What I’ve been reading

1. Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count, by Richard E. Nisbett.  A good compendium of the arguments for environmentalism in the IQ debates.  But this book has all the same flaws as The 10,000 Year Explosion — albeit from the other side of the issue — and egads are those people in the comments section touchy.  This book, by the way, offers the state of the art rebuttals to genetic explanations of Ashkenazi achievement, if you are looking to advance your understanding of those debates.

2. Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating, by Mark Bittman.  The best book on "food sanity" to date.

3. Yesterday's Weather, by Anne Enright.  I'm not usually a consumer of short stories (Alice Munro is one exception) but the best ones in this (high variance) volume are very very good.

4. Bioethics and the Brain, by Walter Glannon.  I wished for more of the author in this book but still I found it a useful compendium on what people are arguing about in the field these days.

5. Ted Gioia, Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music.  So far this is the book of the year for me.  There are many fine books in this area but this one rises to the top of the heap.  It's both the best introduction to its topic and the best book if you've read all the others and feel that nothing more can be said; a major achievement.