800CEORead (Editor's Choice)
"Marçal provides a complete history of the ideas behind, and subsequent realities of, market economics. She is a writer’s writer, using brilliant literary and historical metaphors to bring clarity and life to the story."
The Billfold
"An interesting and thoughtful read."
Margaret Atwood (on Twitter)
"A smart, funny, readable book on economics, money [and] women."
The Baffler
"Thoughtfully challenges conventional assumptions about work, productivity, and value. An enjoyable read, and dryly witty."
Prospect Magazine
"Katrine Marçal’s searing new book exposes the flaws of classical economics and its modern incarnations and in particular its missionary zeal to subordinate all other human aims at the altar of the market. With wit and a hefty dose of anger, she tells a convincing story of the history of economic man. A powerful, and entertaining, story."
Pop Matters
"Sharp writing, numerous examples and familiar pop culture references (think Pretty Woman, Robinson Crusoe, and the goose that laid the golden egg). Engaging and non-threatening (even for people who break into a sweat when trying to balance their checkbooks). An important book."
Booklist
"A no-holds-barred critique of how modern economic theory has largely excluded the contributions of women. She drives her point home with the ferocity of a hammer striking an anvil: economic man is a fiction that excludes women."
Science News
"This is not your standard economics text. Marçal, who writes in snappy (and often spirited) prose, focuses on what an alternative, and more inclusive, economics should look like. An accessible and lively primer on the topic. A well-written and thoroughly researched call to change economics into a discipline that makes “room for the entire human existence” that all economists would do well to heed."
New York Times Book Review
"A sprawling, engaging feminist polemic. Interesting."
The Boston Globe
"Marçal’s romp through the development of the field and the work of Smith, Keynes, Freud, the Chicago School, and Lawrence Summers (among others) is as diverting as it is thoughtful, especially as she points out the gaping hole at its center: the places where self-interest and the market can’t quite reach. Midway through her book, Marçal writes about Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique — in its own way, this vivid, entertaining work is equally groundbreaking."
New Statesman
"A spirited and witty manifesto. Commanding rhetoric punctuated with spiky wit."
New Republic
"An excellent argument for the value of feminism as an analytical lens. A masterpiece of rhetoric, clearheaded analysis, and critical imagination. a model of radical thought. Marçal’s critique—and the anti-capitalist feminist tradition on which it stands—is a historical insight of unimaginable potential."
Booklist
"A no-holds-barred critique of how modern economic theory has largely excluded the contributions of women. She drives her point home with the ferocity of a hammer striking an anvil: economic man is a fiction that excludes women."
