very few large firms have lived and thrived for so long.
De La Rue is the largest commercial currency printer and papermaker in the world, involved in the production of more than 150 currencies as well as a wide range of security documents such as passports and fiscal stamps. De La Rue is also a leading provider of cash-sorting equipment and software solutions to central banks, helping them to reduce the cost of handling cash.
Portals can trace its history back to Henri Portal, a refugee from France who settled at Bere Mill on the River Test in Hampshire in 1712 with a number of other Huguenot papermakers. He founded the company, and through hard work, skill and the shrewd move of tying itself to the Bank of England, Portals thrived and grew through the 18th and 19th centuries, continuing to prosper in the 20th century. It was acquired by De La Rue in the 1990s.
Thomas de la Rue had a very humble start in life. Born in Guernsey in 1793, he worked as a printer and eventually moved to London as a straw hat manufacturer. By 1830 he was convinced that he was not going to make his fortune in hats, and he moved into the stationery business and playing cards.
From cards Thomas progressed to postage stamps and then in the 1850s to banknotes. Thomas had two very talented sons, Warren and William Frederick. They took the company forward and, by the end of the 19th century, De La Rue was printing stamps and banknotes for countries throughout the world. The fourth generation of de la Rues were not as successful as their predecessors, and in the early 1920s the company had to be rescued by a financier, Sidney Lamert, and a very able businessman, Bernard Westall. These two stabilised the situation and took the company forward until it grew again under the guidance of Arthur (known as Gerry) Norman. In the years since the end of the Second World War, De La Rue has grown steadily into the worldwide operation it is today.
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Perfect Rigour
Perfect Rigour (Paperback)
A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of a Lifetime
Masha Gessen
In 2006, an eccentric Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman solved one of the world's greatest intellectual puzzles. The Poincare conjecture is an extremely complex topological problem that had eluded the best minds for over a century. In 2000, the Clay Institute in Boston named it one of seven great unsolved mathematical problems, and promised a million dollars to anyone who could find a solution. Perelman was awarded the prize this year – and declined the money. Journalist Masha Gessen was determined to find out why. Drawing on interviews with Perelman's teachers, classmates, coaches, teammates, and colleagues in Russia and the US – and informed by her own background as a math whiz raised in Russia – she set out to uncover the nature of Perelman's astonishing abilities. In telling his story, Masha Gessen has constructed a gripping and tragic tale that sheds rare light on the unique burden of genius.
Gessen provides a thorough account of the circumstances that led to Perelman's rise in the 'vicious, backstabbing little world of Soviet mathematics and a brilliant reconstruction of the twisted logic that might have led to his mysterious exit. In so doing she has written something rare: an accessible book about an unreachable man.
Perelman and the world of Soviet maths training make a fascinating, moving tale, and in 'Perfect Rigour' Masha Gessen tells it brilliantly.
Perelman possessed and developed a perfect mathematical mind with which he achieved a unique triumph in maths. But having a perfect mind in an imperfect world, is almost bound to end in tragedy, as Masha Gessen's brilliant book reveals.
Gessen gives us a long and vivid description of the world of Soviet mathematics in the 1970s…. Gessen paints a memorable picture of a Soviet sub-culture in which the great players of the mathematical game were nurtured much like the most promising young tennis stars… Gessen's research and reportage portrays the ultimate misfit mathematician…
This strange tale highlights the intensity of the world of modern mathematics and the nature of some of the semi-autistic savants who live in it…. 'Perfect Rigour' is readable, coherent, and enjoyable and we get a distinct image of a man crippled by his inabilities to empathize with or understand other men or women.
[I] hugely enjoyed reading Masha Gessen's book. It gives the reader such an insight into Perelman, mathematics and Soviet education. The book will sit on my shelves between Simon Singh's Fermat's 'Last Theorem' and Graham Farmelo's 'The Strangest Man'.
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For Whom the Bell Tolls
For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hardback)
Light and Dark Verse
Martin Bell
Martin Bell OBE has been many things – an icon of BBC war reporting, Britain’s first independent MP for 50 years, a UNICEF ambassador, and ‘the man in the white suit’ – a tireless campaigner for honesty and accountability in politics.
But as For Whom the Bell Tolls reveals, he’s also a poet of light verse, and here Bell’s poems continue his war by other means on duplicitous politicians, our all-consuming media, the venality of celebrity culture and much more.
