Edward Glaeser's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Edward Glaeser recommends? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Edward Glaeser's favorite book recommendations of all time. At Shortform, we know books. Our book guides are the best in the world. Learn why.

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

William Cronon

4.4

In this groundbreaking work, William Cronon gives us an environmental perspective on the history of nineteenth-century America. By exploring the ecological and economic changes that made Chicago America's most dynamic city and the Great West its hinterland, Mr. Cronon opens a new window onto our national past. This is the story of city and country becoming ever more tightly bound in a system so po

Recommended by Edward Glaeser.

Edward Glaeser

Nature’s Metropolis tells the story of Chicago’s relationship with the great American hinterland. It certainly shaped my understanding of the role that cities played in the 19th century. William Cronon tells this story through a series of commodities, from the timber of the early forest that came down through Lake Michigan, to the corn of Iowa that produced the pigs that were slaughtered in Chicago and then shipped back east. He tells the story of the triumph of Chicago over the earlier porkopolis Cincinnati, which was due to the fact that Chicago enabled America to access the wealth of the Iowa farmland, which was significantly more productive than the old hinterland of the Ohio River Valley. [source]

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Plunkitt of Tammany Hall

William L. Riordon

3.8

This collection chronicles the fiction and non fiction classics by the greatest writers the world has ever known. The inclusion of both popular as well as overlooked pieces is pivotal to providing a broad and representative collection of classic works.

Recommended by Edward Glaeser.

Edward Glaeser

This is sort of a primary source. Plunkitt, a somewhat corrupt politician, unabashedly defends the system he was part of in his own words. It’s a wonderful picture of how the New York Democratic party organisation Tammany Hall worked and how New York worked. It’s not filtered through the lens of either later historians or through the lens of progressive muckrakers. His humanity, his life, comes out in the book. [source]

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The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study

W. E. B. Du Bois, Elijah Anderson

4.6

In 1897 the promising young sociologist William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) was given a temporary post as Assistant in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in order to conduct a systematic investigation of social conditions in the seventh ward of Philadelphia. The product of those studies was the first great empirical book on the Negro in American society.

More than one hundred year

Recommended by Edward Glaeser.

Edward Glaeser

It’s a landmark book in the history of social science and the history of cities. It’s a look at the African-American community in Philadelphia 110 years ago. DuBois spent 15 months personally canvassing Philadelphia and analysing census data. It’s an amazingly good piece of quantitative social science research. It set an example that was much followed by people doing research on cities. That’s one reason to admire it: its place in intellectual history. Because DuBois’s later work The Souls of Black Folks is such a transformative and transcendent piece of literature, that is seen as being his legacy. But for those of us who crunch numbers on a daily basis, as social scientists, The Philadelphia Negro is as great a legacy. [source]

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The Urban Transportation Problem

John Robert Meyer

4.5

Recommended by Edward Glaeser.

Edward Glaeser

Today we think about the extension of economics into other fields in the context of psychology and economics, or law and economics. Transportation economics was an early attempt to merge wisdom from multiple fields. This book marries economics with engineering. It’s a great example of how two fields can be brought together to add tremendous insight to an enormously important issue, which is how to provide transportation in a dense urban core. [source]

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Jane Jacobs

4.5

A direct and fundamentally optimistic indictment of the short-sightedness and intellectual arrogance that has characterized much of urban planning in this century, The Death and Life of Great American Cities has, since its first publication in 1961, become the standard against which all endeavors in that field are measured. In prose of outstanding immediacy, Jane Jacobs writes about what makes str

Recommended by Edward Glaeser and Leo Hollis.

Edward Glaeser

Jacobs pointed out innumerable ways in which people are connected by proximity and the virtues of dense living. [source]

Leo Hollis

This book sums up these new ideas of putting people first – that the city is complex but not a place that needs to be rationalised. [source]