Category: Books

At the end of the day, the true advances won’€™t come in the Kindle, but
in the content. Just as the capabilities of the device will shape what
authors decide to do with it, so too will the decisions of authors
shape the evolution of the device. The Kindle a€™s homepage already
features videotaped testimonials from such literary luminaries as Toni
Morrison, Michael Lewis, James Patterson, and Neil Gaiman. But what the
Kindle, and Amazon, need is not their kind words, but more of their written
words, composed with an eye toward the possibilities offered by
electronic text. Just as the early television shows were really radio
programs with moving images, the early electronic books are simply
printed text uploaded to a computer. Amazon could use its unique
position to change that.

Here is more.  Here is Megan McArdle on Kindle: "Best thing since sliced bread."  Here is me on Kindle, before and after trying it.

Nixon, who became vice president at age 40, was well described as “an old man’s idea of a young man.”

That is from this review of Nixonland, a book which is rapidly approaching the top of my pile. 

I really, really do.  All perfume, and yes that means yours too.  But I loved the book Perfumes: The Guide, by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez.  If you are rating this book along the single dimension of how skillfully it informs the reader, it is one of the best non-fiction books I have read, ever.

Plus it has good sentences like:

Nobody ever died from wearing Mitsouko, but lots of babies were born as a result of it.

And:

Fragrances for men are mostly identical crap, designed to trap you and give you away as a lout.

Recommended.

1. Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights, by Bill Ivey.  The concrete discussions of cultural issues are consistently interesting and thoughtful; the overall talk of cultural rights which frames the book is not even well-developed enough to be called absurd.  The book is best on copyright and least interesting on the NEA, which Ivey once ran.  Most of all the book reflects a creeping horror that the internet will make its entire series of debates irrelevant.

2. Apples are from Kazakhstan: The Land that Disappeared, by Christopher Robbins.  A substantive travel book about you-know-where; it is both fun and full of substance.  Recommended.

3. The Monetary Policy of the Federal Reserve: A History, by Robert L. Hetzel.  This is a very serious treatment of what is, from a historical point of view, an understudied topic.  Recommended; note that while the monetarist point of view is not heavy-handed, it may not appeal to everybody.

4. Philip Bobbitt, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century.  A lengthy and thoughtful volume on how WMD are *the* problem of the future, though I found it didn’t get me further to thinking through my views.  A good start, however, for those who don’t buy the premise.

5. 1001 Buildings You Must See Before You Die.  One of the best books for browsing I have seen, though don’t expect much from the index.  I was most surprised by the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center in New Caledonia, have any of you been there?

On average, how many people are airborne over the US at any given moment?

That’s a typical question from the new Princeton University Press book by Lawrence Weinstein and John Adam.  The title is Guesstimation and the subtitle is: Solving the World’s Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin.

What’s your guess and why; let us know in the comments and I’ll post their answer later today.  The book also tackles such hoary chestnuts as "How many piano tuners are there in Los Angeles," although for mysterious reasons (are they mostly part-timers?) they fall far short of the actual number in the L.A. Yellow Pages.

This book isn’t for everyone but if you think you might like it you probably will.

Addendum: I post the authors’ answer at about comment #31.

You’ll find them here, free and on-line, courtesy of Division of Labor and Michael Greinecker.  The most famous is Kenneth Arrow’s Social Choice and Individual Values but there are many classics in the series; in fact the hit rate is remarkably high even if they are not all recommended for the general reader.  Here is Wikipedia on the Cowles Commission, and by the way it is pronounced "coals."  Here is much more background, including links to photos.  Here is the current home page of an institution which is no longer distinctive precisely because it triumphed.  How is this for a casual sentence:

Several Cowles associates have won Nobel prizes for research done while at the Cowles
Commission. These include Tjalling Koopmans,
Kenneth Arrow, Gerard Debreu,
James Tobin, Franco Modigliani, Herbert Simon,
Lawrence Klein, Trygve Haavelmo and Harry Markowitz.

