BOOK REVIEW Vlad Tarko, Elinor Ostrom: An intellectual biography Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd., Lanham, MD, 2017, xii + 190 Pages, USD 32.95 (paperback) Bobbi Herzberg 1 Published online: 1 February 2018 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018 Vlad Tarko does a superb job of outlining the key contributions of Elinor Ostrom’s scholarly career in this accessible volume on her intellectual journey. One of its greatest strengths is the clear and succinct presentation that allows even a novice reader to gain an appreciation for the core concepts that Ostrom (and colleagues) developed over her 50 ? year career. Tarko captures Ostrom’s optimistic spirit and perseverance in creating complex theoretical frameworks with rich empirical analyses across diverse settings of self-governance. Those who knew her and her work well will find themselves nodding along as he describes the path she followed to such success, while those unfamiliar with her accomplishments will gain a new appreciation for the scope of the work she tackled. The book divides Ostrom’s work into five chapters that mark critical phases of her scholarly pursuits. After a brief introduction of Lin’s early life that gives context to decisions she would make in her scholarship, Tarko turns to the foundation in local governance that formed the base for her early contributions. In this work on metropolitan governance, we see the origins of Ostrom’s commitment to constitutional and institutional forms that recognize the potentiality of individuals to govern themselves and solve even quite complex social and economic dilemmas. But, we also see her cognizance of the challenges individuals face and the threats that might bring their institutional efforts down. This theoretical belief in self-governance born in these early empirical settings, would influence her approach to institutional analysis across her entire career. This emphasis was reinforced by Lin’s early collaboration with Vincent Ostrom, which Tarko captures admirably. In fact, at times, these early chapters blur the line on whose intellectual biography Tarko places before the reader. Those familiar with the Ostroms, however, will not find this intersecting story strange as the Ostroms’ close life of & Bobbi Herzberg BHerzberg@mercatus.gmu.edu 1 F.A. Hayek Program for the Advanced Study of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA 123 Public Choice (2018) 174:411–414 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-018-0511-y