Category: Books
*Autobiography of Mark Twain, vol. I*
Finally, in Florence in 1904, I hit upon the right way to do an Autobiography: start it at no particular time of your life; wander at your free will all over your life' talk only about the thing which interests you at the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale, and turn your talk upon the new and more interesting thing that has intruded itself into your mind meantime.
Also, make the narrative a combined Diary and Autobiography. In this way you have the vivid things of the present to make a contrast with memories of like things in the past, and these contrasts have a charm which is all their own. No talent is required to make a combined Diary and Autobiography interesting.
And so, I have found the right plan. It makes my labor amusement — mere amusement, play, pastime, and wholly effortless. It is the first time in history that the right plan has been hit upon.
I spent about ninety minutes browsing this new book, but found it only moderately interesting, with more emphasis on the "moderately" than the "interesting." If you're obsessed with Twain, you'll find it worth the $20, but the above paragraphs sum up the main problem with the text.
*Bloodlands*
The author is Timothy Snyder and the subtitle is Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. I learned that this period was even bloodier and more brutal than I had thought:
Mass killing in Europe is usually associated with the Holocaust, and the Holocaust with rapid industrial killing. The image is too simple and clean. At the German and Soviet killing sites, the methods of murder were rather primitive. Of the fourteen million civilians and prisoners of war killed in the bloodlands between 1933 and 1945, more than half died because they were denied food. Europeans deliberately starved Europeans in horrific numbers in the middle of the twentieth century.
It is a very powerful book and I can recommend this review and this review. Along somewhat related lines, some of you may wish to read Paul R. Gregory's Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin's Kremlin: The Story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina. Bukharin, of course, was also an economist. Here is Gregory on the book. Here is Gregory on Germany's currently low unemployment rate.
*Washington: A Life*, by Ron Chernow
When the news from Boston reached Mount Vernon around New Year's Day, Washington deplored the methods of the tea party, even if he loathed the tax on tea. It was the next step in a fast-unfolding drama that would fully radicalize him. The administration of the bluff, portly Lord North had decided that Boston should pay for the destroyed tea and that Parliament should assert its supremacy, cracking down on harebrained schemes of independence now beginning to ferment in the colonies…the tea party convinced many British sympathizers that colonial protestors had become a violent rabble who had to pay a steep price for their inexcusable crimes.
I read only a few hundred pages of this book. The level of quality is high, but I find Alexander Hamilton's life much more interesting. This book does have an especially good discussion of Washington's contradictory attitudes and behavior toward his slaves.
*Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory* the new Stanley Cavell memoir
To recognize the end of the day and get to bed, I developed the ritual of eating a box of Oreo cookies together with a can of applesauce. But really the ritual is equally describable as an effort to stop myself from eating the entire box of cookies, a sequence of five (was it?) pairs, each pair stacked in a pleated pliable plastic cup, and from finishing the accompanying applesauce, having conceived the idea that this was not a sensible diet. I slowed the eating by inventing new ways of going through the cookies. One way was to nibble around the circumference of a cookie before finishing off the remaining rough-edged center; another was to twist apart the two wafers of each Oreo, eat off the sugary middle spread from whichever of the wafers it largely adhered to, intending to eat only that one of that double cookie. But each night I lost the battle to stop eating before the package and the can were emptied. I recognize that to this day I unfailingly at the end of a meal leave some portion of food, if sometimes quite small, on my dish — as if to reassure myself that I am free.
I do the same, I should add. That passage is from Stanley Cavell, one of America's leading philosophers. If you're looking for a book which steps outside the usual mode of strict narrative, I recommend this highly, but it will leave many people frustrated. You can buy it here.
For the pointer I thank David Gordon.
Rereading *The Road to Serfdom*
Given all the recent fuss, I picked it up again and found:
1. It was more boring and less analytic on matters of public choice than I had been expecting.
2. Although some of Hayek's major predictions have been proven wrong, they are more defensible than I had been expecting.
3. The most important sentence in the book is "This book, written in my spare time from 1940 to 1943…" In those years, how many decent democracies were in the world? How clear was it that the Western powers, even if they won the war, would dismantle wartime economic planning? How many other peoples' predictions from those years have panned out? At that time, Hayek's worries were perfectly justified.
