1. Entrepreneur Journeys by Sramana Mitra.

I received this book in the mail from Maureen Kelley of BizBookPr.com, presumably because of my previous research on economic freedom and entrepreneurship. Thanks to Ms. Kelley for sending me a review copy.

Sramana Mitra is a columnist for Forbes and in this book she interviews the founders of more than a dozen high-tech start-ups. Each chapter is an interview with a different individual and the questions and answers from each interview are presented in their entirety. The interviews are organized into five sections: (1) Bootstrapping; (2) Taking on Giants; (3) Disrupting Business Models, (4) Addressing Unmet Market Needs, and (5) Tackling Planet Scale Problems.

I suspect that I'm not the target audience for this book and that those who are in the target audience (current or wannabe high-tech entrepreneurs) might get more out of it. As an institutionalist, I am interested in how economic, political, and social institutions affect entrepreneurship. There is very little discussion of that in this book. As an economist, I don't like sampling on the dependent variable. As a series of interviews between Mitra and successful high-tech entrepreneurs, that's exactly what this book is. As a social scientist, I'm afraid I learned very little from these interviews.

For high-tech entrepreneurs, however, these interviews might provide useful roadmaps and insights on "how to get things done" or insights into their competitors. At least that seems to be the points being made by other Amazon.com reviewers and the those posted on Mitra's blog. The interviews do seem very well conducted, although I would have appreciated an explanation for many of the less-commonly known (at least outside Silicon Valley) acronyms.

2. Wine & Philosophy: A Symposium on Thinking and Drinking, edited by Fritz Allhoff.

Review hopefully coming out in the next issue of the Journal of Wine Economics.

3. Prohibitions, edited by John Meadowcroft.

Review forthcoming in the The Independent Review.

4. From the Corn Laws to Free Trade: Interests, Ideas, and Institutions in Historical Perspective by Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey.

Review forthcoming in the Journal of Economics.