Category: Books

Charles K. Rowley and Nathanael Smith, Economic Contractions in the United States: A Failure of Government.

Johan Norberg, Financial Fiasco: How America's Infatuation and Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis.

Nicole Gelinas, After the Fall: From Wall Street — and Washington.

The Voluntary City: Choice, Community and Civil Society, edited by David Beito, Peter Gordon, and Alex Tabarrok.  It's very much anti-zoning.  Here you can look inside the book.  I am genuinely puzzled by this progressive meme that GMU economists don't speak out adequately against zoning and in favor of more diverse, more vital, and more practical urban environments.

1. Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, by Michael Fried.  The text is weak (and mostly skippable), but still this had high value for me.  It's a look at how photography has become the centerpiece of contemporary art, starting with Jeff Wall and offering well-chosen color images from the leading creators.  I had been needing a book like this.

2. The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How American and Europe are Alike, by Peter Baldwin.  This book offers an onslaught of facts and statistics, toward the aim of showing that the United States and Europe aren't so different after all.  You also can read it as a critique of purely statistical reasoning.  At the very least, it's a good reference work even though I wasn't convinced by the central thesis.

3. Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything, by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell.  This is an exciting and prophetic book about taking the ideas of self-experimentation and self-recording to an extreme.  Record your entire life and then do…?…with the data.  Something, they'll figure it out.  Just record the recorders and run regressions on what ends up working.

4. The Perfect Fruit: Good Breeding, Bad Seeds, and the Hunt for the Elusive Pluot by Chip Brantley.  There is now a "go-to" book on the pluot and this is it.  It explains why plums vary so much in quality, why plums are usually bad these days, how the pluot was intended as a replacement, and why some stores call them plumcots.  I paid attention the whole way through.

5. The Informers, by Juan Gabriel Vasquez.  I loved the first part, about the guy's relationship with his dying father, but found the wartime blacklist story only "good."  Still, this is one of the better Colombian novels and I could imagine the author writing a truly great novel someday.  Here is one good review.

6. Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs.  Has any novel this year received better or more unanimous critical reviews?  The writing is smart, beautiful, and quirky and Moore is not afraid to let her main character be weird.  Still, I lost interest within one hundred pages and stopped reading.  I am willing to admit the fault may be mine and over Christmas I'll try it again.  Somehow I need more analytic structure in my fiction.  If you look at the Amazon reader reviews, they make related points.  Here is some background information on the book.  Do let me know if you loved it.

7. Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism.  My mouth watered at the thought of a popular (Norton) Joyce Appleby book on the origins of capitalism.  It is intelligent throughout but it wasn't teaching me anything so I put it down.  Skimming did not alter this impression.  It is more a disappointment than a bad book but it is a disappointment nonetheless.  All of a sudden she's afraid to take chances.

8. Strength in What Remains, by Tracy Kidder.  It bored me and I stopped.  It's OK but I view it as an inefficient blend of narrative and mild information about East African ethnic cleansing.  Most critics praised it.

The new Pamuk book, due out in October, is phenomenal and is getting better each day.

I always enjoy chatting with Russ.  Russ describes the dialogue as follows:

Tyler Cowen of George Mason University and author of Create Your Own Economy talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts
about the ideas in his recent book. The conversation ranges across a
wide array of topics related to information, the arts, and the culture
of the internet. Topics include how autistics perceive information and
what non-autistics can learn from them, what Buddhism might teach us
about our digital lives, the pace of change in the use of technology,
Nozick's experience machine and the relative importance of authenticity
and what the Alchian and Allen theorem has to do with the internet and
culture.

1. The Idea of Justice, by Amartya Sen.  This book is 415 pages of intelligent Sen-isms.  Key themes are the importance of public reasoning, the plurality of reasons, and the possibility of an impartial approach to major ethical questions.  We also learn that in 1938 Wittgenstein was determined to go to Vienna and give Hitler a stern lecture; he had to be talked out of it.  At the end of it all I was more rather than less confused about what impartiality means.  I don't blame that on Sen, but that says more about the book than any particular comment which I might make.  It's a very good introduction to Sen's ethical thought but it's ultimately the Wittgenstein anecdote which sticks with me.

2. Await Your Reply, by Dan Chaon.  This tripartite mystery about reinventing yourself has received rave reviews and Amazon readers are strongly positive.  I read about one hundred pages and thought it was ably done but of no real substance.

3. How to Make Love to Adrian Colesberry, by Adrian Colesberry.  My god this book is sick and I feel bad even telling you about it.  It's exactly what the title promises and it has no business being discussed on a family-oriented economics blog.  The language is explicit and the content is disgusting.  It's also brilliant, funny, and unique.  How often do I see a new approach to what a book can be?  Once you get past the language and topic, it's actually about narcissism, why empathy is scarce, how we form self-images, how men classify and remember their pasts, and why management fad books are absurd.

4. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, by Rebecca Solnit.  For many people
this may be a good book but I could not read far into it.  The main
thesis is quite interesting, namely that people forms immediate islands
of community and cooperation during very trying times.  The examples
include the San Francisco and Mexico City earthquakes, 9/11, and
Hurricane Katrina.  But I found the ratio of information to page was
too low for my admittedly extreme tastes.

Here is an interesting bit on how emergencies inspire crowd cooperation, not panic.

5. Das Museum der Unschuld, by Orhan Pamuk.  That's The Museum of Innocence in English, out in late October, but I found the German-language version in Stockholm.  It's in his "Istanbul nostalgic" mode rather than his "I'm trying to be like Italo Calvino" style and it promises to be one of his very best books.

That's the new Ayn Rand biography, written by Anne C. Heller.  It is a truly excellent, first-rate biography, at least up through my current p.111.  I know Ayn Rand is an emotional topic for many of you, pro, con, or somewhere in between.  But my praise of this book is analogous to how I might praise a biography of Jean Rhys or W.C. Handy.  It's simply a very good book by any objective [sic] standard and it should be of interest to any student of intellectual history, American popular fiction, libertarianism, or for that matter American history.

Did you know that Rand met her husband by deliberately tripping him?  Or that she received WPA funds during the New Deal? 

The author is by no means a "Randian" but she is willing to praise the famous Atlas Shrugged "money speech" as "original, complex, and although somewhat overbearing, beautifully written."  She nominates We the Living as Rand's most persuasive work in a literary sense.

Here is one blog review of the book, which is in any case recommended.

The authors are Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff and the subtitle is Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.  Here is the book's home page.

This book is of course self-recommending.  By "self-recommending" I mean it is obviously worthwhile and it looks as if I have read some of the content in advance.  By self-recommending I also mean…that I haven't read it yet.  Nonetheless someone needs to recommend it, so it recommends itself.

The appearance, after more than twenty years, of a second edition of John
Sutherland’s The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction, is exciting news
for Victorian enthusiasts, whether students, academics or readers. For the
book represents a staggering achievement that is unlikely ever to be
equalled. That a single scholar, working un-assisted, should undertake to
synopsize 554 (now 560) novels and offer biographical accounts of 878 (now
900) novelists, as well as compiling entries on forty-seven magazines and
periodicals, twenty-six major illustrators and thirty-eight (now forty-one)
miscellaneous items (“Sandism”, “the Yellowback”, “The Nautical Novel”), is
a feat that beggars imagination, especially since much of the work was
completed before the availability of the internet and searchable digitized
texts. In his Preface to the first edition Sutherland stated that it took
him five years to prepare the Companion. In his Preface to the new edition
he confesses that it was “the work of a decade”.

Here is more and I thank The Browser for the pointer.