Book reviews

The Antiplanner’s Library: Coming Apart 0
- November 15, 2012
One of the subthemes of the Antiplanner’s latest book is that there is a growing divide between the middle class (meaning people with white-collar jobs and their families) and the working class (meaning people with blue-collar jobs and their families). Charles Murray‘s latest book, Coming Apart, explores this split in … Continue reading →
READ MORE
The Antiplanner’s Library: Spreading the Wealth 0
- August 17, 2012
Subtitled “How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities,” this book sounds like it is right up the Antiplanner’s street (since my home fortunately doesn’t have an alley). Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, argues that Obama intends to forcefully implement the smart-growth agenda in his […]
READ MORE
Book Review: All the Devils Are Here 0
- April 11, 2012
In the Antiplanner’s recent review of Margin Call, I wrote, “No bank secretly realized that mortgage-backed securities were worthless and unscrupulously sold them to unsuspecting buyers.” The authors of All the Devils Are Here would apparently disagree. Unlike most of the books about the financial crisis that the Antiplanner reviewed last year, which each tended […]
READ MORE

Movie Review: Margin Call 0
- January 31, 2012
Margin Call opened four months ago, so this review isn’t exactly timely, but for readers who haven’t seen it, it purports to be about the 2008 financial crisis. Since the Antiplanner has written extensively about this crisis, I found the movie intriguing enough to watch the DVD. The entire picture takes place during about 27 […]
READ MORE
Central Planning Gone Wild 0
- December 13, 2011
In 1957, Nikita Khrushchev bragged that the Soviet Union would overtake the United States in production of steel and other important products within 15 years. Not to be outdone, Mao Zedong immediately decided that China’s own steel industry would overtake Britain’s–then the world’s second-leading manufacturing country (14). Thus began the Great Leap Forward, one of […]
READ MORE
The Technology That Changed Small Business 0
- November 21, 2011
The Antiplanner hasn’t finished reading Marc Levinson’s The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America, but the story he tells is essentially the same as that told by former A&P executive William Walsh in The Rise & Decline of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, a book the Antiplanner discussed nearly […]
READ MORE

Contribute