Bell presents poems on Tony Blair and Iraq, on Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic, on his hero, Reuters reporter Kurt Schork, and colourful episodes from his work and life, from being starstruck by Angelina Jolie, to a mordant epitaph on Margaret Thatcher, to his being a guest at Idi Amin’s wedding:
‘… that by God / Was well worth doing, if distinctly odd.’
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Introducing Bertrand Russell
Introducing Bertrand Russell (Paperback)
A Graphic Guide
Dave Robinson Judy Groves
Unique graphic introductions to big ideas and thinkers, written by experts in the field.
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The Etymologicon
The Etymologicon (Hardback)
A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language
Mark Forsyth
'Witty and erudite … stuffed with the kind of arcane information that nobody strictly needs to know, but which is a pleasure to learn nonetheless.' Nick Duerden, Independent.
'Particularly good … Forsyth takes words and draws us into their, and our, murky history.' William Leith, Evening Standard.
The Etymologicon is an occasionally ribald, frequently witty and unerringly erudite guided tour of the secret labyrinth that lurks beneath the English language.
What is the actual connection between disgruntled and gruntled? What links church organs to organised crime, California to the Caliphate, or brackets to codpieces?
Mark Forsyth's riotous celebration of the idiosyncratic and sometimes absurd connections between words is a classic of its kind: a mine of fascinating information and a must-read for word-lovers everywhere.
'Highly recommended' Spectator.
Mark Forsyth is a writer, journalist and blogger. His book The Etymologicon was a Sunday Times Number One Bestseller and his TED Talk 'What's a snollygoster?' has had more than half a million views. He is also the author of The Horologicon and The Elements of Eloquence, and wrote a specially commissioned essay The Unknown Unknown for Independent Booksellers Week. He lives in London with his dictionaries, and blogs at blog.inkyfool.com.
[Forsyth] riff[s] very entertainingly on the hidden connections of words (from brackets and codpieces, to cappuccinos and monkeys).
I'm hooked on Forsyth's book – Crikey, but this is addictive.
Kudos should go to Mark Forsyth, author of The Etymologicon – Clearly a man who knows his onions, Mr Forsyth must have worked 19 to the dozen, spotting red herrings and unravelling inkhorn terms, to bestow this boon – a work of the first water, to coin a phrase.
This year's must-have stocking filler – the angel on the top of the tree, the satsuma in the sock, the threepenny bit in the plum pudding, the essential addition to the library in the smallest room is Mark Forsyth's The Etymologicon.
The stocking filler of the season.
Witty and erudite … stuffed with the kind of arcane information that nobody strictly needs to know, but which is a pleasure to learn nonetheless.
This witty book liberates etymology from the dusty pages of the dictionary and brings it alive.
'The Etymologicon' contains fascinating facts
From Nazis and film buffs to heckling and humble pie, the obscure origins of commonly-used words and phrases are explained.
A collection of verbal curiosities … fascinating.
A perfect bit of stocking filler for the bookish member of the family, or just a cracking all-year-round read. Highly recommended.
Light, entertaining and fascinating … This is really one of those books where you have to fight hard to resist telling anyone in earshot little snippets every five minutes.
An absolute gem … a pleasure to read.
I want this book to be never-ending … a real winner.
It makes for a very good read … a perfect Christmas gift for anyone who might be interested in where our words come from.
I adored this book. I read and read and then I read some more until it was all gone. It was just my cup of tea, well presented, engaging, witty, wonderful. Full of usable facts and great anecdotes, it's one of the only 'history' books I've read this year that was anything other than dull as dishwater. Full marks.
Mark Forsyth, who blogs as 'The Inky Fool,' is an extreme and hugely entertaining practitioner.
The subtitle … 'A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language' … is a misdescription. It is not a stroll; it is a plunge on a toboggan where the only way to stop is to fall off.
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The Dead Hand
The Dead Hand (Paperback)
Reagan, Gorbachev and the Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race
David E. Hoffman
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
The Dead Hand is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative history of Reagan, Gorbachev and the final decade of the Cold War. Washington Post journalist David E. Hoffman draws on exclusive interviews in both Russia and the US, as well as classified documents from deep inside the Kremlin, piecing together the first full – and intensely dramatic – account of how the US/Soviet arms race came to a close, and revealing the previously unheralded collection of scientists, soldiers, diplomats and spies that made it happen.
A stunning feat of research and narrative. Terrifying.
