Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin As a psychologist who also works in education policy and reads a lot, I’ve become conversant in jargon and tool languages of a variety of social science, science, humanities, and other disciplines. Economists and political scientists commonly have their big equations, sociologists tend to use words that extend off the page, and engineers sometimes try not to use words. But if I’m about to face off with a long read, and it’s a historian, I commonly will look forward to learning something new about how the story is told and through the writing.
The Stanford University historian Jennifer Burns is one of those writers who could probably make a lot of things interesting. I was delighted to read her books Goddess of the market : Ayn Rand and the American right and Milton Friedman : The last conservative . They are worth reading not only to understand these influential figures and their impact on political and other perspectives (especially the American right), but to read a compelling research-based story in plain, clear, descriptive language.
Here, she kindly responds to some questions about the research and writing behind her books. Why did you choose to write about Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman? Jennifer Burns Stanford University Jennifer Burns : It was a combination of personal interest and gaps in the scholarly literature. I was always curious about Rand, both as a novelist of ideas and one of the few women intellectual.
