In the News, May 2012
Posted 05.17.12: “A rambunctious book that is itself alive with the animal spirits of the marketplace…. This story, as Mr. Herman tells it, is worth a thousand economics textbooks…. Freedom's Forge is a story of the triumph of hard-headed American business and industry not only over the Axis powers but also over their lily-livered critics…. It is impossible to read his book and not think that, in times of economic hardship, heroic entrepreneurship, sometimes harnessed to government, will trump Washington's bloodless fiscal tinkering any day. It has been done before and can surely be done again.”—Delves Broughton, The Wall Street Journal
Posted 05.17.12: “This fantastic book does two big things. First, it tells the largely unknown story of America's extraordinary output of war materials during World War II—output that almost defies imagination. By war's end the U.S. had manufactured about 70% of all Allied war material, with U.S. factories outproducing everyone else combined…. The second thing this book does is emphasize that it was the practice of free enterprise that was behind these production miracles…. Freedom's Forge sets the record straight, comprehensively and compellingly.”—Steve Forbes, Forbes
Posted 05.01.12: Michael Dirda is the winner of a 2012 Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for his On Conan Doyle: Or, The Whole Art of Storytelling for the best biographical/critical work. As the Los Angeles Times said in its review, the book "demonstrates why for so many years Dirda has been such an insightful guide to literatures past and present."
Posted 04.27.12: “Jim Manzi has spent his career helping businesses learn from experience—first at AT&T Laboratories, then as a consultant with Strategic Planning Associates and then as founder of Applied Predictive Technologies, a successful software firm. In his new book, Uncontrolled, Manzi notes that many experts tackle policy problems by creating big pattern-finding models and then running simulations to see how proposals will work…. The problem is that no model can capture enough of the world's complexity to yield definitive conclusions or make nonobvious predictions. A lot depends on what assumptions you build into them…. What you really need to achieve sustained learning, Manzi argues, is controlled experiments. Try something out. Compare the results against a control group. Build up an information feedback loop. This is how businesses learn…. These randomized tests actually do vindicate or disprove theories…. Businesses conduct hundreds of thousands of randomized trials each year. Pharmaceutical companies conduct thousands more. But government? Hardly any…. Manzi wants to infuse government with a culture of experimentation.... His tour through the history of government learning is sobering, suggesting there may be a growing policy gap. The world is changing fast, producing enormous benefits and problems. Our ability to understand these problems is slow. Social policies designed to address them usually fail and almost always produce limited results. Most problems have too many interlocking causes to be explicable through modeling. Still, things don't have to be this bad. The first step to wisdom is admitting how little we know and constructing a trial-and-error process on the basis of our own ignorance. Inject controlled experiments throughout government. Feel your way forward. Fail less badly every day. ”—David Brooks, "Is Our Adults Learning?", The New York Times, 4.27.11
Posted 04.12.12: The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded Terry Teachout a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2012 to support the completion of his new book Mood Indigo: A Biography of Duke Ellington.
Posted 03.29.12: New Line Cinema has acquired screen rights to Andrew Ferguson's book Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid into College. The film will be developed as a potential star vehicle for Will Ferrell.
Posted 03.27.12: Hollywood Hypocrites by Jason Mattera is a New York Times and Washington Post bestseller!
Posted 03.21.12: A starred review from Kirkus for Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War Two by Arthur Herman: "It's not often that a historian comes up with a fresh approach to an absolutely critical element of the Allied victory in World War II, but Pulitzer finalist Herman has done just that. The author argues powerfully against the conventional wisdom that America's rearmament took place under the guidance of a competent federal government that brought business and labor together for the country's defense. To the dismay of New Dealers who had hoped to use the war to bring business under government control, the production of the flood of war materiel that drowned the Axis was achieved by the voluntary cooperation of businesses driven as much by the profit motive as by patriotism, solving problems through their own ingenuity rather than waiting for government directives.... A story resting on the statistics of industrial production runs a constant risk of lapsing into tedium, but Herman's account never falters. He carries it off in engaging style by centering this sweeping narrative on the efforts of two colorful business leaders, Henry Kaiser and William Knudsen, who led the struggle to produce ships, planes and arms for Britain and then for America in a war that many had persisted in believing wasn't coming. A magnificent, controversial re-examination of the role of American business in winning WWII."
Posted 03.20.12: "Ozment has produced a delightful and in-depth look into the art and legacy of an artist he describes as the 'creator of an unredeemed, seductive world of beautiful women and powerful men.' The Serpent and the Lamb is packed with stunning images and brilliant analysis, a sheer delight for serious readers of Reformation era history and art."—The Washington Independent Review of Books
Posted 03.19.12: Publishers Weekly on Arthur Herman's Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War Two: "Herman tells the epic story of the American businessmen who, in only a few years, helped America become the largest military power in history. These include William Knudsen, a Danish immigrant who turned General Motors into 'the largest industrial corporation in the world,' and industrialist Henry Kaiser, the 'master builder' responsible for infrastructure projects throughout the country…. Herman has a knack for generating both suspense and patriotic self-congratulation.… The book is a compulsively readable tribute to 'the miracle of mass production.'"