Rightshelf

By Pejman Yousefzadeh Comments (0) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

This could have been quite the excellent book. It is certainly chock full of information on the free market economics movement at the University of Chicago and the figures who made the movement possible. However, it is told in clumsy fashion. Johan van Overtveldt refuses to stray from a literary formula in which he details a particular figure's birth, education, contributions and death and the more the formula gets repeated, the more annoying it gets to the reader. The story of the evolution of the study of economics at the University of Chicago could have been told in a fashion that would have aroused admiration for van Overtveldt's literary skills as well as deep interest in his subject matter. Alas, van Overtveldt has only a gift for recitation and none for narration. And even some of the narration elicits objections; the editing process regarding the book was quite poor, as a number of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors (it appears that English is not van Overtveldt's native language) slipped by the editors and made its way onto the final edition of the book. Most disappointing.

This is not to say that reading the book wasn't valuable. Quite the contrary. I should note as well that depending on one's intellectual upbringing and outlook, certain portions of the book will be more interesting than others--I was particularly fascinated with the discussions of the law and economics program at Chicago as well as discussions concerning the number of Chicago figures who went on to prominence in the world of policy and politics. But the book's literary deficiencies cannot be ignored. One hopes that the paperback version will have at least the grammatical and spelling errors corrected and if certain passages of the book are entirely rewritten--and this will have to include a lot of passages--then, to be perfectly honest, I won't object too loudly.