Category: Books
Best non-fiction books of 2011
I’ve already covered best economics books, best fiction, and the very best books. General non-fiction remains missing. It’s been a very good year, and these are the other non-fiction books which I really liked, a stronger list than the year before:
Anatol Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country.
Daniel Treisman, The Return: Russia’s Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev.
Frank Brady, Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall — from America’s Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness.
Javier Cercas, The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-Five Minutes in History and Imagination. In the waning of Franco’s time, how did Spain turn away from military rule and toward democracy? Can a mediocre man make a difference in history simply by retreating at the right moment? Can a political life boil down to a single response, under gunfire at that? Half of this book is brilliant writing, the other half is brilliant writing combined with obscure, hard-to-follow 1970s Spanish politics (does Adrian Bulli understand the life of John Connally? I don’t think so). Cercas is a novelist, intellect, and historian all rolled into one, and he is sadly underrated in the United States. There’s nothing quite like this book. On top of everything else, if you can wade through the thicket, it is an excellent public choice account of autocracy.
Hamid Dabashi, Shi’ism: Religion of Protest.
Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life. This vivid biography brings its subject to life through the extensive use of correspondence and quotation. The reader gets an excellent feeling of how Bismarck’s government actually worked, his intensity and also his mediocrities, and also the importance of Bismarck in building up Germany as a European power. The story is as gripping as a good novel. Sadly, almost no attention is paid to the origins of the welfare state. Still, this has received rave reviews and rightly so.
Daniel Richter, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts.
Jacques Pepin, The Origin of Aids.
Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created.
Mara Hvistendahl, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men.
David Gilmour, The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, its Peoples, and their Regions.
Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. Funny thing is, I read this on Kindle, didn’t have a physical copy to put in “my pile,” had no visual cue as to the continuing existence of the book, and thus I forget to cover it on MR. I enjoyed it very much.
John Gimlette, Wild Coast: Travels on South America’s Untamed Edge. This book covers Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana. A revelation, I loved it. Could Gimlette be my favorite current travel writer?
Robert F. Moss, Barbecue: The History of an American Institution.
Anna Reid, Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II.
John Sutherland, Lives of the Novelists, A History of Fiction in 294 Lives. I’ll blog about this remarkable book soon.
What is striking is how many “big books” make this list, and that is exactly what you would expect in an age of Twitter, namely that a lot of shorter books are being outcompeted — aesthetically though not always economically — by on-line reading.
Here is the best “best books” list I’ve seen so far, apart from my lists of course.
*Currency Wars*
The author is James Rickards and the subtitle is The Making of the Next Global Crisis. This book is rapidly proving influential, though you will not see it reviewed in all of the major mainstream outlets. The so-called “Right” is walking away from “1990s WSJ Op-Ed CPI bias what’s so bad about poverty anyway?” narrative and looking for alternatives. This is one of them, excerpt:
In sum, Chaisson shows how highly complex systems such as civilizations require exponentially greater energy inputs to grow, while Tainter shows how those civilizations come to produce negative outputs in exchange for the inputs and eventually collapse. Money serves as an input-output measure applicable to a Chaisson model because it is a form of stored energy. Capital and currency markets are powerful complex systems nested within the larger Tainter model of civilization. As society becomes more complex, it requires exponentially greater amounts of money for support. At some point productivity and taxation can no longer sustain society, and elites attempt to cheat the input process with credit, leverage, debasement and other forms of pseudomoney that facilitate rent seeking over production. These methods work for a brief period before the illusion of debt-fueled pseudogrowth is overtaken by the reality of lost wealth amid growing income inequality.
I don’t understand the monetary theory lying behind this claim, nor do I agree with the fascination with gold. The more important point is that if you dismiss this book as “unlikely to be influential” you are not in touch with the broader intellectual currents of our time.
*Pacific Crucible*
The author is Ian W. Toll and the subtitle is War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942. I loved this book and it should join my list of the very best books of the year. Every page was gripping and instructive. Here is an excerpt on “how to leave the dollar zone”:
The word HAWAII was overprinted on all paper currency — in the event of invasion the U.S. Treasury would declare the bills worthless.
I very much liked this passage:
Holmes added that a cryptanalyst “needs only time, patience, an infinite capacity for work, a mind that can focus on one problem to the exclusion of everything else, a photographic memory, the inability to drop an unsolved problem, and a large volume of traffic.”
