It’s no Prize, to be sure. That was Daniel Yergin’s Pulitzer-winning book on the oil industry – such a page-turner that, intending to look up a statistic, I could not put it down and read it in its entirety. The Commanding Heights aims to continue this tradition – an intellectual history of economic policy that focuses on intriguing people and defining events. Yergin and coauthor Joseph Stanislaw chronicle the fall of government and rise of markets to the “commanding heights” of economies worldwide. But economists just aren’t as sexy as oilmen. The people and events approach also misses the fact that so much was structural – India went to markets not just because of some bright economists and their ideas, but because the planned economy was collapsing. That said, it’s a chronicle worth reading.