Category: Books

1. Taxi: A Social History of the New York Cabdriver, by Graham Hodges, 44 out of 240 pp.

2. Kim MacQuarrie, The Last Days of the Incas, 169 out of 522 pp., it is actually quite good.

3. Kiwis Might Fly, by Polly Evans, 1 out of 310 pp.

4. Gold: The Once and Future Money, by Nathan Lewis, 13 out of 447 pp., some of you will love it.

5. Cosmonaut Keep, by Ken MacLeod, 77 out of 352 pp., sorry guys.

To this day, nature hasn’t come up with a microbe that eats it [a tire], either.  Goodyear’s process, called vulcanization, ties long rubber polymer chains together with short strands of sulfur atoms, actually transforming them into a single giant molecule.  Once rubber is vulcanized — meaning it’s heated, spiled with sulfur, and poured into a mold, such as one shaped like a truck tire — the resulting huge molecule takes that form and never relinquishes it.

Being a single molecule, a tire can’t be melted down or turned into something else.  Unless physically shredded or worn down by 60,000 miles of friction, both entailing significant energy, it remains round.  Tires drive landfill operators crazy, because when buried, they encircle a doughnut-shaped air bubble that wants to rise.  Most garbage dumps no longer accept them, but for hundreds of years into the future, old tires will inexorably work their way to the surface of forgotten landfills, fill with rainwater, and begin breeding mosquitoes again.

In the United Sates, an average of one tire per citizen is discarded annually — that’s a third of a billion, just in one year.

That is from Alan Weisman’s truly excellent The World Without Us.  Here is my previous post on the book.

How many more times will someone suggest this book in the comments section of this blog?  I like this book and I think it offers a real contribution.  Nonetheless I feel no need to suggest it in the comments sections of other peoples’ blogs.

I do not treat this book as foundational because of personal experience.  I’ve spent much time in one rural Mexican village, San Agustin Oapan, and spent much time chatting with the people there.  They are extremely smart, have an excellent sense of humor, and are never boring.  And that’s in their second language, Spanish.

I’m also sure they if you gave them an IQ test, they would do miserably.  In fact I can’t think of any written test — no matter how simple — they could pass.  They simply don’t have experience with that kind of exercise.

When it comes to understanding the properties of different corn varieties, catching fish in the river, mending torn amate paper, sketching a landscape from memory, or gossiping about the neighbors, they are awesome.

Some of us like to think that intelligence is mostly one-dimensional, but at best this is true only within well-defined peer groups of broadly similar people.  If you gave Juan Camilo a test on predicting rainfall he would crush me like a bug.

OK, maybe I hang out with a select group within the village.  But still, there you have it.  Terrible IQ scores (if they could even take the test), real smarts.

So why should I think this book is the key to understanding economic underdevelopment?

Addendum: I am sorry there have been too many nasty comments, so I have taken the comments down.  They aren’t deleted forever, I like to think that I will have time to pick out the bad ones and put the thread back up.  I do understand that most of you (and not just on one side of the debate) are capable of discussing this topic with the appropriate tone.

By David Markson, fun, fun, fun.  Excerpt:

Curiously impressed by the fact that Auden paid everyone of his bills — electric, phone, whatever — on the same day that it arrived.

Or:

We evaluate artists by how much they are able to rid themselves of convention.
Said Richard Serra.

Is this a novel or a book of aphorisms?  Could it be a set of blog posts spread out over 190 pp.?  Who cares, I finished it.  Or:

A woman’s body is not a mass of flesh in a state of decomposition, on which the green and purplish spots denote a complete of cadaveric putrefaction.
An early critics presumed to inform Renoir.

1. Vie Francaise, by Jean-Paul Dubois.  He is the French Philip Roth; the bottom line is that I finished it, and not just because of the occasional mentions of Adam Smith.

2. Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, by Gerd Gigerenzer.  The author is a smart guy and an accomplished scholar, but despite his best efforts this book is a few years too late.

3. Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang, by Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok.  Inflation vs. cyclic theories, the latter help you stay an agnotheist by resolving the Goldilocks problem; only some of the universes through time have order as we know it.  I enjoyed it, even though I am sick of popular physics books.  It’s also the first time I’ve understood anything about the Higgs field debates.  Recommended.

4. The Right Talk: How Conservatives Transformed the Great Society into the Economic Society, by Mark A. Smith.  The main thesis is that right wingers have made America a more conservative society by framing issues in terms of economic reasoning.  Maybe I am too close to the topic, but I didn’t learn anything from the book.  At the very least it should interest progressives looking to mimic the successes (?) of the right wing.

5. Blankets, by Craig Thompson.  This I loved and read in one sitting; it is a very good introduction to graphic novels, especially if you are not thrilled by Alan Moore.

Editions of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy often have excessively small print.  Why?  The major works by those authors are long.  Larger print will make the volumes too long and thus too expensive.  Perhaps more importantly the volumes will appear too forbidding to the average buyer.

But isn’t miniscule type for Raskolnikov hard to read?  Ah…most of the people who buy the book don’t read it.  If miniscule type gets them to stop reading sooner rather than later, you might even call it a Pareto improvement.

Self-help books almost always have reasonably large print or even ridiculously large print.  The author doesn’t have much to say and the publisher wishes to pad the book so it looks real.  Furthermore most self-help books are read (at least in part), so to keep the reader happy the print should be large.

Can you think of other generalizations?

Which books are most likely to go into "Large Print" editions? 