I learned that Hawaii never interned its Japanese (with no problems), why the Japanese didn’t go after Australia and why they should have, and why the Japanese failed in the Battle of Midway. I had not known that MacArthur received a payment of $500,000 from the Philippine Treasury in 1942, and the U.S. knew about it and let him keep it.
Highly recommended, even if you don’t care about naval warfare per se. I am now ordering Toll’s other book.
*Making it in the Political Blogosphere*
The author is Tanni Haas and the subtitle is The World’s Political Bloggers Share the Secrets to Success. There are interviews with Arianna Huffington, Jane Hamsher, Nick Gillespie, Lew Rockwell, Juan Cole, Matt Yglesias, Kevin Drum, yours truly, and others. Here is a comment from Kevin Drum:
When I started out, there was much more of a tendency to engage with the other side. Liberals and conservatives would attack each other, but we’d also engage with each other in at least a moderately serious way. Today, you get almost none of that. There’s very little engagement between left and right. And what engagement there is tends to be pure attack. There’s no real conversation at all. That’s a difference that I think professionalization has brought about. The political blogosphere has become more tribal.
A good point, but I blame professionalization less than Kevin does. Maybe some of us are simply a bit sick of each other, and the accumulated slights and misunderstandings weigh more heavily on our emotional responses than does the feeling of generosity from working together in the same “office.” I predict that a given experienced blogger is likely to feel more sympathy for new bloggers, but on average I doubt if the new bloggers are better or more tolerant.
Which means we mostly have ourselves to blame.
Addendum: Nick Gillespie comments.
Sentences to ponder
It is estimated that up to 40 percent of prescriptions go unfilled…
That is from Ezekiel J. Emanuel, here is more. I read somewhere that Zeke has a memoir under contract somewhere, but now Google fails me. Can this be true?
*Enriching the Earth*
The author is Vaclav Smil and the subtitle is Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production, excerpt:
…the single most important change affecting the world’s population — its expansion from 1.6 billion people in 1900 to today’s 6 billion — would not have been possible without the synthesis of ammonia.
…All the children to be seen running around or leading docile water buffaloes in China’s southern provinces, throughout the Nile Delta, or in the manicured landscapes of Java got their body proteins, via urea their parents spread on bunded fields, from the Haber-Bosch synthesis of ammonia.
Another wondrous discovery from late 19th century/turn of the century Germany, though on the other side of the balance Haber played a critical role in inventing the German poison gases used in World War I. Have I mentioned that Vaclav Smil is one of the most important thinkers/writers today, in any field? It is worth reading all of his books, and there are not many people (with many books that is!) you can say that about.
By the way, many people think that Clara Immerwahr (Fritz Haber’s first wife, and the first female PhD at the University of Breslau) looks like Taylor Swift:
*Race Against the Machine* and TGS, a comparison
Race Against the Machine is compared to TGS in this forthcoming Economist article, and see this earlier piece. Short bit:
Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist, and Andrew McAfee, a technology expert, argue in their new e-book, “Race Against the Machine”, that too much innovation is the bane of struggling workers. Progress in information and communication technology (ICT) may be occurring too fast for labour markets to keep up.
I agree a version of this is happening (though I wouldn’t use the phrase “too much”) and I don’t see my analysis as so different from theirs. Possibly the three of us could agree on these propositions:
1. IT has seen rapid innovation since the 1990s, and it has led to great gains, but not so much for ordinary workers.
2. Had innovation gains been much greater in non-IT sectors, median living standards would have gone up much more.
I’m not sure if Erik and Andrew would agree with my:
3. Innovation gains in non-IT sectors have been much slower than usual (by post 1870 standards) in the post 1973 period.
I would make a few other points which I suspect they would not agree with, or would wish to reframe:
4. IT productivity was highest in 1995-1998 and those were splendid years for wages and the labor market. That is one reason why I focus on the “glass half empty problem” (low non-IT innovation post 1973), rather than the “too much IT innovation for labor’s good” argument. I do think the “too much innovation for labor’s good” argument explains why the productivity statistics from 2001-2004 didn’t translate into significant real wage gains and that is an important phenomenon. But it’s at the side of my argument rather than central to it. It’s central to their argument.
