What I’ve been reading

Vaclav Smil, Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities.  This book was too much a pile of facts for my taste — and facts I already know — but it is about the most important topic, namely growth and economic growth, so some of you should read it.  When you get right down to it, there are worse things than a pile of facts!

Swapan Dasgupta, Awakening Bharat Mata: The Political Beliefs of the Indian Right.  What do those people actually believe and why?  A summary and also a collection of original texts, strongly recommended for insight into one of the world’s most important nations and thus one of the world’s most important intellectual movements.

Gabriel García Marquez, The Scandal of the Century, and Other Writings.  His early journalistic pieces are a revelation, both for their connections to a Borges-Cortázar style, and for how they show the roots of his later more literary productions.  His best-known work is perhaps overrated, but his body of work as a whole is still considerably underrated, and this volume will add to your appreciation of him.

I’ve only browsed Owen Matthews, An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent, but it seems to be based on a remarkable amount of original research.  I do not care so much about the history of spying, but for some of you this should be a very good book.

Sarah L. Quinn, American Bonds: How Credit Markets Shaped a Nation.  Less broad than the title suggests, this is still a clear and useful history of some parts of American securitization, starting with such (important) oddities as the Federal Farm Loan Act of 1916.

Adam Minter, Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale delivers exactly what readers of Adam’s previous work would and should expect.  I am a big Adam Minter fan.

Here is what Ben Casnocha has been reading.

Eric Nelson, The Theology of Liberalism: Political Philosophy and the Justice of God is an interesting look at Pelagianism and related free will ideas as the possible origin for classical liberal ideas.  But is free will so important?  Isn’t there a Hayekian/Calvinist/Straussian case for the limits of political power?  Do the Pelagian roots of liberalism collapse more into current progressivism?  In any case I found this book both readable and stimulating, the discussion of the early theology of Rawls was interesting too.