Adding to the growing list of retrospective studies of shopping and consumption is this engaged survey of the impact of American retail trade on community culture and social interaction. Although the author (a city planner in Washington, DC) is broadly within the tradition of Jane Jacobs and other critics of the commercialization of urban space, hers is a contemporary, well-informed, and nuanced judgment of the impact of malls, remote retail, big box stores, and other expressions of contemporary shopping. Even though this book may not meet the expectations of the professional historian, it does attempts to put very present-minded concerns about the social impact of contemporary retailing trends into a historical context.

The author, a retired UCLA economist, has written a number of highly specialized transportation studies. In his Lake Michigan Passenger Steamers much as in his Great Lakes Car Ferries and American Narrow Gauge Railroads, George W. Hinton acknowledges that “the principle purpose is to provide antiquarian scholarship” (p. xi). Here we learn about the wooden and steel, sailing and steam ships that operated on Lake Michigan from the early nineteenth century until well into the twentieth century. Although some attention is devoted to the interlake trade, the passenger lines that draw most of the author's attention are those that served Lake Michigan points exclusively.

Alex Field is an eminent economic historian who has made important contributions to the field. In this book he shows the ambition and the erudition to venture into a wider area, and criticize the entire practice of economics and the social sciences in our time. The paradox he raises in this book has been widely discussed in recent years. It is that the standard model of economics starts off with the assumption that the individual is rational and utility maximizing, and thus will behave in certain predictable ways, among them that they will play “defect” in strategic games that have the nature of one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma. Yet in the real world people are nicer and less selfish than the grim neoclassical model predicts. Altruism—acting against one's direct interest—is an important part of economic behavior. The interesting phenomenon, says Field, is not only that we drop anonymously gold coins in a Salvation Army box or serve without pay on boring university committees. The important things are acts of omission: members of human society do not normally commit acts of aggression and treason even when we have a chance to do so and they are demonstrably to our advantage.

The title of this book attests to the fact that the author “communed” with Max Weber's famous thesis whilst doing her own research. She is absolutely at one with Weber—and Keynes!—in insisting that there is a spirit of capitalism, an irrationality underlying rational calculation whereby one continues to work even when one's needs have been met. Spirit of this sort is held to be a cultural idiosyncracy rather than an a universal norm. However, this spirit has nothing to do with religion, not least for the central reason given by Tawney—namely that Protestant reformers sought to control the economy quite as much as did their predecessors. The author offers us a bold and sustained alternative view: economic growth resulted from one thing and one thing only—the presence of nationalism.

In this imaginative and readable book, Andrew Godley argues that culture matters in economics, and that some cultural traits encourage entrepreneurship, and therefore material prosperity, more than others. More specifically, he joins debates among British historians over the causes for Britain's relative economic decline around the turn of the twentieth century. He argues that British culture was in fact anti-entrepreneurial and concludes that this was likely to have had a negative impact on the country's economic fortunes. This is, therefore, really a book about Britain and its economic culture. Though it certainly has interesting insights into Jewish history as well; the author uses the Jews primarily as a “control group” in his historical “experiment.”

This conference volume brings together a collection of papers dealing with the monetary arrangements of "peripheral" countries in the later part of the nineteenth century, with occasional excursions in the interwar years. It comprises an introduction (written by the two editors plus Agustin Llona Rodriguez) and six chapters. These chapters cover respectively the experience of six Latin countries: three are European and three are Latin American. The three European experiences are dealt with by Giuseppe Tattara (Italy), Jaime Reis (Portugal), and Pablo Martin Acena (Spain). The chapters dealing with Latin American countries are written by Winston Fritsch and Gustavo H. B. Franco (Brazil), Agustin Llona Rodriguez (Chile), and Jose Antonio Ocampo (Colombia).

The author of this ambitious volume tackles the question: why is the United States rich and Brazil poor? Given the importance of the question and the promising comparative approach, readers of this JOURNAL will be tempted to look into John DeWitt's book. Unfortunately, they are likely to be disappointed. The author claims that internal and external factors combined to generate growth in the United States and to breed underdevelopment in Brazil. The external factors hinge on the purported unfairness of the international system. Brazil, according to DeWitt, was “a weak state that could be treated like a palooka and pummeled with impunity” (p. 113). The internal factors of growth or backwardness adduced in the book are based on a series of case studies of regions or industries, such as coastal towns or whaling, along with generalizations about plantation economics. Although there are many useful insights sprinkled throughout the book, the methodology and bibliography are confused and outdated: there are no time series or statistical tests employed in the text; quantitative data are few and almost entirely descriptive; and no mention is made of recent publications emphasizing institutions and factor endowments as sources of economic divergence between the United States and Latin America. In particular, it is troubling that no mention is made in the text or bibliography to Stephen Haber's edited volume, How Latin America Fell Behind (Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press, 1997). This omission prevents DeWitt from addressing the standard text in the literature and severely detracts from the volume's credibility.