Category: Books

Prince William County is looking at 33 percent reductions. Loudoun is
considering program cuts of 5, 10 or 15 percent. Fairfax agencies have
been ordered to find cuts worth 15 percent, which would mean closure of
14 community libraries on Fridays, elimination of two hours of Sunday
service at eight regional libraries and reduction of new materials by
25 percent. Fairfax libraries would eliminate 305 jobs and purchase
70,000 fewer materials annually if these recommendations are followed,
according to a county report.

Fairfax, the region’s largest jurisdiction and one of the country’s
wealthiest, had taken an aggressive approach to maintaining and
expanding its library system before the downturn. The county opened
three new branches in the past year — in Oakton, Fairfax City and
Burke Centre — where soaring, spacious architecture and an abundance
of computer stations, meeting space and comfortable chairs have
attracted brisk business and happy customers.

Here is the story.  New library books will not, alas, be a countercyclical asset.  Comovement is a bitter pill to swallow. 

Often people ask for me background reading about the financial crisis.  I recommend blogs first and foremost but still people wish for a brief primer.  Well, I can recommend a 1200 page primer, namely Marcia Stigum’s The Money Market, now in its fourth edition.  It provides comprehensive coverage of all the major institutions in…the money market.  When I used to teach monetary economics at the Ph.d. level, I made all of the students read this entire book (in an earlier and slightly shorter edition) and I quizzed them on every chapter.  This was considered highly unorthodox at the time and of course 1200 pages is a lot of opportunity cost.  Still, I think it was one of the better educational decisions I have made as a professor and now I view it as somewhat vindicated.  The book is not perfect but it is a very good place to start.  It is also useful as a source of reference.

Trey, a loyal MR reader, asks:

What are good techniques for becoming a better reader of popular non-fiction and history? I analytically approach articles and academic monographs in one way but often find myself having just finished a volume of history or popular non-fiction and am unable to bring my social scientific knowledge to bear on the topic. Rather than asking myself, "What is this a case of?" or "What does social theory have to say about this?" I find myself saying, "That was interesting. What’s for dinner?" Any advice for breaking down this wall is appreciated.

There are (at least) three kinds of useful popular non-fiction works.  The first open up a whole new world to you where previously none had existed.  Many people felt this way when they read Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene for the first time.  For obvious reasons, books like this are increasingly hard to find as you continue your reading career. 

The second kind are to be read in batches.  No one of them is good enough to thrill you and maybe no one of them is accurate enough to trust.  But if you read five to ten of them you get a sense of a field and its critical issues.

The third kind are to be read as marginal additions to a body of knowledge you already have a good grasp of.

The key is to have the kind of book that matches the kind you want. 

To be one of the great American painters, you must satisfy several criteria:

1. You must have an identifiable style and a consistent body of work.

2. Your pictures must complement each other and look better when shown en masse in the form of an exhibit.

3. Your very best pictures must stand among the very best in the American tradition.

4. You must have had a strong influence on other artists, and must capture some essential element of "the American experience."

Let’s start with the nineteenth century today and move on to the twentieth century soon. 

Thanks to Paul Keating for posing the question.

When I was a very young man I thought places for the sick and mad should be made very bright and attractive, given a sort of festiveness to alleviate our human miseries.  But maybe these places are like animals and cannot change their spots and stripes no more than leopards and tigers.

That is from Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture, the current favorite to win the Booker Prize this Tuesday.  I read it on the flight back from London and enjoyed it very much.

In addition to the Booker Prize, there is a lot coming up this week, including the beginning of the Kramnik-Anand chess match, the economics Nobel Prize, and whether a new Great Depression is on the way.  Please stay tuned…

1. The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, by Victor Pelevin.  A fun Russian weird novel; here is a good review of it.  It’s one of the few works of fiction I’ve finished lately.

2. The Patron’s Payoff: Conspicuous Commissions in Italian Renaissance Art, by Jonathan K. Nelson and Richard J. Zeckhauser.  Put together a collaborating art historian, a first-rate microeconomist, an interest in signaling and a preface by A. Michael Spence and this is what you get.

3. White Heat: The Friendship Between Emily Dicksinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, by Brenda Wineapple.  Yes, this is a very good book.  But it has the same problem that most other Emily Dickinson books have.  Her poems are so short you can fit them into a narrative and they are so strong they tend to overwhelm any non-fiction context they are put in.

4. Geoffrey Heal, When Principles Pay:Corporate Social Responsibility and the Bottom Line.  The main point is that socially responsible behavior is often profitable for business in the long run.  I know that doesn’t sound like such a compelling message right now, but this is a highly intelligent and now a sadly neglected book.

5. Samuel Johnson: A Biography, by Peter Martin.  This is only the third best biography of Johnson (Walter Jackson Bate is #2) and it is still one of the best books of the year.  What does that say?

The subtitle is Warren Buffett and the Business of Life.  Is it massive?  Yes.  Does it contain numerous revelations about his childhood, his "slight obsession" with trains, his love of collecting, and his sex life?  Yes.  Is it well written and well researched?  Yes.  Does it cover many financial episodes (most of all Salomon Brothers) and famous characters?  Yes.  Is it number one on Amazon?  Yes.  Does it contain analytic depth?  No.  Did I like it?  Yes, but for a return which is mostly biographical in nature, it’s a lot of detail to wade through.

Part of this new policing mentality is that publishers are becoming more
  risk-averse – children’s book authors, for example, are being asked to sign
  contracts agreeing to ‘appropriate conduct’ in their private lives.

Here is much more, mostly a discussion of how digitalization is changing the literary world.

Here are a few reviews and a few more and more.  Here is the Amazon listing.  A partial read and a browse put me in (temporary?) agreement with this Amazon review:

The story, when it gets going, is exciting and relatively fast-paced
and all that. But it takes some 600-700 pages to get there, during
which time you are immersed in the world of Arbre and its native
culture. The first few pages are chock-full of in-world jargon à la A
Clockwork Orange, and it will be difficult to read. (Not to worry–
there is a glossary, and selections from the Arbran dictionary appear
throughout the text)…Anathem takes eight thousand years of
fictional history and makes it as relevant and meaningful as anything
from the Cycle.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, Cryptonomicon is the place to start.  It’s one of my favorite popular fictions from the last twenty years and you don’t even need to like "that sort of thing."