Authoritative and chilling … a readable, many-tentacled account of the decades-long military standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union … The Dead Hand is deadly serious, but this story can verge on pitch-black comedy – Dr. Strangelove as updated by the Coen Brothers.
'The Dead Hand' is a brilliant work of history, a richly detailed, gripping tale that takes us inside the Cold War arms race as no other book has…a story so riveting and scary that you feel like you are reading a fictional thriller.
An extraordinary achievement.
This is a tour de force of investigative history.
A thought-provoking book which reads like a thriller. A gripping chronicle of the second half of the last century and a brilliant analysis of the single strategic conflict that more than any other shaped today's world.
I found 'The Dead Hand' extremely stimulating. As a Foreign Office Minister I was involved in Gorbachev's meeting with Margaret Thatcher; and as Defence Secretary from 1992-95 I was very much associated with the safe removal of post-Soviet states' nuclear weapons. This book is an excellent history of that period.
This book, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction and is soon to be published in the UK, is in the best traditions of American long-form reportage… Key characters are evoked in enough detail to make us care and then carry the narrative through to the end. It involves simplifications and elisions: but in this case, these are less important than the horrified fascination Hoffman – a former Washington Post Moscow correspondent, later foreign editor – succeeds in rousing through a story at once journalistically detailed and morally alive.
Hoffman's magisterial, human, vividly readable account of a remarkable time doesn't stop in 1991.
[Hoffman] has compiled a fascinating narrative of the last phase of the cold war and the era of Mikhail Gorbachev, glasnost and perestroika, which ended amid the collapse of the Soviet Union.
This is an important well-written volume that makes a major contribution to our understanding of the last decade of the Cold War and its aftermath.
['The Dead Hand'] has important things to say… It is exceptionally well informed. Anyone interested in the Cold War will learn something new from this fascinating, if rather depressing, read.
If you like your history told James Bond style, you'll love this book.
David E. Hoffman bagged a Pulitzer for 'The Dead Hand: Reagan, Gorbachev and the Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race' (Icon Books, €11.99). The book reads with the pace of a political thriller and includes wonderful insight into the relationship between the Cold War's two central characters who managed to pull their empires back from the brink at a time when they shared an arms arsenal with the explosive power of 1 million Hiroshimas.
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Messi – 2013 Edition
Messi – 2013 Edition (Paperback)
The Inside Story of the Boy Who Became a Legend
Luca Caioli
El Pibe de Oro. The Golden Boy. Diego Maradona’s unwaning shadow looms large over world football. In 2007 the brilliant Argentine chose Lionel Messi as his successor to the famous No. 10 shirt. But you can never be sure that potential will be fulfilled.
Three years later, Messi – El Pulga, the Flea – is a European Champion, Olympic Gold Medallist, the most naturally gifted footballer on the planet and a hero to millions of fans across the globe. Champions, reporters and coaches blunder time and time again in their haste to find superstars. This time they got it right.
Aged only 22, he shows a degree of maturity rarely seen on the soccer pitch. Yet underneath the layers of footballing brilliance, he is still the shy boy who describes his Maradona moment with disarming simplicity: ‘I saw the gap and I went for it.’ Transcending both club and country, he is a sporting god who prefers homemade cookies to brand name perfumes.
Author Luca Caioli draws on exceptional testimonies. Messi’s parents, Celia and Jorge, his bother Rodrigo and his uncles and aunts; his coaches at Grandoli and Newell’s Old Boys; Charly Rexach, Alex García, Frank Rjikaard, Gianluca Zambrotta from Barcelona; Hugo Tocalli, Pancho Ferrero, el Coco Basile, Roberto Perfumo from Argentina. And to conclude, Leo Messi himself sizes up his life so far.
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Introducing Positive Psychology
Introducing Positive Psychology (Paperback)
A Practical Guide
Bridget Grenville-Cleave
An INTRODUCING PRACTICAL GUIDE to improving your outlook on life
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Introducing Mindfulness
Introducing Mindfulness (Paperback)
A Practical Guide
Tessa Watt
Appreciate your life- right here, right now.
Learn how to use mindfulness every day, by listening to your body, becoming more aware of the present and letting go of negative thoughts.
Mindfulness teacher and consultant Tessa Watt introduces simple techniques with lots of examples and exercises for newcomers to begin right away, as well as outlining deeper mindfulness practice for those who wish to take it further.
