Category: Books

The culture that was Chicago

by  Tyler Cowen in

More than three-quarters of turn-of-the-century Chicago homicides led to no criminal punishment — not because the perpetrator could not be identified, but because no jury would convict.  One historian’s study of Chicago homicide cases in that period reads like a compendium of bar fights that got out of hand, nearly all of which took place in front of witnesses and most of which ended in defense victories.  A system in which easily identified perpetrators succeed so readily is bound to have a small prison population.

That is from the new and excellent book The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, by William J. Stuntz, recommended to me by the excellent Chug Roberts.

How many Borders are being replaced by other bookstores?

by  Tyler Cowen in

The article is interesting throughout, but here are, to me, the salient bits:

Vanderbilt University in Nashville is moving its bookstore to a 27,000 square-foot former Borders, betting that the new location on the perimeter of campus can serve students and residents in an area where several bookstores have disappeared.

… Although Books-A-Million has taken over leases for more than a dozen Borders stores, and Barnes & Noble is expected to acquire some of its intellectual property, like the Borders.com Web site, there were few takers for the Borders leases offered at auction in recent weeks under the bankruptcy process. Bidders were required to take over the lease under the existing terms…

…One niche that has proved attractive is Borders’ airport locations. The Hudson Group has taken over at least nine former Borders stores at airports in Las Vegas, Baltimore, Newark, Boston, Washington Dulles and Raleigh-Durham, in some cases, turning over the space in less than a week.

The day may yet come when one takes a flight to have a satisfactory book-browsing experience.

*When the Sleeper Wakes*

by  Tyler Cowen in

Reading this H.G. Wells novel (free on Kindle), I kept on thinking of Robin Hanson in the lead role, which I suppose means I enjoyed it.  The basic premise is that a man wakes up after a two-hundred year coma, and because of compound interest he owns half the earth.  He is also feared and worshiped, and over the previous two hundred years more than a few people have tried to speak and rule on his behalf.

The story predicts that future hypnosis techniques will allow everyone to calculate math problems and play chess like a savant, “relieved from the wanderings of imagination and emotion.”  Years of study will be replaced by a “few weeks of trances.”  Memories will be grafted, but not desires.  There will be silk-like threads running through all banknotes and they will offer the blurred image of a temple and promise miracles, sound familiar?

I consider Wells to be an underrated author, especially in some of the “minor” works.  There is all of Wells for $3.00 here.

Michael Lewis’s *Boomerang*, and the new Richard Pomfret book

by  Tyler Cowen in

The subtitle is Travels in the New Third World, and it is a convenient collection of Lewis’s recent and sometimes controversial writings on the financial crisis.  I liked the Iceland piece best, the German one least.  It is out next week, but a review copy is in my hands.

There is also in my pile Richard Pomfret’s The Age of Equality: The Twentieth Century in Economic Perspective, Belknap Press, a popular economic history of the 20th century, listed as due out October 15 but my paid-for copy just arrived.

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. David Stevenson, With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918.  Thorough, readable, never thrilling but consistently satisfying.  It is a good follow-up to Niall Ferguson’s splendid The Pity of War.

2. Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World.  No surprises, good, perhaps best on the evolution of the natural gas market.

3. Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn. Never bad, it becomes excellent by the end.

4. Roger Ebert, Life Itself: A Memoir.  One-fifth or so of this book is interesting, so some small number of you should wade through it.  I liked the discussion of black and white cinema best, but most of it is rambling and insufferable.

5. Steve Sem-Samberg, The Emperor of Lies, A Novel.  “I don’t want to read any more about the Holocaust” is not good enough reason to neglect this stunning Swedish novel.  A fictionalized account of the Lodz Ghetto, it looks at the lives of the ghetto rulers and whether they were heroes or collaborators.  I found it tough to read more than one hundred pages of this at a time; by focusing on the suicides rather than the murder victims, it is especially brutal.  Definitely recommended, I urge you to get up the gumption.

6. Jo Nesbo, Nemesis: A Novel.  Highly entertaining, indeed gripping, but by the end I was wondering whether I had wasted my time.  It turns out not to be conceptual after all.  A good plane read, which is for me what it was.

I didn’t “get” the new Stephen Greenblatt book; was Poggio so important?  I still find myself unable to enjoy Hollinghurst, though in the abstract I admire the writing.  Bellow’s The Victim is beautifully written but seemed to me dated.

The wit of the Irish?

by  Tyler Cowen in

What’s unusual about the Irish [medieval] material is that it’s all spelled out so clearly.  This is partly because Irish law codes were the work of a class of legal specialists who seem to have turned the whole thing almost into a form of entertainment, devoting endless hours to coming up with every possible abstract possibility.  Some of the provisos are so whimsical (“if stung by another man’s bee, one must calculate the extent of the injury, but also, if one swatted it in the process, subtract the replacement value of the bee”) that one has to assume they were simply jokes.

