Michael Shermer's "The Mind of the Market"

Shermer writes an interesting tale, but there is something that just doesn't "feel right" when I'm reading the book. I buy most of the analysis, but he shades things toward a liberatarian bias that I'm not happy with. I know that I'm arguing ad hominem, but his background of being cocksure in his evangelical phase, then cocksure in his Ayn Randian/libertarian phase, and now cocksure in his free market/evolutionary psychology/neuroeconomics phase. He's a serial prosyletizer. He's very effective in packaging and marketing. He isn't an original thinker, but he is entertaining and informative.

He's the kind of guy that I don't mind edging up to in order to listen to, but he is not a guy I want to spend time with. He has too much of the air of snake oil salesman. He's probably a wonderful human being (e.g. he claims that people with his ideological makeup are far more charitable than people like myself), but I would rather spend my time with people who come across as more empathic and warm and caring and certainly more forgiving of the confusion that is the human condition.
I intend to read the book again. It is worth it. Not because it is original, but because it summarizes a lot of current trends in thinking. It is a nice panoramic survey. But it is too tidy to encourage debate. I guess what I'm saying is that this reads more like a Cole's Notes than a literary original. Certainly Cole's Notes has a role to play in helping you to understand the "lay of the land" but it doesn't provide the essential experience of plunging into the artistic original.