Razib thinks so:

I think that it is somewhat peculiar that many
of us find fiction from the past more engaging than popular
contemporary works. Aupelius’ Golden Ass gets my attention; most contemporary fiction does not.  I
am arguing here that this is partly due to the fact that in the past
those who read copiously were, on average, much more like me than they
were like the typical human. Not only were readers by and large
men (usually of some means and comfort), but they were often also
disproportionately eggheads who were eccentric by their nature. How
many elite scholars were there such as Claudius
who were not attracted to the public life of politics and do not appear
in the annals of history? With the printing press, cheaper paper, and
the rise of mass literacy, things changed, the distribution of taste shifted.  And so did the distribution of genres.

Read the whole thing.  I believe that literary "market taste" was closest to mine in the 1920s, a remarkable decade that saw the publication of major works by Proust, Mann, Joyce, Rilke, Kafka, and numerous other masterpieces.  That may be more a "spirit of the times" effect than an audience composition effect, since I prefer it to earlier and more elite periods as well.  (Or maybe only by then did fiction get dumbed down to my level!)

When it comes to Roman literature there is also a significant selection effect, namely what later manuscript collectors thought was worth preserving and protecting.  Many novels were written during Roman times, but not many of them have come down to us and thus the average quality of Roman literature may look artificially high, just as the average quality of today’s literary menagerie looks artificially low.

James Joyce, Ulysses, Kindle edition, $3.19.  Free shipping, too. 

Is the book market going the way of the music market, where there is a systematic redistribution of the surplus toward suppliers of the hardware rather than suppliers of the content?

Dani Rodrik tries an experiment:

Princeton University Press ran a small ad for my book last Sunday in the New York Times book review. I was curious if it would have any effect on sales, so I ran a little experiment.  I checked the book’s sales ranking in amazon.com at periodic intervals starting on Saturday afternoon.

But the ad didn’t matter so much (see also the comments on the post).  I would note a few points of speculation:

1. Below the top tier, a book can rise rapidly through the Amazon rankings without selling so many extra copies.

2. Amazon buyers are better educated and not representative of the market as a whole.

3. It is an open question whether the Amazon rankings are "honest," or strategically designed to sell what is hot at the moment, by making it look especially hot.

4. The best question to ask is: Is your book in Wal-Mart and Costco?

5. The next best metric is to check its location in Barnes and Noble.

6. Success of a book in Borders is less representative of overall success than it used to be; Borders (which is on the verge of going under, I might add) is now closer to an "indie" book store in many ways than it is to B&N.

Addendum: Chug writes in the comments: "display ads for books are not to sell books. they are for good relations between the publisher and the author…."

Surprise.  That’s against his deathbed instructions, in case you haven’t been following the controversy.

1. The World is What It Is, by Patrick French.  This authorized (yes, authorized) biography digs up all the dirt on V.S. Naipaul; I’ve never read anything like it.  Here is a Paul Theroux review.  Here is another rave review.  Theroux’s own self-loathing, quasi-fictional biography of his "friendship" with Naipaul — Sir Vidia’s Shadow — remains one of my favorite books but this is a wonderful sequel.  And if you haven’t read through Naipaul’s ouevre you should, especially A Bend in the River, A Turn in the South, and Among the Believers, among others.  There is something to be said for misanthropy raised to an art form and packed with intellectual content.

2. Paradise with Serpents, by Robert Carver.  The only question is whether this is the first or the second best book on Paraguay in the English language; here is the other contender.

3. The wisdom of Arnold Kling

4. Problems with farm price futures, worth a read.

The author is Bill Kauffman and the subtitle is The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism.  Here is one excerpt:

Above all, they feared empire, whose properties were enumerated well by the doubly pen-named Garet Garrett: novelist, exponent of free enterprise and individualism, and a once-reliable if unspectacular stable horse for the Saturday Evening Post.  Writing in 1953, he set down a quintet of imperial requisites.

1. The executive power of the government shall be dominant.

2. Domestic policy becomes subordinate to foreign policy.

3. Ascendancy of the military mind to such a point at last that the civilian mind is intimidated.

4. A system of satellite nations.

5. A complex of vaunting and fear.

He could have listed this too.  In my view this book goes wrong by failing to consider that the right-wing, anti-militarist tradition was wrong on some pretty critical cases.  Nonetheless if you are looking for a well-informed, well-written, and up-to-date book on that tradition, consider this your go-to source.

The Dutch edition is out now, or at least I have copies in my hands.  You can buy it at these places.  The Korean edition is out as well, but I don’t know how to Google the title.