This vibrant narrative history of political economics from the 1840s to today recasts the dismal science as a Grand Pursuit (Simon & Schuster, $35). Sylvia Nasar covered economics for The New York Times before turning to biography with A Beautiful Mind, and she combines these two areas of expertise to elucidate ideas and investigate the lives they grew out of. Here’s Alfred Marshall, walking Dickens’s London to get a first-hand look at labor conditions. Here’s Marx, hunkered down in libraries. Nasar covers the Great Depression and two world wars, recreating the experiences of Schumpeter, Keynes, Hayek, Fisher, and others as they faced the terrific challenges of avoiding economic ruin once the gunfire had stopped. The book closes with Amartya Sen, a high-caste Bengali, witnessing the horrors of the 1943 famine, partition, and violence, and using ethics to develop a new economics of social welfare. As much an adventure as a history of ideas, Nasar’s book shows economists in action as the “trustees…of the possibilities of civilization.”