Category: Books

Banana, by Dan Koeppel

You will never, ever find a seed in a supermarket banana.  That is because the fruit is grown, basically, by cloning…Every banana we eat is a genetic twin of every other.

It turns out, by the way, that the world’s supply of Cavendish bananas — the ones we eat — is endangered by disease (more here) and many experts believe the entire strain will vanish.  Most other banana strains are much harder to cultivate and transport on a large scale, so enjoy your bananas while you can.  The previous and supposedly tastier major strain of banana — Gros Michel — is already gone and had disappeared by the 1950s, again due to disease.  Today, European opposition to GMO is one factor discouraging progress in developing a substitute and more robust banana crop.

I liked this bit:

"Uganda doesn’t endure famine, and to a great extent that is because of bananas," said Joseph Mukibi…

And finally:

Most horrifying of all to Americans, the Indian banana is used as a substitute for tomatoes in ketchup.

I’ve grown tired of single topic foodstuff books, as they are now an overmined and overrated genre.  But Dan Koeppel’s Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World is one of the best of its kind.  It is a seamless integration of politics, economics, history, biology, and foodie wisdom.  Here is one review of the book.  Here is Dan’s one-post banana blog.

The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics

Arnold Kling reports:

…the new  Concise Encyclopedia of Economics
is dirt cheap. The hardback edition retails for $45 and runs over 600
pages, in an unusually large 8-1/2 by 11 size. Contributors include
Bryan and myself, but most of the authors are actually respectable. In
fact, many are quite renowned. Although it is structured as a reference
work, it can be fun just to read. But I don’t recommend taking it on
your next plane trip.

The editor was David R. Henderson, who sometimes comments on this blog. 

He is also author of the excellent and much underrated The Joy of Freedom.  Russ Roberts and I were on the editorial board and we are also contributors.  The publisher is Liberty Fund.  I haven’t seen a copy yet of the final edition, but I believe this will be a very useful way for many people to learn economics.  The Amazon link is here.

Department of “Whatever”

Suffering the gloom, inevitable as breath, we must further accept
this fact that the world hates: We are forever incomplete, fragments of
some ungraspable whole. Our unfinished natures – we are never pure
actualities but always vague potentials – make life a constant
struggle, a bout with the persistent unknown. But this extension into
the abyss is also our salvation. To be only a fragment is always to
strive for something beyond ourselves, something transcendent. That
striving is always an act of freedom, of choosing one road instead of
another. Though this labor is arduous – it requires constant attention
to our mysterious and shifting interiors – it is also ecstatic, an
almost infinite sounding of the exquisite riddles of Being.

To be against happiness is to embrace ecstasy. Incompleteness is a
call to life. Fragmentation is freedom. The exhilaration of never
knowing anything fully is that you can perpetually imagine sublimities
beyond reason. On the margins of the known is the agile edge of
existence. This is the rapture, burning slow, of finishing a book that
can never be completed, a flawed and conflicted text, vexed as twilight.

Eric G. Wilson is a professor of English at Wake Forest University. This essay is adapted from his book Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, being published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Here is the link.

Review of John Gray’s *Black Mass*

There’s lots of piling on in this one.  Fifteen years ago I predicted to Jim Buchanan that Gray would end up a Catholic; I stand by that claim, as he doesn’t have anywhere else to go.  The final step is when you challenge whether man is any better than nature at all, and that’s what happened in his previous book Straw Dogs.  I’ve long enjoyed Gray’s anti-utopianism, his ability to challenge conventional views, and his willingness to change his mind, but this review does score some telling points.

My Law and Literature reading list

The first real meeting of the class is today; we will be reading and viewing the following:

The Bible, Book of Exodus and later selected excerpts.

Herman Melville, selected stories, including "Bartleby"

Franz Kafka, "In the Penal Colony."

Snow – Orhan Pamuk

Neuromancer – William Gibson

Leo Tolstoy – Great Short Works, including Hadji Murad and Ivan Ilyich

Eugene Zamiatyin – We

Jose Saramago – Blindness

Jack Henry Abbott – In the Belly of the Beast

Fernando Verissimo – Borges and the Eternal Orangutans

J.M. Coetzee – The Life and Times of Michael K

Law Lit, by Thane Rosenbaum, selections

Mario Vargas Llosa – Who Killed Palomino Molero?

Francisco Goldman – The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?

Films: Battle Royale, others, including I hope some new releases.

Book Forum reminder — The Logic of Life

Don’t forget to pre-order your copy of Tim Harford’s The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World.  Alex and I will be starting our Book Forum soon, along with some prestigious guest reviewers, and Tim’s book will start appearing in book stores this Tuesday.  Tim is one of the world’s best popular writers on economics, and we only select those books that we feel will yield maximally interesting book forums.

What I’ve Been Reading

1. India, by Michael Wood.  This book looks ordinary but it is a wonderful (selective) history which captures the magic of India.  Recommended to both the beginner and the expert.

