Somewhat surprisingly, the distinguished writers convened by the New York Sun to offer their picks of the year’s best books found nothing by You. They did, however, find books by authors including Mark Steyn, Efraim Karsh and Robert Kagan. One surprise entry that caught my eye is a book that uses the Yanomamo bushmen of South America — celebrated as multicultural heroes in grades K-5 of the elite St. Paul Academy and Summit School — for comparative purposes:
In the long history of economic thought since the publication in 1776 of Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations,”a dozen or so works stand out as seminal in their exquisite blend of data and theory and epochal boldness in attempting to answer a big question. Pace Smith, the newest addition to the canon is Eric Beinhocker’s “The Origin of Wealth” (Harvard Business School Press, 527 pages, $29.95), which dares to answer how humanity made the transition from small bands of hunter-gatherers to giant nations of consumer-traders. Contrast, for example, the Yanomam
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