Mention of the war on terror usually calls up images of the U.S. soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Homeland Security apparatus and armed National Guardsmen stationed at airports and border crossings. But there’s another major front in the war on terror, and its battles are carried out in the largely invisible, high-tech, and interconnected world of global finance.

In Ever Wonder Why? and Other Controversial Essays (Hoover Institution Press, 2006), Thomas Sowell takes on a range of legal, social, racial, educational, and economic issues—along with “the culture wars”—in this latest collection of his controversial, always thought-provoking essays.