4. If current trends do turn out very badly, this is not the best guide for understanding exactly why.
It's fine to downgrade the book, relative to some of the claims made on its behalf, but the book doesn't give us reason to downgrade Hayek.
Bill Bryson’s *At Home*
Indeed, the history of early America is really a history of coping with shortages of building materials. For a country famed for being rich in natural resources, America along the eastern seaboard proved to be appallingly deficient in many basic commodities necessary to an independent civilization. One of those commodities was limestone, as the first colonists discovered to their dismay. In England, you could build a reasonably secure house with wattle and daub — essentially a fraework of mud and sticks — if it was sufficiently bound with lime. But in America there was no lime (or at least none found before 1690), so the colonists used dried mud, which proved to be woefully lacking in sturdiness. During the first century of colonization, it was a rare house that lasted more than ten years…A hurricane in 1634 blew away — literally just lifted up and carried off — half the houses of Massachusetts. Barely had people rebuilt when a second storm of similar intensity blew in…Even decent building stone was not available in many areas. When George Washington wanted to pave his loggia at Mount Vernon with simple flagstones, he had to send to England for them.
The one thing America had in quantity was wood.
That is all from the new Bill Bryson book, subtitled A Short History of Private Life, which is both entertaining and informative.
Mario Vargas Llosa wins Nobel Prize
That's for literature, sadly he never had the chance to win a prize for economics, as his political career as a Peruvian classical liberal was cut short by electoral defeat. He has many fine books but I have two particular favorites: The War of the End of the World (serious and epic, concerning a millenarian revolt in Brazil) and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (a fun story and spoof of telenovela culture). Conversation in the Cathedral is sometimes considered a classic but I find it unreadable. I suspect his early The Green House will resonate more with Latin Americans. His last major novel, The Bad Girl, was entertaining but not entirely satisfying and it reminded me a bit too much of an older man writing about sex. The Feast of the Goat is a very good study of political power. Here are previous MR mentions of Mario Vargas Llosa.
Here is Wikipedia on Vargas Llosa. Alex has done a good bit of work with Alvaro Vargas Llosa, son of Mario and a prominent writer on classical liberal themes, and perhaps he will relate some of that to us.
Ten memorable Nigerian books
Natalie has been staying with us, so I have been searching for interesting reads on Nigeria; here is an account of ten important novels about the country.
I am told that on Lagos island rents can run $60-70k a year and have to be paid two years in advance. Here is a short Rem Koolhaas video on Lagos. Lagos may soon be the third largest city in the world, and yet other than informal buses the city has virtually no mass transit. The traffic jams are legendary. A journey to nearby Benin should only take three hours but now it can last days.
Some say that Nigeria is the largest user of motorcycles in the world; many hospitals in the country have a ward named after the motorcycles. In Lagos, there is a recent partial ban on their use.
Here is a good article on the maturation of Nollywood. Here is a good, regular source of information about Nigeria, namely 234Next.com.
Here is the renowned BBC Lagos special.
What I’ve been pawing or will be pawing
1. J.G. Ballard, Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton An Autobiography, self-recommending.
2. Robert L. Tignore, Egypt: A Short History. A good introduction and overview.
3. Barry Eichengreen, Exorbitant Privilege: The Decline of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System.
4. Steven Rattner, Overhaul: An Insider's Account of the Obama Administration's Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry. An entertaining account of economic policy making inside the Obama administration.
5. Steve Hely, How I Became a Famous Novelist.
6. John Quiggin, Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us, reviewed by Arnold Kling.
7. Robert Ashley, Outside of Time. The story of his compositions, a new theory of drone, why American opera has failed (one syllable per note is a problem), and how he used his Tourette's to help him turn involuntary speech into music: "I spent years tinkering with my consciousness trying to reconcile the performer — legal and highly paid — with the person you cross the street to avoid."
*Red Plenty*
"No!" said the Chairman in triumph. "No subsidy!" This is America! Don't you see that the very fact that the hemburger [sic] kiosk is there means that somebody has worked out how to make a profit by selling the meal at fifteen cents. If the capitalist who owns the kiosk couldn't make a profit at that price, he wouldn't be doing it. That is the secret of everything we see here."
