Alchemy Leveraged: The Federal Reserve and Modern Finance
Roger W. Garrison

Kevin Dowd and Martin Hutchinson’s Alchemists of Loss: How Modern Finance and Government Regulation Crashed the Financial System (2010) presents a superior analysis of the origins of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Although the authors cite the Federal Reserve as the main institutional cause of the crisis, they call for it to pursue Volcker-style price stability—a monetary policy that would still leave the economy vulnerable to Fed-induced booms and busts.

The Silencing of Soldiers
Laurie L. Calhoun

For more than fifty years, the U.S. Defense Department has sponsored drug studies and brain research that aim to minimize soldiers’ all-too-human reticence to kill. The preemptive prescription of drugs intended to reduce soldiers’ self-doubts and anxieties may serve a strategic military purpose, but increasingly it comes at the expense of soldiers’ long-term well-being.

Mario Vargas Llosa: An Intellectual Journey
Julio H. Cole

An admirer of the Cuban Revolution until well into his career, Nobel laureate novelist and essayist Mario Vargas Llosa has become the most prominent exponent of classical liberalism in the Spanish-speaking world. His political migration away from the left reflects his gradual disenchantment with ideology and fanaticism, themes reflected in his great novels The War at the End of the World and The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta.

Disaster Relief as Bad Public Policy
William F. Shughart

Only 25 percent of the respondents to a survey conducted in Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina identified government as their most important source of aid. Government relief to disaster victims is often less effective than aid provided by volunteers, non-profit organizations, and commercial enterprises, and it often facilitates corruption, encourages growth in disaster-prone areas, and crowds out self-help.