That is from David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

Pen and pencil myths

by  Tyler Cowen in

There’s a popular myth that NASA spent “millions” of dollars developing a pen for astronauts to use in the weightless environment of a space ship — while their sensible Russian counterparts were happy to use the low-tech pencil.  Alas, for all its appeal and plausibility, this is not true.  Initially, astronauts and cosmonauts were both equipped with pencils, but there were problems: if a piece of lead broke off, for example, it could float into someone’s eye or nose.  A pen was needed, one that would defy gravity, write in extreme heat or cold, and be leak proof: blobs of ink floating around the cabin would be more perilous than a stray pencil lead.  A long-time pen maker named Paul C. Fisher patented the “space pen” in 1965 (which he had developed at the cost of a million dollars, at the request of but not under the auspices of NASA.)  NASA bought four hundred of them at $6 each, and, after a couple of years of testing, the pens were put into space.

That is from Kitty Burns Florey, Script & Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting.

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Andes, by Michael Jacobs.  Most travel books disappoint me, but I found this one interesting throughout, most of all the section on Venezuela.  It is conceptually strong and overall enthralling.

2. Sergio Chejfec, My Two Worlds. Are you deeply interested in how an Argentinean observer might phenomenologically regard a southern Brazilian city, combined with his philosophy of walking, in fictional form?  I am.  This may or may not be of general interest.

3. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years.  Do you seek an overly verbose, sometimes fascinating synthesis of economic anthropology, early 20th century credit theories of money, and the history of debt?  The book overinterprets early historical evidence and falls apart as it approaches contemporary times, still it has a vitality which many other tracts lack.  Here is a chat with the author.

4. Wells Tower, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.  This Jonathan Miles quotation is better than anything I will come up with: “Tower’s stories [have] the kind of torque that’s so damnably rare these days in American short fiction, where the payoff tends to be the faint, jewel-box click of epiphany, the small tilting of a life.  Tower’s ambition is greater and brawnier than that.”

5. Charles Seife, Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking.  An excellent and compulsively readable history of the attempts to make fusion power work; I thank Gordon for the original pointer.

6. Aurel Schubert, The Credit-Anstalt Crisis of 1931, no further comment required.

Who invented interchangeable parts?

by  Tyler Cowen in

This I had not known, but apparently it is old news:

The symbolic kingpin of interchangeable parts production fell in 1960 when Robert S. Woodbury published his essay “The Legend of Eli Whitney and Interchangeable Parts”…Woodbury convincingly argued that the parts of Whitney’s guns were not in fact constructed with interchangeable parts…

With Eli Whitney reinterpreted as a promoter rather than as a pioneer of machine-made interchangeable parts manufacture, it remained for Merritt Roe Smith to identify conclusively the personnel and the circumstances of this fundamental step in the development of mass production.  Smith demonstrated that the United States Ordnance Department was the prime mover in bringing about machine-made interchangeable parts production of small arms.  The national armory at Springfield, Massachusetts, played a major role in this process, especially in its efforts to coordinate its operations with those of the Harpers Ferry Armory and John Hall’s experimental rifle factory, also at Harpers Ferry.

That is from David A. Hounshell’s excellent From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932.  Here is a related article, possibly gated, here is another.

*Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the new book by Ezra F. Vogel, excerpt:

Deng in 1978 had an equally dramatic effect on the Japanese people.  In the 2,200 years of contact between China and its island neighbor, Deng was the first Chinese leader to set foot in Japan.  He was also the first to meet the Emperor of Japan.

So far the main lesson I am drawing from this book is how provincial the Chinese leaders were circa 1978, but also how willing they were to absorb evidence and change their minds, especially following visits to Western Europe and Singapore, both of which had significant impacts on them.  I am also learning that the 1979 war with Vietnam was a more significant event than I had thought.

The publication date of the book is listed as 26 September, but Amazon shipped my copy earlier this week.

Eating in besieged wartime Leningrad

by  Tyler Cowen in

One of the surest survival techniques was to get employment in food processing or distribution.  Leningraders with these sorts of jobs, unsurprisingly, seldom died of starvation.  All 713 employees of the Krupskaya sweet factory survived; so did all those at the no.4 bakery and at a margarine manufacturer.  At the Baltika bakery, only twenty-seven out of what grew from 276 to 334 workers died, all of the victims being men.  Canteen waitresses and bread-shop sales girls were notoriously “fat,” as were orphanage staff — a friend of Ostroumova-Lebedeva’s, spotting “Rubenesque” young women in a newly reopened public bathhouse in the spring, automatically assumed that they worked in bakeries, soup kitchens or children’s homes.  Menstruation having ceased for most during the winter, women who gave birth in 1942 were also assumed to have worked in a food plant or dining hall.  (The only two pregnant women Chekrizov saw during the whole of the siege were both waitresses in his shipyard’s cafeteria.)

That is from Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, by Anna Reid.  Here is my previous post on the book.