Business Week asked B-schoolers for summer reading recommendations. Here’s how they responded: “MBA professors and students have loads of suggestions, from Daniel H. Pink’s A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age (Riverhead, 2005) to the upcoming release of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Scholastic, 2005), the sixth in the series of children’s fiction that has also captivated adults.” (Note to self: Add a chapter on quidditch to the paperback edition of AWNM.)
One book mentioned in the roundup is Pietra Rivoli’s The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy, which I read last month and which I highly recommend. Rivoli, a Georgetown University professor, shows how global trade actually works by tracing the tortuous history of a T-shirt she buys in Florida. She visits the Texas farm that grew the cotton, the Chinese factories that spun the yarn and sewed the plain shirt, the American family business that screen-printed the shirt with a kitschy design, and the bustling west African markets that sell used American T-shirts. The key takeaway: Hers is a story less of free markets than of the great lengths to which people in all countries go to avoid free markets.