Christmas Reading List

The National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship offers its annual Holiday Book List for those whose passion is entrepreneurship and free enterprise.
Here are three from their list that I’ve added to my list to Santa:
Harold Evans, They Made America: Two Centuries of Innovators from the Steam Engine to the Search Engine (Little Brown, 2004).
“Historians are beginning to understand the central role that entrepreneurs have played in building the US and affecting its economic, political, and cultural outlook. Two new histories will help bring this message to a popular audience. Harold Evans’ They Made America has received a great deal of publicity, and has even spawned an accompanying television series on PBS. This work is something of a coffee table book about entrepreneurship, chock full of interesting illustrated portraits of fascinating entrepreneurs and innovators like Thomas Edison, George Doriot (a venture capital pioneer), and Ida Rosenthal (inventor of the Maidenform bra).”
John Steele Gordon, Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (HarperCollins, 2004).
“John Steele Gordon is well known for his regular columns in American Heritage and other journals. An Empire of Wealth offers a popular and easy-to-read history of America’s economic growth. Like Evans, Gordon opts to tell this history via interesting biographies and stories. You’ll get the expected portraits of Gates, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and other entrepreneurs, but you’ll also learn about the origins of the Great Depression, the early 19th century debates over a national banking system, and the development of innovative technologies like the computer and electricity.”
Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Harvey Rosen (eds.), Public Policy and Economics of Entrepreneurship (MIT Press, 2004).
“This edited volume collects papers from a distinguished group of economists who participated in a 2001 conference sponsored by Syracuse University. Contributors tackle a host of issues, including how public policy can stimulate entrepreneurship, the role of entrepreneurship in promoting upward mobility, and what Holtz-Eakin calls ‘entrepreneurship in unexpected places’ (i.e. large corporations and non-profit organizations). The wide range of contributions means that the volume has no one single theme, but it does offer some of the latest academic thinking on the links between public policy and entrepreneurship.”