Timur Kuran. The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East. (Princeton UP: 2011)
I have been excited to read this book given the press it has received and the controversy it has incited (see the Economist review, Nicholas Kristof's eyebrow-raising NYT assessment - who still cites Weber as a plausible authority on Islam? - and its followup, and the reviews in the Independent and the New Yorker, among others). Not only has this book been a conversation starter, but it addresses some of the questions that I seek to explore in my dissertation: how are economic systems culturally influenced and created?
I am also intrigued by Kuran as a person. His earlier book, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), examined something quite extraordinary: what do people lie about in the interest of social acceptability, and how do those lies shape the world? Not only is this a fascinating question in and of itself, but it is an indication that certain scholars truly are able to follow their bliss in terms of research topics. Granted, his earlier work was published nearly twenty years ago, and academia has become shockingly corporatized, structured, and limiting in the last decade. But, still, Kuran's topical breadth gives me hope.
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