Results for “What I've Been Reading”

442 found

1. Government and the American Economy: A New History, no editor but the book is dedicated to Bob Higgs by Price Fishback.  Imagine essays by economic history luminaries, mostly classical liberals, covering many different eras of American economic history.  For some this is a gold mine.

2. The Third Domain, by Tim Friend.  An overview of archaea, those odd life forms that survive where nothing else can.  A fascinating look at a still mysterious topic.  It’s not as well written as the top-drawer popular science books but since you probably know little or nothing about the topic the amount you will learn is high.

3. Empires of Trust: How Rome Built — and America is Building — a New World, by Thomas F. Madden.  This book is avowed pro-Roman, pro-American, and sees strong parallels across the two regimes; part of the thesis is that neither wanted to build an empire but had to.

4. The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America, by Maury Klein.  This is a big, clunky book with lots of poor exposition.  It also covers a vital era — the real Industrial Revolution — which has remained oddly neglected by too many economic historians.

5. The Race Between Education and Technology, by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz.  This is the most important book on modern U.S. inequality to date; here is my previous coverage of their ideas.  I’m still waiting for Paul Krugman to write a critique but right now their core hypothesis is looking strong.

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.

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.

1. Henning Mankel, Depths.  I loved this story.  Have I mentioned that Mankell is one of my favorite contemporary writers?

2. Nick Lane, Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life.  One of the best popular science books I’ve read in the last few years.  Among other matters he explains why curing aging isn’t so easy, why eukaryotes seem to have evolved only once, and why it often should be "The Selfish Cell" and not always "The Selfish Gene."  His book Oxygen is excellent as well.

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?

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.

1. Steven Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement.  It covers the Federalist Society, GMU School of Law, Institute for Justice, among other institutions.  The material rang true to what I know; Orin Kerr comments.

2. Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters.  This one blew me away; you don’t even have to like poetry, it is more like reading letters.  You do need to know a little about his life with Sylvia Plath to appreciate it.  A modern masterpiece, highly recommended.

3. 2666: A Novel, by Roberto Bolaño, you can pre-order it here.  So far I’m only reading the Amazon site every few days or so, thinking about when the book will come.

4. Francisco Goldman, The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?.  Maybe the best book on why Guatemala is such a mess but also on why there is hope.  Make sure you read the dissenting reviews on Amazon.

5. Hubble: The Mirror on the Universe, revised and updated, by Robin Kerrod and Carole Stott.  Stunning.  Most smart people make the mistake of not reading enough picture books.  It’s not just that the pictures are good; the text must concentrate on what is truly essential.

1. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein.

I liked Alan Schwartz’s Amazon review: ""Buy on apples, sell on cheese" is an old proverb among wine merchants. Taking a bite of an apple before tasting wine makes it easier to detect flaws in the wine, and the buyer who does so will not as easily make the mistake of paying more than the wine is worth. Cheese, on the other hand, pairs well with wine and enhances its flavor, so a seller who offers cheese may command a higher price for the wine (and may even deserve it, if the wine is intended to be drunk with cheese).""

2. Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.  Yes, that’s the Clay Shirky.  This is (implicitly) a very good Hayekian, spontaneous order treatment of social software on the web.  The book poses a simple and important question: what happens when it is virtually costless to organize people into groups?

3. Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa, by Robert Paarlberg.  The point is unassailable, the subtitle says it all.

4. Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: A Saudi Family in the American Century.  So far it’s great.  I know you’re sick of reading about Bin Laden; just think of it as a (partial) history of the Saudis.

Addendum: The new "Nudge" blog is here.

We have molecular gastronomy, so why not apply science to…other things, as does Mary Roach.  The subtitle is "The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex."  Here is the author’s home page; she also wrote Spook and Stiff, both of which are good.  This isn’t a "how to" book, it is a real popular science book on its topic and I predict it will be successful.

2. The Dawn of Indian Music in the West, by Peter Lavezzoli.  You need to care about the topic, but today this became one of my favorite non-fiction books, ever.  I bought a copy just to express my loyalty to the author.  I’ve said this before, but lack of knowledge of Indian classical music is the biggest gap in the education — and enjoyment — of many many smart people.  This is one very good introduction but it offers much to the veteran as well.

3. How Judges Think,  by Richard A. Posner.  Every sentence in this book is substance, to a remarkable degree.  It’s hard to find a central thread to the argument, but I blame that on the topic rather than on any failing of the author.  After all, judges think in some pretty complicated ways and Posner goes out of his way to minimize the role of conscious theory in judicial behavior.  Content aside (which reflects all of Posner’s usual erudition), anyone interested in non-fiction should take a look at this book.  Just imagine, a text totally stripped of that which is content-less.  Can the reader stand it?

1. Predictocracy: Market Mechanisms for Public and Private Decision-Making, by Michael Abramowicz.  A good compilation of current knowledge on prediction markets; he also argues for letting prediction markets determine many social decisions.  Here is his debate with Robin Hanson on the same.

2. Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East, by Robin Wright.  An intelligent and experienced book on current trends in the Middle East and why we should be optimistic that pluralism will triumph.  Here is one good review.

3. "What makes Finnish kids so smart?"

4. Superior, Nebraska: The Common Sense Values of America’s Heartland, by Denis Boyles.  Contra "What’s the Matter with Kansas?", Boyle argues that the Midwestern values of individual responsibility are wise and sophisticated and that the Republican Party embodies much of this wisdom.  The author lives…in France.  By the way, here are maps for per capita Starbucks and Wal-Mart.

