Reviews

The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters Diane Coyle (Princeton, $41, 306 pages) Economist Diane Coyle argues that traditional economics metrics like Gross Domestic Product and the System of National Accounts, important as they were in helping policy-makers and economists understand material well-being, are inadequate to measure complex modern economies and thus economists are unable to answer the vital question: “Are things [...]

Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $56 hc  or $38 pb in August, 531 pages) Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys have written a remarkable biography of a poet, Constantine Cavafy, who lived, in their own admission, an unremarkable life, by writing it thematically rather than linearly. Cavafy was born into a Greek family in Alexandria, [...]

I Also Had My Hour: An Alternative Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton Dale Ahquist (Ignatius, $21.95 USD, 477 pages) Chesterton scholar Dale Ahlquist has assembled a unique “autobiography” of G.K. Chesterton by taking snippets from GKC’s vast body of writing and arranging them into a collage of sorts – Ahlquist says the quotes are “cobbled” together -- in lieu of an autobiography. (Chesterton [...]

Let Colleges Fail: The Power of Creative Destruction in Higher Education Richard K. Vedder (Independent Institute, $39.95, 230 pages) It is axiomatic that you get what you paid for, except perhaps in post-secondary education where universities get bailed out by governments or donors and incentives and such that professors care more about research than teaching. Richard K. Vedder, founding director of the [...]