Andrew Carnegie

Reviews / Votes

"Bostaph succinctly and effectively distills the career and economic context of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, packing the punch of a book twice its length." * Choice Reviews * "A short economic biography that captures the high points in Carnegie's life and career. Bostaph's book is well written and balanced in its evaluation of the wily Scot.... [A]s Samuel Bostaph shows in his excellent biography, a great entrepreneur does more than any politician to improve the quality of life for ordinary people." * Future of Freedom * "Bostaph's insights about economic theory and history and his penetrating depiction of Carnegie's personality will establish this book as a definitive work on this key figure in American economic history." -- David Gordon "Dr. Bostaph's economic biography of Andrew Carnegie is the one to read for students of one of America's most famous (and notorious) entrepreneurs." -- Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Loyola College of Maryland "A perceptive biography of Andrew Carnegie, the great American industrialist and philanthropist, and it delightfully does not shrink from analyzing Carnegie's minuses either." -- Morgan Reynolds, Texas A&M University "Lucidly written and consistently interesting, Samuel Bostaph's economic biography exhibits the very type of entrepreneur in business and philanthropy. The context for Carnegie's enterprise, especially the social approval for what he did, receives full weight, as it should. America was a business-respecting civilization, and Carnegie flourished in it." -- Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, University of Illinois at Chicago, author of Bourgeois Equality (2016) "A nice and readable economic history of the life of the steel pioneer whose net worth would have exceeded $300 billion in today's dollars." -- Edward Stringham, Professor at Trinity College and President of the American Institute for Economic Research Andrew Carnegie is a hero to some, a "robber baron" to others. Either way, he led a fascinating life, and his influence on the United States throughout the second half of the nineteenth century was profound indeed. Yet the details of his life and influence remain largely unknown to most Americans today. Samuel Bostaph's new intellectual biography of Carnegie remedies this, giving us a rich yet fair portrait of this surprisingly complex yet towering figure. Bostaph tells Carnegie's story with both historical accuracy and sound economic judgment, shying away neither from his accomplishments nor his controversies. Bostaph's Andrew Carnegie is part inspirational and part cautionary, with just enough historical detail to give the necessary context but without overwhelming the reader in minutia. And Bostaph's analysis of Carnegie's economic philosophy, which Bostaph situates within both nineteenth-century and contemporary economic theory, provides the deepest account yet of Carnegie's complicated and influential life. For those interested to understand Carnegie's life, economic philosophy, and influence, there is no better place to start than Samuel Bostaph's Andrew Carnegie. -- James R. Otteson, Wake Forest University