Book medley
Burton Folsom, New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR’s Legacy has Damaged America; this book has a good compendium of free market critiques of Roosevelt, although I would not look here for a balanced review of the evidence. Senselessness, by Horacio Castellanos Moya; this is now my favorite novel from either Honduras or El Salvador, depending how you classify the nationality of the author. Alex Beam, A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books. A fun inside history of the Chicago Great Books series. Lily Tuck, Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante; I liked this book very much, without even being a previous devotee of Morante. Gilles Kepel, Beyond Terror and Martyrdom: The Future of the Middle East. Both Kepel and Belknap Press are wonderful, but there’s not much here. Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics, with a new section on the 2008 crisis. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, a new edition. I wanted to read this again but in fact it is unreadable, I am sorry to report. After about forty pages I believe that 2666 is as good as the reviews, here is the latest survey of them.