You might expect a book about inventions that shaped the modern economy to begin with the invention of computers, the internet, or perhaps some important but obscure financial software you can’t begin to understand. Instead, bestselling author Tim Harford, a senior columnist at the Financial Times whose previous works include The Undercover Economist, begins with the plow.

Yes, the plow. And for good reason. According to Harford, not only did the plow create the underpinnings of civilization, different types of plows led to different types of civilizations which reshaped social structures, family life and economic and political systems.

From this beginning, Harford effortlessly leaps across time and continents to show readers various inventions in a new light, revealing unexpected insights into 21st-century society. Harford notes, “Inventions shape our lives in unpredictable ways—and while they’re solving a problem for someone, they’re often creating a problem for someone else.”

Some of the inventions Harford highlights are what you might expect to find: the bank, double-entry bookkeeping and the iPhone being among them. And then, of course, for anyone old enough to remember The Graduate, there’s plastic.

But other inventions may be less known, including the Billy Bookcase (a cheaper bookcase), M-Pesa (more than 20 million Kenyans use it to move money by mobile phones) and the Haber-Bosch process (which uses nitrogen from the air to make ammonia, which can then be used to make fertilizer).

Tim Harford ends his fantastically enlightening book by talking about an invention that has improved our lives “almost beyond our ability to measure.” I’ll give you a hint: if you’re reading this review after dark, you’re probably using one somewhere in your house.

Imagine that you’re 19 years old and you’ve been offered $100,000 to drop out of college and build the tech start-up of your dreams. For the 20 students who win a Thiel Fellowship each year, with funding and mentoring provided by PayPal founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, this is reality. In Valley of the Gods, Wall Street Journal reporter Alexandra Wolfe (daughter of writer Tom Wolfe) profiles several members of the 2011 class of Thiel fellows, among them John Burnham, who aims to mine asteroids for platinum and gold; Laura Deming, who’s focused on extending human longevity; and Paul Gu, who wants to create a new method for loaning money. 

Wolfe follows this first class of Thiel fellows from the time when they’re still finalists, waiting to learn if they’ve won an award and undecided as to whether to put off college. She highlights their living spaces (like the communal house depicted in The Social Network, where Mark Zuckerberg and friends lived and worked before Facebook was the world’s highest-valued company), their social lives and their work struggles. Launching a successful tech start-up is incredibly difficult, even with a good idea, an unusual level of intelligence and monetary support, and Wolfe conveys the young entrepreneurs’ ups and downs well.

These stories are interspersed with a more general profile of Silicon Valley, its history, its connection to Stanford University and its oddities, like Cougar Night at the Rosewood Hotel, where “older” women hit on young techies. These asides make for fascinating reading, but they take us away from the Thiel Fellows and their struggles, so we care less about them than we otherwise might have. Still, readers seeking an inside view of this high-tech mecca will certainly find it in Valley of the Gods.

This article was originally published in the January 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Tracy Kidder has guided a legion of readers along many a wondrous journey, and they’ll be eager to join his latest trip in A Truck Full of Money, a portrait of entrepreneur Paul English, who in 2012 sold Kayak—the online travel company he cofounded—to Priceline for $1.8 billion. It’s a timely, fascinating successor to Kidder’s 1982 Pulitzer Prize winner, The Soul of a New Machine, about an engineering team at Data General racing to create a 32-bit supercomputer.

The digitial world has changed dramatically in the three decades since, and Kidder has chosen a compelling, enigmatic subject to examine this new era. A Truck Full of Money is not only an intriguing account of one computer whiz’s rise (and occasional falls), but an in-depth look at the inner workings of the tech startup world.

Born in 1963, English was the sixth of seven children in a Boston-area working-class family. After becoming fascinated with computers at Boston Latin School, English successfully wrote a program to steal his teacher’s password and used it to access more programming commands. After graduating near the bottom of his class, his high SAT scores entitled him to free tuition at University of Massachusetts Boston, where he enrolled with thoughts of becoming a jazz musician. Programming provided his pathway to success, however, and along the way he discovered an innate talent for recruiting and managing the cream of the coding crop, ultimately creating a fiercely loyal inner circle that has followed him from venture to venture. 

Just like the dot-com world, English’s life has included precipitous peaks and valleys, sometimes ignited by bipolar disorder. At one point in the mid-1990s, after leaving a company, he spent months in his attic creating a website for Xiangqi (Chinese Chess), programming “his way out of depression.” Never one to sit on his laurels, English is his own constantly churning idea factory, whether he’s creating a company, seeking ways to help the homeless in Boston or to further education in Haiti. (Kidder first met English when he was writing Mountains Beyond Mountains, an account of Dr. Paul Farmer’s charitable work in Haiti and elsewhere.)

