Take a look at some of our summer reading recommendations with this issue of @TFAS.
Roger Ream’s Book Suggestions:
The Halo Effect… and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers
By Phil Rosenzweig
There have been many best-selling business books that claim to contain all the secrets for organization success, some so bold as to promise greatness. This book deconstructs many of the myths about what leads to superior performance and boils it down to sound strategic planning, successful execution, and a significant degree of luck. Forget the hedgehogs, foxes and whatever the other latest trends may be. Schumpater had it right long ago: capitalism is marked by “the gale of creative destruction” that even the best strategic thinking and flawless execution is unlikely to overcome. But those concepts offer the best hope for success.
The Struggle to Limit Government
By John Samples
Samples, director of the Center for Representative Government at the Cato Institute, serves on the faculty of The Fund’s Capital Semester program, teaching Theories of Constitutional Interpretation. This book looks at the continued transformation of the American system from a regime that protected economic liberty to one based on the Progressive notions of entitlement and the regulatory state. Samples goes behind the policies to examine the ideas from which they emanate, with a particular focus on the past three decades of sausage-making in our nation’s capital.
Steve Slattery’s recommendations:
War
By Sebastian Junger
A riveting account of warfare told from the perspective of the author who spent months with a platoon in Afghanistan. Junger brings the reader inside the minds of the soldiers, who experience breathtaking excitement of firefights amid periods of deadly boredom, emotional highs and devastating lows.
Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay
By William W. Warner
William Warner’s classic about the Maryland blue crab and the intriguing lives of the Chesapeake Bay watermen.
Ed Turner’s Suggestions:
William F. Buckley Jr.: The Maker of a Movement
By Lee Edwards
No one knew Conservatism like Buckley, and no one knows Buckley like TFAS Regent Lee Edwards.
Learn about the writers who influenced Buckley’s life as a defender of free enterprise and fierce opponent of Communism.
Edwards’ concise and insightful biography of a man whose life and legacy tower over other mere mortals of the 20th century, renders an intimate view of American political history as only an insider can tell it. Read it, enjoy it, then pass it on.