Entries Tagged 'Reviews' ↓

Murder at the Margin by Marshall Jevons (Princeton University Press, 1978)

Can economics and English ever mix? I switched from English to Economics in graduate school for a purely economic reason. The tenured professors in the English Department were so incensed with their graduate students going on strike for higher wages that the profs abolished the only source of financial aid in the department…awards for teaching freshmen English.

At a mixer for new grad students in Economics at UW, I was teased by an upperclassman, “Oh, you mean English majors can add?” In one of my many classes where I was the only woman, my professor whipped out a poem by an author I’d never even heard of, and looking straight at me, read it aloud. He concluded with a smile and the statement, “Even we economists can appreciate great literature.”

So it was with some delight and skepticism I picked up a copy of Marshall Jevons’ book, “Murder at the Margin,” the first known mystery by an economist. Both feelings were richly rewarded.
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Last night I caught an early show of a new documentary film with the Yes Men.

Who are the Yes Men? Well, they are kind of like the Blue Men, only they don’t work for a corporation; they pretend to represent corporations, government agencies, and other powerful institutions that the Yes Men don’t like.

Unlike Michael Moore who plays a buffoonish bad boy giving the bigwigs a hard time, the Yes Men become the bigwigs. The two of them in this film give everyone they come in contact with an Alice in Wonderland tour of what the world could be if it weren’t so out of whack. They take dry financial concepts such as “hazard” (a bad thing that could happen) and “risk” (the likelihood that the bad thing could happen) and show us through their own experiences what these concepts really mean to us as human beings.
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As a self-employed cookbook indexer I felt obligated to see the movie, Julie & Julia, even though I never cared for Julia Child or French cooking. I mean, Meryl Streep is wonderful, isn’t she?

When the movie suddenly introduced Irma S. Rombauer, author of The Joy of Cooking, I was as stunned and in awe as Julia was. Irma has long been my heroine for producing the culmination of, and antidote to, all those syrupy Betty Crocker-type cookbooks I grew up with. Like Julia in the movie, I listened to Irma’s litany of  big-publisher perfidy with an equal amount of growing horror.

When Irma concluded her ‘plaint by wailing about the ineptness of her publisher’s indexer in putting “Crispy Chicken” under “D” for “Drumstick” rather than “C,” I probably had the biggest smile in the audience.
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