Reduce anxiety and handle your emotions more effectively, enjoy the moment and recover from bad moods more quickly, and slow down and find your own source of calm.
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Introducing Happiness
Introducing Happiness (Paperback)
A Practical Guide
Will Buckingham
Apply the wisdom of philosophers to become a happier person.
What is happiness? What makes you happy?Is there more to life than happiness?
Learn to cultivate your taste for pleasure, free yourself from the various disturbances of life, and overcome irrational expectations that cause distress. Go with the flow and rediscover the joy of existence.
Filled with exercises, tips and case studies, this Practical Guide will enable you to see happiness in a new light, with the help of the world’s greatest minds
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Introducing Ethics for Everyday Life
Introducing Ethics for Everyday Life (Paperback)
A Practical Guide
Dave Robinson
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Inflight Science
Inflight Science (Paperback)
A Guide to the World from Your Airplane Window
Brian Clegg
The perfect companion to any flight – a guide to the science on view from your window seat. There are few times when science is so immediate as when you're in a plane. Your life is in the hands of the scientists and engineers who enable tons of metal and plastic to hurtle through the sky at hundreds of miles an hour. Inflight Science shows how you stay alive up there – but that's only the beginning.
Brian Clegg explains the ever changing view, whether it's crop circles or clouds, mountains or river deltas, and describes simple experiments to show how a wing provides lift, or what happens if you try to open a door in midair (don't!). On a plane you'll experience the impact of relativity, the power of natural radiation and the effect of altitude on the boiling point of tea. Among the many things you'll learn is why the sky is blue, the cause of thunderstorms and the impact of volcanic ash in an enjoyable tour of mid-air science. Every moment of your journey is an opportunity to experience science in action: Inflight Science will be your guide.
What a lovely little book this is: the ultimate holiday read before the holiday's even begun…. Author Brian Clegg clearly understands that science is only as dry as the ivy-covered professors who make it so.
This is science simplified, surprising and entertaining.
Everything you were afraid (very afraid) to ask is explained in this brilliant guide to the science of getting into the air, staying there and landing.
'Inflight Science,' by Brian Clegg, is essentially an eye-spy book for adults. After passing through the traumas and trials of security (where it is unlikely, you will be pleased to learn, to get enough of an X-ray dose to damage your DNA), and settling the kids to watch movies on their seatback screen (the LCD TV, by the way, relies on the same technology as sunglasses) this book will take you through the rest of your journey. Despite the odd alarming fact it is not, however, designed to scare one off flying. Quite the reverse: its intention is to inform – fitting into that publishing niche somewhere between hard science and Schott's Miscellany that was so successfully exploited by books such as 'The CloudSpotter's Guide.' The great strength of the book is its ability to pull out from the mundane experiences of modern air travel – the contrails and cumulonimbus, the security scanners and salted snacks – to explain a wider technical point.
…we should be grateful for this book from Brian Clegg, an unabashed aircraft geek. Everything about aircraft seems to fascinate him: how much they weigh, how their lavatories work, how they affect our bodies. His curiosity extends to airports, which he turns into pleasure palaces full of little-known facts rather than the dull shopping malls we normally take them to be. His book is structured as a representative flight, from check-in to customs, in which at every turn he micro-analyses the technical and scientific aspects of the experience. I consider myself reasonably competent on matters aeronautical, but he still managed to surprise me with something new on every page. For example, he digresses on why there will never be electric aircraft. The reason is that to carry the same amount of energy as 10kg of jet fuel, you'd need one ton of batteries…. With this book in hand, we have all we need to set off on our next flight with our eyes open to the sheer wonder of what is involved.
Clegg's foray into the science of air travel should be awarded some precious space in your hand luggage … The beauty of the book … lies in the way it makes you see the world afresh, learning about the way things work.
Each paragraph makes the world of science easier.
The perfect non-fiction equivalent of an airport novel.
Light but informative … fun and accessible and the perfect book to read on your travels … it'll leave you marvelling at the science and engineering that goes into flying.
'Inflight Science' catches the current wave of Brian Cox-approved popular science … for those who are interested in the way things work, and have seen the films on offer on board, it's a pleasant way of riding out the bumps.
An engaging guide for the unscientific to every aspect of your flight.
['Inflight Science'] is a revelation … In short, a whole new world of flying opens up.
