Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Friday 24 May
6:45 PM - 7:45 PM
Sylvia Nasar’s megabestseller A Beautiful Mind was ‘perhaps the best economics-related book of the past quarter-century’, according to the New York Times.
This master storyteller has a knack for translating economics for the general reader – and placing it in the rich context of the characters, cities and historical events that drove it forward.
Grand Pursuit traces the birth and progress of modern economics, which grew from the idea that humans are not, after all, powerless in the face of an all-determining god – that we can determine our own lives, on a society-sized scale. This idea, which we take for granted, is only 150-odd years old. Historically, it’s a newborn notion.
Nasar traces this development from the days of Dickens and Thomas Carlyle in a rapidly industralising 1840s Britain, to Marx and Engels, ‘the odd couple of the proletarian revolution’, and through to the current day.
The Washington Post has praised ‘the breadth and depth of [Nasar’s] research and the elegance of her prose’.
In this book, she brings economic history to life – and makes it matter. She’ll be joined in conversation by Christine Kenneally.
Sylvia Nasar appears as part of a double-bill with Kate Atkinson. Book your discounted tickets to both sessions here.
Featuring
Christine Kenneally
Christine Kenneally is an award-winning journalist and author who has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times, Slate, Time, New Scientist, Scientific American, the Monthly, BuzzFeed and other publications. She writes about identity, culture, and science, and her stories have covered death in 20th century orphanages, brain surgery, emergency communications, and animal thought.
She was a senior contributor at Buzzfeed News for 4 years, working on an American orphanage story. Published in August 2018, the story was viewed more than six million times in six months and was nominated for a National Magazine Award and two Deadline Awards. Her books, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures and The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language, are published by Penguin and Black Inc.
Before becoming a reporter, Kenneally received a Ph.D. in linguistics from Cambridge University and a B.A. (Hons) in English and Linguistics from Melbourne University. She was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia, and has lived in England, Iowa, and Brooklyn.
Sylvia Nasar
Sylvia Nasar is the author of A Beautiful Mind, which inspired the Academy-Award-winning movie and was translated into 30 languages.
She was an economics correspondent for The New York Times and is the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Business Journalism at Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Newsweek and other leading publications, and her new book is Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius.