Category: Books
Which books to take to Africa?
Niall writes me:
I have an optimization problem that I thought you and other loyal MR
readers, like myself, could help me with.The Question: How should I go about selecting books to bring with me for
a year of field research in rural Africa?Conditions:
1. I have a limited amount of weight I can carry on the flight
2. There is little or no access to additional books where I will be
3. I only expect to return to the US once during that yearThanks for continuing the to make MR the most educational blog on the web.
Sadly I do not know this fine gentleman. But I’ll suggest the following five books: Moby Dick, The Bible (but it must be a serious translation), Plato’s Dialogues, Homer’s Odyssey, and a long, fun book of science fiction or fantasy that you haven’t already read. LOTR would be a fine first choice if it fits that bill, otherwise ask around. The basic principles are that the works should be long, deep, divisible into smaller parts, capable of sustaining rereadings, culturally central in some way, and last of all you need one piece of pure fun. Readers, can you improve upon these tips?
I’ll add that if you read some language other than English, and thus read more slowly in that language, pick a book or two there as well.
The best sentence I read yesterday
Psychoanalysis is about what two people can say to each other if they agree not to have sex.
That is from Adam Phillips, in the new book Intimacies.
Why you should throw books out
I’m guest-blogging for Penguin just a bit, to promote the paperback edition of Discover Your Inner Economist. Here is my post on why you should throw books out. Natasha, alas, does not agree and sometimes she pulls them out of the trash and scolds me. But here is an excerpt in my defense:
Here’s the problem. If you donate the otherwise-thrashed book
somewhere, someone might read it. OK, maybe that person will read one
more book in life but more likely that book will substitute for that
person reading some other book instead.So you have to ask
yourself — this book — is it better on average than what an attracted
reader might otherwise spend time with? No I’m not encouraging
"censorship" of any particular point of view, but even within any
particular point of view most books simply aren’t that good. These
books are traps for the unwary. A lot of books don’t make the cut of
"above average to those readers they will attract" and of course since
you’ve spent some time with the volume you ought to be in a position to
know. (But note the calculation is tricky. Sometimes a very bad book
can be useful because it might appeal to "bad" readers and lure them
away from even worse books. Please make all the appropriate
calculations here.)
Note that the smarter and more discriminating are your friends, the higher the standard your book donations to them must meet. Toss it!
Grand New Party
The authors, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, invited me to their book party at Borders — and I wanted to meet them — but no I must stay home and read and blog their book! (I wrote this post last night.) If there was rush hour road pricing, as indeed they propose, I would have been there in a flash but no I am munching on cherries on my sofa.
The subtitle is "How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" and the Amazon link is here. Their favored policies include the following (with varying degrees of enthusiasm/utopianism on their part):
1. Family-friendly tax reform.
2. Sprawl is OK or at least it could be with rational traffic management policies.
3. Government reinsurance for catastrophic health care expenses, plus they consider the Brad DeLong health care plan.
4. Abolition of the payroll tax for many lower-income earners.
5. Allocate money to public schools on a student-weighted basis, as is done in San Francisco.
6. Reallocate funding toward lower-tier state universities and away from flagship schools.
7. Don’t expect old-style unions to come back.
That is only a sampling. The broader vision is that the Republicans can and must find a way to be more friendly to the non-rich. Personally I don’t see any reason to tie all of this to the Republican Party but I agree with most of their proposals. There’s a great deal of common sense here and it stands as one best general policy books in a long time.
The deep question is why something like this hasn’t already happened. You’ll find the superficial "Republicans are just pro-corporate crooks" answer from bloggers like Kathy G. Another possibility is that Republicans don’t get much electoral credit for pro-poor initiatives (just as many voters simply won’t believe that "Democrats can be tough"). The more competitive political messaging becomes, the more this constraint binds and so the policies of upward redistribution are more likely to be enacted by Republicans in the resulting political equilibrium. If the authors are to get their way somehow this dynamic must be reversed.
Addendum: I’ve met Reihan only in passing and I have not had substantive correspondence with either of the authors. Nonetheless the authors thank me in the conclusion for having saved them from "all manner of errors"; maybe this is another instance of the influence of blogs.
Second Addendum: You’ll find links to video and audio on the book at Ross’s blog.
W.H. Auden on banking
Auden wrote the following praise to Cyril Connolly about his recently published book:
As both Eliot and Edmund Wilson are Americans, I think Enemies of Promise is the best English book of criticism since the war, and more than Eliot or Wilson you really write about writing in the only way which is interesting to anyone except academics, as a real occupation like banking or fucking, with all its attendant boredom, excitement, and terror.
That is from Stefan Collini’s often quite interesting Common Reading: Critics, Historians, and Public.
First Stop in the New World
The subtitle is Mexico City, The Capital of the 21st Century. If you are familiar with this charming metropolis, it is a superb book. Excerpt:
Apart from the obvious problems of traffic and transportation, the growth created other confusing complications. Today, out of the city’s eighty-five thousand streets, there are about eight hundred fifty called Juárez, seven hundred fifty named Hidalgo, and seven hundred known as Morelos. Two hundred are called 16 de Septiembre, while a hundred more are called 16 de Septiembre Avenue, Alley, Mews, or Extension. Nine separate neighborhoods are called La Palma, four are called Las Palmas, and there are numerous mutations: La Palmita, Las Palmitas, Palmas Inn, La Palmas Condominio, Palmas Avenida, La Palma I y Palma I-II Unidad Habitacional.
Here is the Amazon link. Here is the author’s home page and blog, which has an excellent Raymond Chandler quotation.
Atmospheric Disturbances
It may be that friendship is nourished on observation and conversation, but love is born from and nourished on silent interpretation…The beloved expresses a possible world unknown to us…that must be deciphered.
That is Gilles Deleuze and it is the front quotation in the new novel Atmospheric Disturbances, by the very beautiful Rivka Galchen. The key premise of this novel is that a 51-year-old psychiatrist suddenly believes that his wife has been replaced with an exact look-alike; he refers to her as the Simulacrum. I read it straight through. Here is an interview with the author.
Review of Stephen Marglin on economics and community
Wow, is this scathing (or try this version). It’s by E. Roy Weintraub. I found the pointer on the Oxonomics blog.
The Price of Everything
Here is Ezra Pound’s Usura Canto, here is a link to Russell Roberts’s The Price of Everything: A Parable of Possibility and Prosperity, available for pre-order. Can you guess which one has the better economics? In fact Russ’s book is the best attempt to teach economics through fiction that the world has seen to date.
Here is Russ’s summary of the book. Here is Arnold Kling on the book.
O Economista Que Há Em Si
That’s the Portuguese-language version of Discover Your Inner Economist, the Amazon link is here. Here are various Portuguese-language web sites about the book. I am pleased to be represented in the Lusaphone world, as Portuguese is a very beautiful language, even when the topic is economics. Oddly Natasha insists that, heard at a distance, Portuguese sounds a great deal like Russian.
And of course the English language paperback edition of Inner Economist, just out and only $10 on Amazon, can be found here.
Bottomfeeder
The author is Taras Grescoe and the subtitle is "How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood," buy it here. Yes this is one of the best non-fiction books this year so far and yes I say that after having read (and mostly liked) the last five books on the exact same topic. I hope it does well because this book is an object lesson in how to best your competitors and we’ll see whether or not that matters.
Did you know that the average cell membrane of an American is now only 20 percent omega-3-based fats? In Japan it is 40 percent.
Or did you know that American sushi restaurants promising you "red snapper" are usually serving tilapia or perhaps sea bream.
The book has a superb explanation of how "frozen at sea" fish are now better, safer and tastier than "fresh fish," including for sushi.
English fish and chips was originated by Jewish merchants in Soho, drawing upon the same Portuguese traditions that led to tempura in Japan.
The Japanese are experimenting with acupuncture to keep fish alive and "relaxed" on their way from the ocean to being eaten.