Imagine Leonardo da Vinci seated next to you on an airplane. . . . Brian Clegg attempts to restore something of the lost wonder of air travel . . . even as Leonardo, so fascinated by science, might have done . . . leav[ing] his readers improved for the journey and filled with a renewed sense of curiosity toward the wonders out their window.
If flying in an airplane has left you with questions, Clegg will have the answers you're looking for and then some.
In other discussions of everything from jet engines to jet lag, Clegg both fascinates and informs.
There's much to be learned in this book, for both young and old.
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Written in Stone
Written in Stone (Paperback)
The Hidden Secrets of Fossils and the Story of Life on Earth
Brian Switek
The first book on the hunt for evolution’s ‘missing links’ over the last three decades – and what palaeontologists’ findings mean for our place on earth.
Well researched and beautifully written
Magisterial … part historical account, part scientific detective story. Switek's elegant prose and thoughtful scholarship will change the way you see life on our planet.
A fine guide to the four-dimensional tapestry of life
Switek has produced in his first book prose and paleontological inspiration comparable to the work of the late Stephen Jay Gould … Highly recommended.
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Not Fade Away
Not Fade Away (Paperback)
The Life and Music of Buddy Holly
John Gribbin
Buddy Holly was killed at 22 when the plane he was travelling in crashed on 3 February 1959. Although this was less than two years after Holly's first hit record, Don McLean described this as 'the day the music died.' But Sonny Curtis, Holly's friend and musical colleague, told us that the music didn't die, because 'Buddy Holly lives every time you play rock'n'roll.' Fifty years after Holly's death, his lasting influence is clear; a musical based on his life seems set to run for longer than his lifetime and artists as diverse as Blink 182 and Bob Dylan call him an inspiration.The Beatles chose That'll Be the Day by Buddy's group The Crickets as their first attempt at recording, as well as taking the idea for their name. Clearly, the music didn't die!John Gribbin, an ardent fan since he was twelve, presents this labour of love written in the spirit of Sonny Curtis' lyric, as a celebration of Holly's all too brief life, and as an introduction,for all those not around in 1959, to the man and his astonishing musical legacy. "Not Fade Away" also includes – uniquely – a full and detailed account of every Holly recording session, which any Buddy fan will devour.
If you want an introduction to the man and his music, you should read this charming and enthusiastic volume by John Gribbin.
Buddy Holly and The Crickets had an electrifying effect on us as young lads in Liverpool … things would definitely not have been the same without his huge talent. Love ya' Buddy!
Buddy Holly and The Crickets had an electrifying effect on us as young lads in Liverpool. We were inspired to learn guitar by seeing him on television and listening to his records. 'That'll Be The Day' blew our minds and Lord knows how long we took trying to learn the opening riff. His guitar and vocal style was massively influential on us as writers and players and things would definitely not have been the same without his huge talent. Love ya' Buddy! P.S. The name of his band, The Crickets, also influenced our choice of band name so those boys have a lot to answer for!
This new book provides the excuse to keep Holly's music-making memory and influences alive.
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Join the Club
Join the Club (Paperback)
How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World
Tina Rosenberg
In the style of Nudge or The Spirit Level – a groundbreaking book that will change the way you look at the world. This is the story of a new kind of social revolution which has transformed the lives of millions. It has drawn oppressed Indian women out of misery and passivity, persuaded teenagers to demand safe sex and to rebel against smoking; helped cure tuberculosis; enabled soldiers to have the confidence to face enemy fire and organized the nonviolent overthrow of a brutal dictator. Radical, optimistic and cogently argued, Join the Club will make you appreciate the power of one of humanity's most abundant resources: our connections with each other.
Timely, thoughtful and important.'
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Introducing Joyce
Introducing Joyce (Paperback)
A Graphic Guide
David Norris Carl Flint
Introducing Joyce provides an introduction to the life and work of the great pioneer of modernism.
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The Dickens Dictionary
The Dickens Dictionary (Hardback)
An A-Z of England's Greatest Novelist
Jon Sutherland
For fans new and old, an enjoyable tour through the world of Dickens in the hands of a master critic. Charles Dickens, the 'Great Inimitable', created a riotous fictional world that still lives and breathes for thousands of readers today. But how much do we really know about the dazzling imagination that brought all this into being?
For the bicentenary of Dickens' birth, Victorian literature expert John Sutherland has created a gloriously wide-ranging alphabetical companion to Dickens' work, excavating the hidden links between his characters, themes, and preoccupations, and the minutiae of his endlessly inventive wordplay.