Here is one Amazon review of the book, Francis Spufford's latest:
This is a fantastic, innovative look at the economic policies of the USSR under Khrushchev. If my opening sentence sounds dull, please don't see it as a true representation of this book. Spufford's approach is to interweave extensive research with the imagination and invention of a novelist. The end result is a fantastic patchwork in which fictional characters rub shoulders with historical ones and stunning descriptive passages add lustre to what might have been dry, factual information.
It's one of the most stylish fictional experiments of the year, and yet it suddenly, and repeatedly, breaks into disquisitions about market socialism, Oskar Lange, the measurement of Soviet gdp, and Leonid Kantorovich.
Here is one Guardian review of the book. Here is a Telegraph review, also a rave. Here is more praise. Here is the Amazon UK listing. For a while Amazon US claimed the book would come out in March, now there is just this strange and useless listing.
I thank a loyal MR reader for the pointer.
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
Spiegel Online: Germany will make its last reparations payment for World War I on Oct. 3, settling its outstanding debt from the 1919 Versailles Treaty and quietly closing the final chapter of the conflict that shaped the 20th century.
…in 1953, West Germany agreed at an international conference in London to service its international bond obligations from before World War II. In the years that followed it repaid the principal on the bonds, which had been issued to private and institutional investors in countries including the United States.
Under the terms of the London accord, Germany was allowed to wait until it unified before paying some €125 million in outstanding interest that had accrued on its foreign debt in the years 1945 to 1952. After the Berlin Wall fell and West and East Germany united in 1990, the country dutifully paid that interest off in annual instalments, the last of which comes due on Oct. 3.
It is surprising that Germans are not more Keynesian.
*Berlin at War*
That's an excellent new book by Roger Moorhouse. I found good material on virtually every page:
Heinz Knobloch was dispatched by his mother to a department store by the Hallesches Tor to buy something — anything — exempt from the rationing. He managed to return with two tins of sardines. He was lucky to have escaped with his booty intact: the new legislation against hoarding meant that some of the more punctilious shopkeepers were already insisting on opening all tins immediately upon purchase.
I also learned that many Berliners starting suspecting the Holocaust because of the rather efficient German postal system. When letters would be sent to "ghetto inhabitants" on the Eastern front, often they would be returned with notice that the intended recipient had passed away.
*Listen to This*
She [Mitsuko Uchida] tells of how she once tried to get [Radu] Lupu to visit Marlboro. "I got every excited, describing how people do nothing but play music all day long. But he said no. His explanation was very funny. "Mitsuko," he said, "I don't like music as much as you."
That's from the new book on music by Alex Ross. It's not a comprehensive tour de force like The Rest is Noise was, but it is smart and well-written on every page and if you liked the first book you should buy and read the second. The portraits cover, among others, Radiohead, Bjork, John Luther Adams, Marian Anderson, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, and Uchida. The chapter on Bob Dylan is especially good and it eclipses Sean Wilentz's entire recent book on Dylan.
Adam Smith is usually smarter than you think
In passing, Jacob T. Levy effectively scores the point and fills us in:
Adam Smith, generally thought of as the first systematic analyst of the market economy, was in my view the first major analyst of the modern state who saw it more or less completely: its permanent system of taxation and debt, its permanent expenditures on public works, its standing army, its bureaucratic structure, its colonial and imperial ventures, its complicated relationship with economic growth and prosperity, and in general the inevitability of a system of “police” or policy. This is not wholly distinct from his work as an analyst of the market; standing armies and professional bureaucracies are aspects of the division of labor, and the wealth of nations is a key determinant of their ability to fulfill their state projects. But it is partly distinct.
Adam Savage on scientific testing
I had a whole episode written called the surreal gourmet, which ended with tenderizing steak with dynamite, but it had all those other things like poaching fish on your catalytic converter or cooking eggs in your dishwasher, Jamie loves the idea of tenderizing meat in the dryer.
…Also the idea of is it safe to eat fresh road kill. We think that would be just hilarious and gross.
That is Adam Savage, from Jeff Potter's new and periodically interesting book Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food. This is most of all a book for those who wish to think of cooking in terms of engineering, but without going the molecular gastronomy route.