John Reader’s Africa: A Biography of a Continent.  Most of all it offers historical and geographic reasons why African development has proven so problematic.  The author very frequently thinks in terms of mechanism, so it will be congenial to most economically-oriented readers.  Have you wondered why slavery is so common in African history, or why African societies are so frequently conservative and obsessed with the veneration of elders?  Why parasites can feast on humans so easily in Africa?  Why Africa has been underpopulated?

This book, which came out in 1997, is old news to many of you.  But I just discovered it, and it made for excellent airplane reading to the extremely livable, very beautiful, and tasty city of Denver.  If you are interested in African development, or economic geography more generally, this book is a must.

But not all is bright.  I now worry that, since I missed this book for ten years, there is something deeply deficient in my book-finding algorithms.  I thank Karol Boudreaux, who pointed the book out to me while we were in Tanzania.

I began by exposing the myth that imprecision, slowness, and noisiness are liabilities of brain function, "bugs" in computers.

That is from Read Montague’s new and notable Why Choose This Book?: How We Make Decisions, an in-depth look at neuroscience and the brain.

Why not read among your books?

Slate.com has a new book forum, I am also the T.C. on page two.  Excerpt from my contribution:

Clare Clark’s The Nature of Monsters is a flat-out fun read.  Set in 1718, the story blends influences from Edgar Allen Poe, Alfred Hitchcock, Michel Foucault (the potentially monstrous nature of scientific knowledge), and Daniel Defoe.  Imagine a veiled apothecary who appears to practice black magic, holds captive a woman who is virtually mentally retarded, and has strange dealings with a free-thinking bookseller.  Should you, as a pregnant woman without a husband, stay in his house or flee?  The tone of the book is serious, and the style is borrowed from the 18^th century. Things are most dangerous precisely when they appear most safe.

But is it underrated?  You’ll find more recommendations at the link.

We continue Underrated Week, noting that this entry is sure to inspire philosophic debate.  Can it plausibly be argued that Michael Jordan is an underrated basketball player?  That Wayne Gretzky is an underrated hockey player?  Yes, I say.

When it comes to the Western classics, I hold a few works above all others, and by an order of magnitude: Homer, the Hebrew Bible, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Shakespeare, Proust, Moby Dick, Joyce’s Ulysses (shriek if you wish), and the two major novels of Tolstoy.

Yes, those are the most underrated classics.  There are simply too many people who lump them in with Rabelais, Stendhal, Twain, Mann and other totally splendid but slightly less than divine works.  If I could read Italian, Dante might also make the list. 

Next in line would be Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Goethe’s Faust (German language version only), and of course Bleak House of Charles Dickens; read the latter carefully and you will see plot twists that very few if any critics catch.  If you’re simply listing the best novel whose wonders most educated people have no clue of (one extreme form of underrating), Bleak House is the clear winner (loser?) on the entire list.

Sara Bongiorni and her family attempted to live without goods made in
China for a year, and found that it was no simple task.  She has
documented the project in a book called, A Year Without ‘Made in China.

In a book?  A printed book?  You mean the kind of book that is made out of um…paper and ink?  Good luck Sara, I love you but for at least a year — maybe more — I won’t be reading any Chinese goods you try to send my way…

Here is the link.

Yes it is "Underrated Week" and our next genre is science fiction.

But – sorry guys — I don’t think there is much underrated science fiction.  You might think the genre as a whole is underrated, but within the genre there are so many sad desperate souls (I know, I am one of them) who will clutch at straws and elevate the mediocre into the worthwhile and the worthwhile into the superlative.

Science fiction has been treading water since the 1960s.  Since that time its most glorious achievements have been on the screen, not on the printed page.  There are some excellent individual books, such as Eon or Hyperion, but the genre is mostly retreads.  Nor do I think much of attempts to cross science fiction with "serious fiction," whether it is coming from Philip K. Dick or Doris Lessing.  Yes the idea is cool but the execution is usually quite flawed.

Still we all must have our picks, so here are mine:

1. Sphere, from Michael Crichton.  Forget the last few books.  He is the best science fiction writer in contemporary times, though his publisher works very hard to make sure that label does not stick.

2. Star Maker, by Olaf Stapledon.  Read Stapleton if you fervently believe that British Hegelianism is the missing element in most science fiction.  Yet this is probably my favorite science fiction novel of all time, who else can credibly skip over 20,000 years in a single breath?  "Civilizations rose and fell, yet now we must move on," or something like that.  Honorable mentions go to Stapledon’s Odd John and especially Sirius.

3. Jonathan Lethem, Gun with Occasional Music.  This is marketed as contemporary literature, which keeps away the science fiction fans.

It is hard to call Joe Haldeman underrated but still there are fans who don’t know he is one of the best science fiction writers, period.

I guess there is some underrated science fiction after all.

Crying Uncle: OK people, I retract the claim "Science fiction has been treading water since the 1960s."  Card and Butler are the most convincing counterexamples.

…is great fun.  I still can’t decide if it is a "good bad book," like Shantaram, or a "good good book," but it’s a good book of some kind or another. 

Imagine a cross between Memento and The Time Traveler’s Wife and you get halfway there.  There’s also plenty on when cheap talk equilibria matter (I hope you’ve seen Saw) and some visual influences from graphic novels and alternative typographies.  In any case it should become a big hit.

Many of you have asked for posts on the most underrated books.  Today will start a short flirtation with this topic ("underrated week," which of course starts on Friday) and we’ll break books down by category.

For mystery, I’ll nominate the works of Henning Mankel, although arguably he is not underrated any more by critics.  Verissimo’s Borges and the Eternal Orangutans is my other pick.  Or how about Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx?

Readers, comments are open…