Kidder’s highly readable account is as mesmerizing as the generous genius he depicts. English is both beguiling and passionately creative—planning an office space that transforms into a cutting-edge night club or showing up in his Tesla as an Uber driver while conducting research for his new travel company, Lola. 

A Truck Full of Money is a wild, ultimately fulfilling ride from a master storyteller.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our interview with Paul English about A Truck Full of Money.

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Ever dreamed of owning your own business? Paul Downs has been living that dream for nearly three decades and has the battle scars to prove it. After sharing his experiences on the New York Times “You’re the Boss” blog, he decided to narrow his focus, documenting a year in the life of his small woodworking company in a book. Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business may inspire you, but it will also have you asking hard questions before you hang out a shingle somewhere.

When Downs started woodworking in 1986, he worked alone making furniture. Over the years, he took on employees and developed a specialty in crafting boardroom tables, but he rarely noticed how these changes affected his company. Downs extols the strong, silent temperament common to woodworkers, but it takes ages for him to realize that a shop full of rugged individualists needs cohesive leadership or the end product will suffer. A fancy table ends up being made with mismatched types of wood because every person in the chain of command assumed the previous one had signed off on what turned out to be, in essence, a typo; nobody bothered to ask. 

Downs is straightforward and brutally honest about others’ shortcomings as well as his own. His humility about the ways he failed and the nail-biting number crunching that keeps him up at night should be a caution to others. From the outside, a business making more than a million dollars a year seems like a success; in truth, that’s rarely the case. Downs often declined his own salary to ensure that his employees took home a fair wage. One year his income averaged only $3.79 per hour. 

Small business owners and those who dream of joining them need to read Boss Life. Anyone who has a boss can learn a lot here, too. It’s not always as rosy on the other side of the counter as we may suspect, and the view from this angle can help an employee become an asset with a little extra effort. There’s every reason to follow a dream you’re passionate about, but do so with your eyes open; Boss Life can help.

This article was originally published in the August 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Despite being a vast topic, economics seems at the simplest level to be about connecting buyers and sellers. But what about exchanges where money's not involved? From life-or-death matters like organ donation to finding Junior a spot in that prestigious preschool, "matching markets," where both sides must choose each other, are also an economic force.

In Who Gets What—And Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design, Stanford professor and Nobel laureate Alvin E. Roth is plainly passionate about his subject matter. Thankfully he's also adept at translating the big concepts here into lay language. Much of his work has focused on kidney transplants and expanding the available pool of donor organs. When someone offers a kidney to a patient in need, if they turn out to be incompatible, the story can end abruptly with no transplant performed. As Roth has demonstrated, kidney "exchanges," where willing donors extend the offer to anyone who's a good match, can result in kidneys being paid forward many times over, improving the outcomes for numerous patients.

This model can affect school choice, sports team playoffs, even something as mundane as the judgment calls made when choosing a parking space. Understanding how these matches work can hopefully lead us to choose well without too much equivocation, whether we're bidding in an eBay auction or applying for a job. 

Roth's goal for the book is to bring awareness of economic forces to our attention, but also to point out that they're amazing, much as the natural world becomes more seductive the closer you look. At first glance the ideas in Who Gets What—and Why can seem tangled, but tease them apart a bit and you'll find Roth has met his goal. This is heady science that will change your view of the world around you.

Global and ravenous, modern capitalism has turned American citizens into mere consumers, people who are focused principally on their own gratification and essentially indifferent to the needs of the larger society. This, in a nutshell, is Paul Roberts’ thesis in The Impulse Society.

He contends that when capitalism in the U.S. was driven by manufacturing, and most buying and selling of goods took place within national borders, economic growth benefited everyone. Not so these days, he argues, when manufacturing has fled, borders are porous to both labor and capital and the financial sector dictates the rules of the game. That game, it turns out, is finding ways to maximize profits for the few by squeezing and manipulating the many.

At first it appears that Roberts is blaming the victims for their social insularity—for turning away from community and immersing themselves in technological gadgetry, for overextending themselves financially and for shirking political engagement. But he goes on to show that these are all the inevitable consequences of a system that values profit above all else. If we act on impulse instead of reflection, it’s because there is more profit to be made from impulse. The system lures, nudges or bludgeons us into buying things we don’t need and often can’t afford. And via its extension of easy, pay-later credit, the system allows us to find immediate delight in our own economic enslavement.

A political realist, Roberts doesn’t go so far as to counsel a revolt against capitalism. He does suggest a series of palliative measures—moderation of political rhetoric, re-imposition of banking regulations, acts of individual community-building—but they sound more like wistful wishes than practical plans. Ultimately, he fails to confront the paramount question of how national actions can hope to stem—much less turn back—the rapacious global phenomenon he has so skillfully anatomized.

This article was originally published in the September 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.