Covering America, Bastards, Childhood, Christmas, Empire, Fog, Larks, London, Madness, Murder, Orphans, Pubs, Punishment, Smells, Spontaneous Combustion and Zoo to name but a few – John Sutherland gives us a uniquely personal guide to the great man's work.
Excerpt: HANDS; Every Dickens novel has a master image. In Our Mutual Friend it is the river. In Bleak House it is the fog. In Little Dorrit, it is the prison. In Great Expectations it is the hand. We often know much more about the principals' hands in that novel than their faces. Who, when the name Magwitch is mentioned, does not think of those murderous 'large brown veinous hands'? Jaggers? One's nose twitches—scented soap (the lawyer, like Pontius Pilate, is forever washing his hands). Miss Havisham? Withered claws. So it goes on…
John Sutherland, sharpest and wittiest of literary commentators, turns his attention to the Inimitable, with lively results.
Sutherland, as always, wears his erudition lightly, and his love of the quirky and off-beat shines warmly through this enjoyable book, which often made me laugh aloud.
Step forward John Sutherland, whose crackling little book is a surprise antidote to Dickens ennui.
Sutherland is clearly a man who knows his subject so well that he's able to play games with it. The result is a joyful dance of a book that even the most jaded Dickens reader will relish.
An imaginative and witty dictionary.
[Sutherland] has written a witty and quirky Dickens Dictionary in handy bite-sized entries … A delight.
Sutherland, as always, wears his erudition lightly, and his love of the quirky and off-beat shines warmly through this enjoyable book, which often made me laugh aloud
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Ronaldo – 2013 Edition
Ronaldo – 2013 Edition (Paperback)
The Obsession for Perfection
Luca Caioli
From the author of the bestselling Torres and Messi, a revealing new biography of Real Madrid's Cristiano Ronaldo. When a young Portuguese player with sublime abilities arrived at Manchester United in 2003, Alex Ferguson put the no. 7 shirt – once worn by Best, Cantona and Beckham – on his back without hesitation. The expectation was clear, and Cristiano Ronaldo didn't disappoint. Ronaldo won the FIFA World Footballer of the Year in 2008, the first Premier League player ever to do so. Since his record-breaking GBP80m move to Real Madrid, his goal-scoring flair has continued and made his on-going rivalry with Barcelona's Lionel Messi even more intense. Luca Caioli tells the inside story of this global superstar both on and off the pitch, unveiling the life of one of modern football's great players as never before.
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Economyths
Economyths (Paperback)
How the Science of Complex Systems is Transforming Economic Thought
David Orrell
From the inability of wealth to make us happier, to our catastrophic blindness to the credit crunch, "Economyths" reveals ten ways in which economics has failed us all. Forecasters predicted a prosperous year in 2008 for financial markets – in one influential survey the average prediction was for an eleven per cent gain. But by the end of the year, the Standard and Poor's 500 index – a key economic barometer – was down 38 per cent, and major economies were plunging into recession. Even the Queen asked – Why did no one see it coming? An even bigger casualty was the credibility of economics, which for decades has claimed that the economy is a rational, stable, efficient machine, governed by well-understood laws. Mathematician David Orrell traces the history of this idea from its roots in ancient Greece to the financial centres of London and New York, shows how it is mistaken, and proposes new alternatives. "Economyths" explains how the economy is the result of complex and unpredictable processes; how risk models go astray; why the economy is not rational or fair; why no woman (until 2009) had ever won the Nobel Prize for economics; why financial crashes are less Black Swans than part of the landscape; and, finally, how new ideas in mathematics, psychology, and environmentalism are helping to reinvent economics.
A must read for understanding the roots of the financial crisis, the severe limitations of the field of economics and what needs to be done to improve our ability to avoid future crises.
This is without doubt the best book I've read this year, and probably one of the most important books I've ever read…. Orrell exposes the rotten heart of economics… There are other books talking on economics, but I've not come across another that explains it so well for the layperson, takes in the credit crunch, totally destroys the validity of economics as we know it and should be required reading for every politician and banker. No, make that every voter in the land. This ought to be a real game changer of a book. Read it.
The author dissects ten fundamental misunderstandings … Orrell manages to convincingly explain the relevance of these myths and make them understandable, even for laymen, in a wider context.
