Results for “best book”
1829 found

Can you judge a book by its cover?

Greatman
I saw this and thought I should buy the book — Kate Christensen’s novel The Great Man — just because I liked the cover.  As an experiment, I deliberately did not scan the contents or read the blurbs on the back.  The title isn’t very descriptive either.  I then bought the book.

My thought was this: presumably the publisher designs the cover to
appeal to people who will spread favorable word of mouth about the
book.  As a sometimes good (but non-reductionist) Bayesian, if I like
the cover I should infer I will praise the book.  Furthermore I should
be especially keen to buy on this basis for a "word of mouth book," and
indeed this author does not have a celebrity name.

If I like the cover *a lot*, can I receive a worse evaluation by
checking out the blurbs and thus skewing or minimizing my gut reaction
to the image?  Surely if someone is able to manipulate me, my optimal
strategy is let just some of the manipulative information through.  The
case for viewing the cover — and only the cover — is simply that many
more people see the cover than evaluate any other part or aspect of the
book.  Might we then not expect the cover to be the strongest and best
thought out signal?

I can now report that the topic of the book interests me greatly,
and I am enjoying the first half of the book.  I fully expect to finish
it.

I will continue this experiment by buying another book just for its cover.

I do understand that this is usually considered the strategy of a relatively stupid person.

Under what conditions should a smart person prefer books with stupid or ugly covers?

Under what conditions should you — for non-superficial reasons — prefer other items, just because of their looks?

Five Best

This is one of my favorite features of The Wall Street Journal.  Yesterday they asked Kanye West to name his five favorite restaurants.  Usually (and more usefully) some other celebrity is asked to name five favorite books, CDs, or movies.

Five is enough to frame the namer’s tastes.  And your chance of learning about a new peak experience is relatively high.  Even if you get no useful information, you’ve had a chance to judge a celebrity.

I believe this method of "criticism" will become increasingly popular.  The biggest potential downside is encouraging excess winner-take-all behavior on the part of producers.

Addendum: Here are favorites from HobNobBlog.

What are the best novels for teaching economics?

Ezra Klein asks me:

What do you think the best fiction books are for understanding economics?  Left and right?  From my perspective on the spectrum, I’d go with Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, but I’d be interested to hear your favorites…

Some will cite Harrison Bergeron, the Vonnegut anti-egalitarian short story.  Others would nominate Ayn Rand, anarcho-capitalist science fiction, and of course there are the fictional-economic creations of Russ Roberts.  But what are the Western classics that — policy polemics aside — teach one how to think like an economist?

My attention is usually drawn to 1660-1775 in British fiction, starting with Defoe and continuing through Swift, Boswell, and just about everyone else.  To my eye they all thought like rational choice economists, albeit strange ones with a focus on approbation, self-deception, and the perverse social consequences of individual action (see my In Praise of Commercial Culture, the chapter on literature, for more detail).  They are the true roots of Smith’s TMS.  Dickens and Balzac are contenders, but I find them a bit too one-note, as is Harriet Martineau.  Nonetheless the eighteenth century works remain ahead of their time and they certainly don’t teach basic economics or help one think much about policy.

What are your picks?

What are the best novels about politics?

Queried here, I will simplify and make it books, period, but restrict it to fiction, not counting philosophy.  My list of five:

1. Shakespeare’s Henriad, a no-brainer at #1, if you count it as more than one book it still should take up as many slots as it needs.  Psychology is primary and stands above politics, and libertinism is by no means unrelated to power.

2. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, vanity, pride, and self-deception are the keys to understanding political behavior, plus Swift shows an understanding of "the rules of the game."

3. Montesquieu, Persian Letters, yikes, have you ever seen that Monty Python skit "Summarize Proust"?

4. Sophocles, Antigone, the claims of the family vs. the claims of the state continue to plague Iraq and many other places.

5. Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, the former is not just a good tale but also a profound comparative study of regimes, the latter is the brutal truths of war.

Interestingly none of these are proper novels.  I read Kafka’s The Trial as more about theology than worldly affairs.  As for politics as a profession, the source from The Economist recommends "Primary Colors", C.P. Snow’s "The Corridors of Power", and "All the King’s Men".

It is less fruitful and less fun to guess at the best novels about business and economics, perhaps because the relevant truths seem banal in a fictional context.

Grab bag of books

1. Vicki Howard, Brides, Inc.: American Weddings and the Business of Tradition.  Weddings have become big business; this book tells you how and why.

2. Matthew D. Adler and Eric A. Posner, New Foundations of Cost-Benefit Analysis.  There is not exactly a new thesis here, but it is the most intelligent discussion to date of the strengths and limits of cost-benefit analysis.