5. The S&P 500 has been flat, in real terms, for well over a decade. I thus see a truly gloomy productivity picture post 1997-98 or so, weighing IT successes against other problems and slowdowns. (I see this as one issue for their account, since they are asserting good times for capital in recent years.) More generally, the productivity picture for the U.S. between 1995-1998 is quite good and IT-based, and 1973-1995 is poorly understood, highly mixed, but overall still quite inadequate with the 1970s and early 1990s having been worse than most people realize. Overall I see the bad productivity years as bad years for the workers, not vice versa. I also see the broader technological stagnation as setting in well before the IT boom of the 1990s.
6. The biggest employment problems, namely those of late, have come when output is low and/or falling, not rising. That is another reason why my agreement with some of their major propositions comes at the side of my argument rather than being central to it. I understand how the TGS argument fits into the cyclical story of 2007-2011 (excess confidence and overextension, Minsky moment, AD contraction, AS problems slow down the recovery), but I don’t understand how the Race Against the Machine story interacts with the cycle, or if it is even supposed to.
I had a long chat with Erik earlier in the week and found large areas of agreement on many matters (without wishing to speak for him in any formal sense, don’t attribute any of this to him!). We also have quite similar predictions about the future, and this blog post is solely about the past. These “side arguments” I am referring to are already in the process of becoming more central and they will shape our future. The story of a largely stagnant median will become progressively less important relative to the story of labor market polarization, and I suspect that over time Erik and I (I didn’t get to chat with Andrew as much) will agree increasingly.
Addendum: Arnold Kling comments.
Best economics books of the year
1. Best behavioral economics books of the year, Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, and Bryan Caplan, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids.
2. Best economic history book, Alexander Field, A Great Leap Forward: 1930s Depression and U.S. Economic Growth.
3. Second best eBook of the year, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy. By the way, here is my recent debate with Erik; we both agreed in advance to mix things up and generate controversy, so interpret the exchange accordingly. In reality, Erik and I agree about many many things and Matt Yglesias notes as much. (We do, however, seem to disagree about what this graph means.) Arnold Kling comments on the debate itself.
4. Best economics/business book of the year: Tim Harford’s Adapt.
5. Best Austrian or Austrian-influenced book of the year: Daniel B. Klein, Knowledge and Coordination: A Liberal Interpretation. It’s not out yet, I’ll cover it more when it appears, more information here.
6. Best economics textbook, Ahem! I don’t mean my favorite economics textbook (though it is that too), rather best economics textbook. The revised second edition of Micro just appeared, the macro is due out any day now.
Overall if I had to pick one, text aside, it might be the Alexander Field book, but this is a diverse lot with something for everybody.
Page turners
…he’s [Jonathan Gruber] writing a graphic novel explaining the [health care] bill, which will be published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux in December. He said the opponents were mostly to blame for the bill’s bad press, and only sort of entertained a question about whether the Obama administration could have done a better job of selling it.
Other parts of the story indicate that Gruber is upset. Hat tip goes to Austin Frakt on Twitter.
Best fiction and fiction-related books of 2011
1. Murakami I now have finished it, don’t think it adds up to anything but it is consistently fun for 900+ pages. How many other books can claim that?
2. 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. Get up the gumption.
3. Audur Ava Olafsdottir, The Greenhouse. From Iceland, it’s funny and sheer fun to read and short and easy yet deep and moving.
4. Habibi, by Craig Thompson. I don’t enjoy many graphic novels, but this is my favorite of all those I have read.
Away from fiction proper we have:
5. The Anatomy of Influence, Harold Bloom. In part this is a lifetime achievement award, but his best passages are still stunning.
6. Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003, by Roberto Bolano. Will make you want to read a lot more Latin American fiction.
Soon I’ll cover the best economics books of the year.
My new Kindle Fire
I have no idea what it does, rather I bought it out of rational Bayesian inference. It looks and feels cool; at first I thought Apple had sent me a new product by mistake.
Unfortunately, other than turning it on (itself a struggle), I cannot figure out what to do next.
Yana will be home later.
