The Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance
From Publishers Weekly
Hailed as an "economic romance" by the publisher, yet reading more like a dissertation on big business versus the consumer, this snappy, well-written novel casts economic polemic in fictional form. Laura Silver is a newly hired English teacher at the prestigious Edwards High School in Washington, D.C. On the street one day, she strikes up a conversation with Sam Gordon, fellow instructor of economics at Edwards. Despite Sam's fanatical devotion to free-market capitalism, bleeding-heart liberal Laura finds she enjoys their verbal sparring. Over the course of the school year, Laura and Sam run into one another on campus and around town, each time learning more about the other and delving further into political and economic topics. Meanwhile, an out-of-the-ordinary subplot pits ruthless Charles Krauss, CEO of mega-corporation HeathNet, against smart and savvy Erica Baldwin, director of the consumer watchdog agency, the Office of Corporate Responsibility, with their vicious sparring illustrating Sam and Laura's abstract arguments. It's an understatement to say that this is a novel with an agenda the agenda is the story here. Readers with a basic sympathy for deregulation and capitalist hegemony will enjoy Sam and Laura's intellectual adventures best, but students of economics across the board may find this fictionalized debate engaging and informative.
RAHS Library Call Number FIC ROB
Saving Adam Smith: A Tale of Wealth, Transformation, and Virtue
From the Back Cover
A novel of markets and morals.
Adam Smith is back to set the record straight....
If Adam Smith returned to life, would he admire the global capitalist system that honors him or would he be horrified?
The Wealth of Nations is Smith's most popular work, but Smith himself revered his Theory of Moral Sentiments, an unread classic that searches for the wellsprings of human happiness and virtue. There is virtue in markets, yet Adam Smith would have been appalled by a world that holds wealth above human connections, a world of markets unsupported by an underlying moral fabric ... a world like ours.
And so it is in Jonathan Wight's Saving Adam Smith, a wondrous imagining in which Adam Smith stands before us today—generous, incisive, committed, and unflinchingly honest. As Smith was a revelation to his contemporaries, so he is to us: a man whose true message—obscured by centuries of misinformation and caricature—has never been more vital for sustaining business and society.
Adam Smith has come back to life ... and is he upset....
Adam Smith ... You've heard of him. The Father of Modern Economics. Died in 1790 ... but two centuries later, Adam Smith's spirit is tortured by what it sees on Earth. Tortured by the caricatures promoted in his name. Tortured that we've forgotten the morality at the heart of his message on wealth. Tortured enough to return to Earth ... in the body of an immigrant mechanic in Virginia.
Is this madness? At first, doctoral student Richard Burns thinks so. But not for long ....
In Saving Adam Smith, Jonathan Wight summons Adam Smith back to life, in a heart-pounding adventure ripped straight out of today's headlines. As the suspense builds, Burns rediscovers Adam Smith's most profound insight about markets: Selfishness is simply not enough. But will he—and Adam Smith—survive long enough to share it?
"Wight's book is astonishingly good. The storytelling is as good as the business best seller, The Goal, and the economics is better. A few more books like this and economics will no longer be the obscure and dismal science it now seems to the public."—Deirdre McCloskey, Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, and English, University of Illinois at Chicago
RAHS Library Call Number FIC WIG