5. Edward Castronova, Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun is Changing Reality.  This seems to be less popular than Synthetic Worlds but in terms of social science I think it is better and deeper; recommended.  Here is a Russ Roberts podcast with Castronova.

Descubre al Economista que llevas dentro.  That’s the Spanish language translation of my Discover Your Inner Economist, due out in Spain February 19.

You can order copies through some of these sources.

The translation is very well done and accurate, though it is odd to read myself sounding like a Spaniard instead of a colloquial Mexican.  Whenever I go to Spain I am in fact shocked to discover that there is an entire European country in which the people speak Spanish.  And they speak it well.

If you want to come to my talk in Madrid next week, here is the link.

1. Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America, by Andrei S. Markovits.  Not the usual swill on this topic; sadly the main prediction of this book is that the passing of Bush will not make America much more popular in Europe.  Read this short article on the same.

2. Dante, Paradiso, translated by Robert and Jean Hollander.  There still is not a gripping English-language Paradiso on the market, as the Mandelbaum translation is flawed as well and don’t ever trust Penguin translations with anything.  This one doesn’t elevate me as the text should.  But it has the best notes of any edition, is laid out most nicely, and is the best for trying to follow the Italian and cross-reference the translation.  If you buy only one English-language Paradiso maybe it is this one.  An alternative is the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow edition, lyrical but archaic, on-line for free.

3. Castles, Battles, and Bombs: How Economics Explains Military History, by Jurgen Brauer and Hubert van Tuyll.  The table of contents looks amazing, but my browsing indicated this book to be boring.  Still, some of you should read it.  It is full of factual substance, slotted into an economic framework.

4. Americanos: Latin America’s Struggle for Independence, by John Chasteen.  Every now and then a history book sweeps you up into its world; this one did it for me, most of all the treatment of Alexander von Humboldt but from beginning to end as well.  The best and most readable book on its topic.

5. William Gibson, Neuromancer.  Wow, this is now twenty-four years old.  I’m teaching it next week in Law and Literature class.  Upon rereading what strikes me most is how little science fiction it offers and how much it follows in the stylistic footsteps of Hammett and Chandler.

1. Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America’s Soul, by Michael Reid.  A good treatment of the region’s recent history; it is best for its balanced assessment of what market-oriented reforms have managed or not.

2. Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?: The Transformation of Modern Europe, by James J. Sheehan.  Blah, blah, blah, blah, Europe has fewer soldiers than it used to, blah.  Blah.  Sheehan is a first-rate historian, but there’s not much to this book.

3. Architecture of Authority, by Richard Ross.  This book is nothing more than photos of jail cells, parole hearing rooms, Mary Boone Gallery, and the like.  Thought-provoking.

4. Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism, by John Updike.  Scattered essays on just about everything.  Completely apart from his fiction, Updike is simply one of the smartest and most impressive people out there.  It is amazing how many topics he knows so much about and how well he writes about them.

5. Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (And Stick You With the Bill), by David Cay Johnston.  This is quite a good compendium of different ways that government screws us over, written from a mixed populist/libertarian point of view.  Recommended.  I expected not so much but the substance here held my attention.  I’d now like to know the total welfare cost of all these bad policies.

1. India, by Michael Wood.  This book looks ordinary but it is a wonderful (selective) history which captures the magic of India.  Recommended to both the beginner and the expert.

2. Las Benévolas, by Jonathan Littell, the Spanish-language edition of this famous French novel just came out (I don’t read French).  Here is the French edition.  Here are some of the raves.  Here is a critical review.  I loved the first twenty pages and was bored by the next thirty.  We’ll see how far I get in this Spanish-language edition of almost 1000 pages.  My current best guess is that a WWII-themed novel of this kind simply can’t be that original.  The French love it, perhaps, because an American-born writer wrote it in the French language.

3. Angus Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD.  This is a good summary of knowledge about economic growth, by a premier empirical economist.  But, as I am already familiar with the basic literature, I couldn’t find any reason to keep on reading.

4. The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World, by Eric Weiner.  This book is well-written, witty, and deserving of its current bestseller status.  At first I thought it was just fluff, but its applied, anecdotal, and travel-based approach gives one of the better windows on happiness across cultures.  His particular observations are astute, especially on Switzerland and Thailand; in the latter case, referring to sex, he writes that something which cannot be shoved under the rug is now regarded as a piece of furniture.

5. Virginia Postrel on Ron Paul, no spam bots please.

I’ve discarded lots of unfinished books on this trip, but two have stood out for their excellence:

1. The Past, by Alan Pauls.  I don’t usually like drug-fueled tales of unhealthy sexual obsession, but I’ll make an exception for this one.  This Argentine novel has received rave reviews across Europe, but still does not seem to have a U.S. publisher; the Amazon link is to a UK edition.  It’s uneven, but it has a higher number of memorable scenes than almost any other contemporary novel.

2. The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, by Alvaro Mutis.  Imagine a Colombian version of 1001 Nights and Don Quixote, in novella form.  This is 700 pp. of sheer delight, and it also indicates we are just starting to figure out which Latin American works of fiction will prove of lasting importance.  This is one of them, and another superb translation from Edith Grossman.

If I read two works of fiction this good in 2008, I will be grateful.