*The Origins of AIDS*
The author is Jacques Pepin and this is a splendid book. It is a remarkably thorough epidemiological detective story, which breaks new ground, and on top of that it serves up an excellent (partial) history of Zaire, history of the African sex trade, and history of Haiti. Excerpt:
In tropical Africa, the median number of infective [mosquito] bites is 77 per year, but in the rural and rainy areas of central Africa this number is generally >>200. The record belongs to a village of Equatorial Guinea, where humans sustain 1,030 infective bites per year, three per day!
It is the most impressively researched book I’ve read all year, as suspenseful as a thriller, and tragic in mood. It’s amazing how far back Pepin can trace back the history of AIDS and the diversity of sources and records he draws upon. Here is one overview of the book. Definitely recommended, one of the best books of the year.
Capitol Gains
I have written several times before (e.g. here and here) about how Washington insiders, politicians and staff, use their knowledge of behind the scene deals to profit in the stock market (see also Megan McArdle’s recent piece from which I stole the headline). Last night 60 Minutes reported on the story based on new research in Throw Them All Out a forthcoming book by Peter Schweizer.
Here is one bit from the transcript:
In mid September 2008 with the Dow Jones Industrial average still above ten thousand, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke were holding closed door briefings with congressional leaders, and privately warning them that a global financial meltdown could occur within a few days. One of those attending was Alabama Representative Spencer Bachus, then the ranking Republican member on the House Financial Services Committee and now its chairman.
Schweizer: These meetings were so sensitive– that they would actually confiscate cell phones and Blackberries going into those meetings. What we know is that those meetings were held one day and literally the next day Congressman Bachus would engage in buying stock options based on apocalyptic briefings he had the day before from the Fed chairman and treasury secretary. I mean, talk about a stock tip.
While Congressman Bachus was publicly trying to keep the economy from cratering, he was privately betting that it would, buying option funds that would go up in value if the market went down. He would make a variety of trades and profited at a time when most Americans were losing their shirts.
Even though the Congress is exempt from insider trading law, many of 60 Minutes’s findings are hugely damning, which you can tell just by looking at the stunned faces of John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi when Steve Kroft questions them about their special dealings. The video is here.
Cosmopolitan Rangoon
A largely English administrative class presided over the colonial apparatus; Scots dominated trade. The big companies of the day…were all in Glaswegian hands.
…In the early twentieth century, Burma enjoyed a higher standard of living than India and was far less densely populated. And as the economy grew, there was a need for cheap labour as well as entrepreneurial and professional skills. all this came from India, with movement into Burma unchecked and for a long time positively encouraged. By the late 1920s Rangoon even exceeded new York as the greatest immigrant port in the world and this influx turned Rangoon into an Indian City, with the Burmese reduced to a minority. There was a mingling of peoples from every part of the subcontinent, from Bengali schoolteachers and Gujarati bankers, to Sikh policemen and Tamil merchants. There were Chinese too, and smaller communities of Europeans, Americans and even Latin Americans (the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda lived in Rangoon briefly in the 1920s). The Cambridge political economist and long-time Burma civil servant J.S. Furnivali invented the term “plural society” to describe Rangoon’s mix of nationalities. Steamships fastened Rangoon to Calcutta and then, with the start of air travel, Rangoon became a hub for all of Asia…World-class schools and a top-notch university helped create a cosmopolitan and politically active middle class.
That is from the new and interesting book Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia, by Thant Myint-U.
A liberal reads conservative books
A guy named Carl T. Bogus (he’s for real) speaks:
One striking difference is that the iconic conservative works are about ideology. By contrast, the most influential liberal books of the era are about policy issues. Those works are Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962), The Other America by Michael Harrington (1962), The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963), and Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader (1965), which helped launch the environmental, anti-poverty, feminist, and consumer movements, respectively. Some prominent liberal books of the time were about ideology — such as The Vital Center by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (1949) and The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith (1958) — but these are exceptions to the rule.
…Conservatives have big appetites for ideology; liberals don’t. There are, of course, taxonomies of conservative schools of thought. People on the right classify themselves as libertarians, neoconservatives, social conservatives, traditional conservatives, and the like, and spill oceans of ink defining, debating, and further subdividing these schools of thought. There is no parallel taxonomy on the left.
True or false? The full article is here, interesting throughout. Hat tip goes to www.bookforum.com.
Addendum: Arnold Kling comments.