What is Paul Rivlin reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Paul Rivlin, author of the newly released Arab Economies in the Twenty-First Century.

His entry begins:

I am reading Peter Hennessy’s Having it So Good: Britain in the Fifties. This is the second volume of his history of Britain after the Second World War and takes up the story from Never Again: Britain 1945-1951. These books are encyclopedic covering many aspects of life including sport, diet, religion, dress, politics and economics and have a long historical sweep. In the late 1940s and early 1950s some of Britain’s leaders were Edwardians, with experience in and before the First World War. Understanding them means understanding the world they were formed in and this is included. The remarkable achievement of these books is that the reader is never lost in the detail. The author steers through many subjects and then brings the reader back to the main road and the main point.

For someone born and brought up in the Britain of the 1950s, Hennessy conveys the details of a world that I was too young to see. Britain in the early 1950s was an interesting mixture. It had undergone the massive transformation that the Second World War and the post-war Labour government had generated through social policy and nationalization. It was losing...[read on]

Paul Rivlin is a Senior Research Fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Tel Aviv University. He is the author of The Dynamics of Economic Policy Making in Egypt (1985), The Israel Economy (1992), Economic Policy and Performance in the Arab World (2001), and papers on defense economics and Arab economies.

Read an excerpt from Rivlin's Arab Economies in the Twenty-First Century, and learn more about the book at the Cambridge University Press website.

Writers Read: Paul Rivlin.

--Marshal Zeringue