Two of the practical takeaways from the book are a) if only for selfish reasons, do not eat most Asian-farmed shrimp, and b) eat more sardines. They are, by the way, very good with butter on sourdough bread.
This is one of the best single topic food books of the last five years. It is historical, practical, ethical, and philosophical, all at once.
What I’ve been reading
1. The Book of Love: The Story of the Kama Sutra, by James McConnachie. A serious book about…another serious book. It’s good.
2. Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It, by Elizabeth Royte. This is a subtler than expected treatment of the economics of bottled water.
3. Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture, by Grant McCracken, our leading practitioner of anthropology and marketing; he is always interesting so far I am just browsing this one.
4. Paul A. Offit, Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure. This superb book details how pseudo-science can attain such a grip on the human mind. It is a level better than the other books on the same topic and it is one of my favorite non-fiction books so far this year.
Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do
And the subtitle is "(and What It Says About Us)". The author is Tom Vanderbilt and here is the Amazon link. I wrote the following blurb for it:
"Everyone who drives–and many people who don’t–should read this book. It is a psychology book, a popular science book, and a how-to-save-your-life manual, all rolled into one. I found it gripping and fascinating from the very beginning to the very end."
It’s out in July and so far it is one of the best popular social science books of the year.
I also liked the article on traffic — John Staddon’s "Distracting Miss Daisy" — in the latest Atlantic Monthly. It had these two good sentences:
Paradoxically, almost every new sign put up in the U.S. probably makes drivers a little safer on the stretch of road it guards. But collectively, the forests of signs along American roadways, and the multitude of rules to look out for, are quite deadly.
What I’ve Been Reading
1. My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey, by Jill Bolte Taylor. What’s it like to lose half your brain in a stroke, be aware of the entire process, be unable to reason coherently, and then recover your faculties over the course of years? This first person account is written by a Harvard neuroscientist.
2. Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill. Many critics are claiming this is the first great 9-11 novel. It grips your attention immediately and has a strong craft but philosophically does it have anywhere to go? It is rare that I put a book down after the halfway mark but that was the case here. Some of you will like this but I look for something more exotic from my fiction.
3. Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect With Others, by Marco Iacoboni. This is now the go-to popular science book on mirror neutrons. I especially liked the discussion of why we find conversation easier than giving monologues (well, not everyone does), even though a priori you might expect the opposite.
4. Now the Hell Will Start: One Soldier’s Flight From the Greatest Manhunt of World War II, by Brendan I. Koerner. The story of a black WWII GI who goes AWOL and marries into a Burmese hill tribe. This could have been a great book but as it stands it is a "good enough to read" book. The digressions are often more interesting than the main story.
5. Hedge Funds: An Analytic Perspective, by Andrew Lo. Finally a serious book on hedge funds based on real data, written by a leading financial economist, and covering August 2007. I’ve only browsed the book but it is a must for anyone who follows this area.
6. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels. I read this (yet again) on the flight back from Japan, it is still one of the best books and one of the most important books for aspiring social scientists. A must-read if you don’t already know it.
The dumbing down of Borders
You leave the country for a few weeks and you come back to ruin. I’ve visited two Borders stores since my return and both have done away with their new books tables. In one case the table is still there but has about one-quarter as many books on it if that. The very best-selling books now get four to six piles on the table — or more — rather than leaving space for a greater number of titles with one stack a piece. The front of the store offers many more paperback books and many more bestsellers that have been doing well for months. Many bookshelves are gone altogether and replaced with non-book, non-CD, non-DVD items, such as expensive writing journals and gift cards. It’s much more like a Barnes and Noble.
In sum, the front of a Borders store no longer produces much information about the new titles on the market and it is no longer a good place for the well-informed to browse. I’ve yet to compare what’s stocked on the shelves but I am not hopeful about the trend. It’s hard to believe that the front of the store is the only site of ruin.
On the brighter side, maybe Borders Magic Shelf will prove of use. But check it out here — so far it doesn’t compare to browsing a well-stocked new books table nor for that matter Amazon.