CNN anchor reads academic book

Jamie FlorCruz is CNN’s leading man in China, and in his “Jamie’s China” column he is quoting my Mechanics of Modernity:

Within its Great Wall, China has exerted strong control over its people. From the era of feudal warlords to modern China, rulers have been obsessed with avoiding bottom-up peasant revolts. The perpetual question in the minds of all Chinese was how chaos could best be avoided,” writes Erik Ringmar in “The Mechanics of Modernity in Europe and East Asia. “Political thought as it developed from the earliest times onward, including Daoism, Legalism and Confucianism, was more than anything attempts to answer this question.”

My appreciation for CNN achor persons just went up by 500%. It turns out they are even reading fat and, lets face it, not very appealing-looking academic books. If you don’t mind a pdf of my original manuscript, you can download it here.

Rather inexplicably, The Mechanics of Modernity is doing really well on the Amazon sales charts. The rankings vary a bit since they are updated hourly, but right now it’s at #18 in “international economics,” at #16 in “development and growth economics,” and at #26 in “economic history.”

But, I should add, this is also only in the Kindle store, and it’s only for books that are free downloads. That’s right. My book is topping the sales charts but I’m actually not selling any copies. It’s OK, all I want is readers. My guess is that some class somewhere is using it as a textbook, and that this generates a (comparatively) large amount of downloads. Great.

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