3. Nation-States and the Multinational Corporation, by Nathan M. Jensen.  Rule of law and credibility, not low corporate taxes, are the key features in luring foreign investment.  You pro-tax people might think this is good news, but it probably just means that the burden of those taxes falls on labor, or on consumers.

4. The Marketplace of Christianity, by Robert B. Ekelund, Robert Hebert, and Robert D. Tollison.  This book is full of stimulating hypotheses, especially if you don’t flinch at chapters with titles like "The Counter-Reformation: Incumbent-Firm Reaction to Market Entry."  The economics of religion remains one of the most exciting fields.

5. Democratic Constitutional Design and Public Policy: Analysis and Evidence, edited by Roger Congleton and Birgitta Swedenborg.  This book offers the best minds in European public choice, Barry Weingast, and Roger.

If you read only one book by Orhan Pamuk

The White Castle is short, fun, and Calvinoesque.  Not his best book but an excellent introduction and guaranteed to please.  Snow is deep, political, and captures the nuances of modern Turkey; it is my personal favorite.  The New Life isn’t read often enough; ideally it requires not only a knowledge of Dante, but also a knowledge of how Dante appropriated Islamic theological writings for his own ends.  My Name is Red is a complex detective story, beloved by many, often considered his best, but for me it is a little fluffy behind the machinations.  The Black Book is the one to read last, once you know the others.  Istanbul: Memories and the City is a non-fictional memoir and a knock-out.

Random rants on music and books

1. Bob Dylan’s latest has received rave reviews just about everywhere.  Who can doubt an honest effort from the elder statesman?  In reality it is little more than a repackaged version of his last two (superb) albums and thus mostly predictable and mostly boring.  By the way, it is becoming clearer — against all former odds — that he was often a horrible lyricist but he remains, even in his dotage, a remarkable vocalist.

2. I loved the first half of Samuel Beckett’s Watt, but then lost the thread of the book.  Beckett’s fiction remains underread, if only because we’ve yet to figure out just how good it is (or isn’t).  The best parts are astonishing, but at times I feel I am listening to one of those unfunny British radio comedy shows.

3. Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children is a novel about thirty-somethings, in a pre- and post 9-11 NYC, transitioning (or not) into adulthood.  That is a recipe for literary trouble.  But I bought it anyway, trusting Meghan O’Rourke, and yes it deserves the sterling reviews.  I kept expecting Megan McArdle to show up as a character and give them all a good talking-to about microeconomics, which is exactly what the characters need.

4. The best world music release of the last year or so remains Amadou and Mariam, Dimanche a Bamako.  It is also the best pop album of the last year.  The two Mali musicmakers are blind and also married to each other.  I don’t see how anyone could help but love this music.  After a year from its purchase, I’m still listening to it.

5. Steven Slivinki’s Buck Wild: How Republicans Broke the Bank and Became the Party of Big Government is exactly what the subtitle suggests.  How did that happen?  One factor is that the Republicans found Democratic rule too horrible a prospect to bear and they became more populist.  Let’s hope the Democrats don’t make a comparable mistake.

6. Stephen Miller’s Conversation: The History of a Declining Art.  I loved the title, hated the subtitle.  Much of the book, which considers the preconditions of good conversation, is fascinating and, despite its popular level, goes beyond the muddled arguments of Habermas.  It collapses when it argues that the quality of conversation is declining in the modern world.  The evidence consists solely of examples of bad modern conversations.

Lynne Munson reviews my book

She covers Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding, in The Weekly Standard.  Here is the link, which offers only a bit of the review to non-subscribers.  Here is an excerpt from the critical part of her review:

…few critical observers would agree that contemporary American art has put its best work forward in recent decades, when our artists and art institutions have enjoyed more riches than at any other time in history.  Contemporary American artmaking has been monopolized for nearly a half-century by postmodernism, a politics-obsessed formulaic approach that has yielded such shock-art masterpieces as Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (which finds itself in numerous museum collections).  Artists who do not work in the postmodern mode are excluded from museum exhibitions and the best galleries.

Of course, no better can be said of the products of the European art world, whose denizens have, at best, striven to vie with their postmodern American counterparts for the prize of Most Shocking.  But to argue, as Cowen does, that "the American model encourages artistic creativity [and] keeps the politicization of art to a minimum," is to be unaware of how narrow and prescriptive American artmaking has become.  The simple fact is that artmaking in America has been taken over by a single bad idea, despite the ample and diverse funding it receives.

Her last sentence is a good illustration of how two people can look at the same facts and see such very different patterns.