2. Las Benévolas, by Jonathan Littell, the Spanish-language edition of this famous French novel just came out (I don’t read French).  Here is the French edition.  Here are some of the raves.  Here is a critical review.  I loved the first twenty pages and was bored by the next thirty.  We’ll see how far I get in this Spanish-language edition of almost 1000 pages.  My current best guess is that a WWII-themed novel of this kind simply can’t be that original.  The French love it, perhaps, because an American-born writer wrote it in the French language.

3. Angus Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD.  This is a good summary of knowledge about economic growth, by a premier empirical economist.  But, as I am already familiar with the basic literature, I couldn’t find any reason to keep on reading.

4. The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World, by Eric Weiner.  This book is well-written, witty, and deserving of its current bestseller status.  At first I thought it was just fluff, but its applied, anecdotal, and travel-based approach gives one of the better windows on happiness across cultures.  His particular observations are astute, especially on Switzerland and Thailand; in the latter case, referring to sex, he writes that something which cannot be shoved under the rug is now regarded as a piece of furniture.

5. Virginia Postrel on Ron Paul, no spam bots please.

Gang Leader for a Day

Here is my review of Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets.  I found this a difficult review to write.  The book is very interesting and Venkatesh is one of the world’s best and leading social scientists (and I don’t say that lightly).  Still, I thought his book was…how can I put it….somewhat evil, if I may call upon that old-fashioned concept.  The book required him to work with, and often encourage, a vicious gang leader for up to six years.  For instance:

J.T., the gang leader at the
center of the story, and of Mr. Venkatesh’s research, becomes wrapped
up in the idea of having his own biographer. Eventually it became his
obsession that Mr. Venkatesh record the details of his life, including
the shakedowns. In part, this was J.T.’s narcissism, and in part he
needed the motivation of an observer. Most of all, J.T. seemed to enjoy
having an audience: "I realized that he had come to rely on my
presence; he liked the attention, and the validation," Mr. Venkatesh
reports. None of J.T.’s underlings were qualified for the role of
courtier, but the highly intelligent and nonjudgmental Mr. Venkatesh
was perfect.

Here is my conclusion:

When it comes to understanding
the world, biography is truly the underappreciated method in the social
sciences. The life of the individual reveals what is otherwise hidden
in abstract numbers or faceless questionnaires. Mr. Venkatesh is to be
applauded for his path-breaking work and his compelling exposition.
He’s lucky that he didn’t have to pay a high price, but by the end of
the story the reader is wondering whether someone else might have, due
to Mr. Venkatesh’s unintended encouragement of J.T. Yes, evil really
can be attractive, and the biographical achievement here is splendid,
but when I return to the thought of encouraging and feeding the ego of
a gang leader for six years running, I can’t bring myself to be
attracted to this book.

I would recommend that you read Gang Leader for a Day, but ultimately I could not shy away from writing a negative review.  Let me know what you think.

What I’ve been reading

I’ve discarded lots of unfinished books on this trip, but two have stood out for their excellence:

1. The Past, by Alan Pauls.  I don’t usually like drug-fueled tales of unhealthy sexual obsession, but I’ll make an exception for this one.  This Argentine novel has received rave reviews across Europe, but still does not seem to have a U.S. publisher; the Amazon link is to a UK edition.  It’s uneven, but it has a higher number of memorable scenes than almost any other contemporary novel.

2. The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, by Alvaro Mutis.  Imagine a Colombian version of 1001 Nights and Don Quixote, in novella form.  This is 700 pp. of sheer delight, and it also indicates we are just starting to figure out which Latin American works of fiction will prove of lasting importance.  This is one of them, and another superb translation from Edith Grossman.

If I read two works of fiction this good in 2008, I will be grateful.

Wrong on Race

Here is Bruce Bartlett´s new book, here is an overview.  Incendiary, etc.  The positive suggestion is that the Republicans should, and will need to, start courting black voters, and that greater electoral competition in this manner will help the courted parties.  The main theoretical question is when the statute of limitations runs out for holding the background of a party against that party.  I don’t have a clear view on that question, although for individual candidates I think that the time horizon should be quite long.

Addendum: Here is a Matt-Bruce exchange.  Perhaps I posted this link without enough explanation.  What I find so interesting is why Bartlett remains a Republican, or from the synopsis seems to.  After all, he has come close to endorsing Hillary.  Whether you like that or not, it is a big step for someone from his market-oriented background.  Does he stay a Republican because he thinks Republicans are better on race issues?  I haven’t read the book, but I thought there were many interesting issues going on in this new work of his.  I am sorry to have given rise to an exchange with nasty comments.  They’ve been deleted.  I might add I believe there is plenty of racism all around; the interesting positive question is why it takes one form (more open) in Republican circles and another very different form in Democratic circles.  Wage and other data show that discrimination is not especially concentrated in Republican areas, I hope to post more on that topic soon.