Results for “What I've Been Reading”
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What I’ve been reading

The Story of Silver, by um…William Silber, probably is the best book on silver, as I suppose it should be.  How many other books have this same property of coincidence of name and topic?  Did James Igel ever write a book on hedgehogs?

Adrian Tinniswood, The Royal Society & the Invention of Modern Science is the best short introduction to its stated topic.

Linn Ullmann, Unquiet: A Novel.  A novel, yes, but also a not so thinly veiled memoir of life with her two very famous parents Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann.  Fantastic if you already know the back story, but at the very least readable if you don’t.

Kenneth M. Pollack, Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness.  Pollack takes a look at the systematic dysfunctionalities behind Arab militaries, arguing most of them have been worse than the North Korean or Somalian fighting forces.  Jordan in 1948, Hizbullah, and early ISIS are the main exceptions here, British training in the former case being a factor and morale a factor in the latter two cases.

Andrew S. Curran, Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely.  A good filling-in of what were to me many blanks in the life of Diderot, a figure whom I never can decide whether he is underrated or overrated.

What I’ve been reading

1. Josh Rosenblatt, Why We Fight: One Man’s Search for Meaning Inside the Ring.  An actual conceptual phenomenology of fighting, there should be more books like this about more different topics.  Think of the model “X is actually like this.”  Recommended.

2. Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, State Capture: How Conservative Activists, Big Businesses, and Wealthy Donors Reshaped the American States — and the Nation.  A serious and scholarly book, rather than the kind of hysterical falsehoods we’ve come to expect on such topics.

3. Peter Doggett, Are You Ready for the Country? Elvis, Dylan, Parsons and the roots of country rock.  Five hundred pages of text, and consistently interesting throughout, at least if you care about the topic.  Otherwise not.  I have pre-ordered the author’s forthcoming biography of CSNY.

4. Tony Spawforth, The Story of Greece and Rome.  Highly readable and useful, not comprehensive on say the economics side but a fresh look and what we know and do not know and how the various pieces fit together.

What I’ve been reading

1. Jackie Chan, with Zhu Mo, Never Grow Up. “My ankle joint pops out of its socket all the time, even when I’m just walking around, and I’ll have to pop it back in.  My leg sometimes gets dislocated when I’m showering.  For that one, I need my assistant to help me click it back in…I can’t lift heavy objects.”  He needed brain surgery after filming Armour of God, and he sustained permanent hearing loss in his left ear.  Recommended, if you like the movies.  And: “That was how I pursued girls, I overwhelmed them.”

2. John L. Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire: the Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844.  “…the rise of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints can only be understood if it is placed in the context of the hermetic tradition.  The distinctive doctrines of the church — preexistent spirits, material spirit, human divinization, celestial marriage — are opaque unless we explore their relationship to the evolving fusion of hermetic perfectionism and radical sectarianism occupying the extreme edge of the Christian tradition from the late Middle Ages into the early modern age.”

3. Guy Arnold, Africa A Modern History: 1945-2015, second edition.  It is hard to image that a 1077 pp. doorstop kind of a book on “Africa” might be very good, but in fact this one is.  It is the best book on contemporary Africa and its (recent) historical roots that I know.  I am reading this book all the way through.

4. Cass Sunstein, How Change Happens.  How does social change happen, organized around Cass’s favorite topics, such as nudge and polarization and cascades.  This book doesn’t cover everything, but it is one of the essential introductions to a topic that is very difficult to handle.  And I am happy there is no subtitle.

Joshua S. Goldstein and Staffan A. Qvist, A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow, is a good and correct “green” take on the case for nuclear energy.

The Cato Institute has put out Michael D. Tanner, The Inclusive Economy: How to Bring Wealth to America’s Poor, and Randal O’Toole Romance of the Rails: Why the Passenger Trains We Love are Not the Transportation We Need.

What I’ve been reading

1. Elaine Dundy, Life ItselfShe as a teen taught Mondrian how to jitterbug, married Kenneth Tynan and moved into London high society, became an important writer in her own right, and got tired of him wanting to whip her.  I was never inclined to stop reading.

2. Amina M. Derbi, The Storyteller and the Terrorist in Our Newsfeeds.  In this novella a Muslim girl in Northern Virginia posts stories of murders on-line and those murders start coming true.  I finished this one too.  Unusual in its approach.

3. Timothy Larsen, The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith.  On the surface this is an account of various famous British anthropologists and their views toward Christianity.  At a deeper level it contrasts the anthropological and religious approaches to understanding society.  Why do so many anthropologists have more tolerant attitudes toward the religions they study than to Christianity?  Do the Christian beliefs of an anthropologist help or hurt that individual’s understanding of other religions in the field?  Once you’ve seen another religion “from the outside” as an anthropologist, and observed its apparently arbitrary features, can you still be religious yourself?  Definitely recommended, here is my previous review of Larsen on John Start Mill.

4. Colin M. Waugh, Paul Kagame and Rwanda: Genocide and the Rwandan Patriotic Front.  This is perhaps the most conceptual book I know on the Rwandan genocide, most of all because it ties the killings to both prior and posterior events very well.  Recommended, but (for better or worse) note the author is relatively sympathetic to Kagame in the post-conflict period.  I did just buy Waugh’s book on Charles Taylor and Liberia, which you can take as a credible endorsement of this one.

Noteworthy is Kieran Healy, Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction.  I have not read it, but had positive impressions from my paw-through.

What I’ve been reading

Leo Damrosch, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends who Shaped an Age.  The same 18th century British club had as members Samuel Johnson, Boswell, Burke, Gibbon, Adam Smith, Joshua Reynolds, Sheridan, Goldsmith, and David Garrick (often considered the greatest actor of the time).  I never tire of reading about them.

Andrew Arsan, Lebanon: A Country in Fragments.  At first this book feels like a kind of running splat, but with a bit of patience it becomes a remarkably compelling portrait of a society on the brink, most of all a desperate love letter to Beirut.  If you can get through the squirrelly early political material, this is one of the best “country books” and also “city books” of the last few years.

James Simpson, Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism, feels throughout as if it is an important book.  And anyone interested in religion and development should read this one.  Yet I had trouble following the actual arguments.  It is probably good.

Marixa Lasso, Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal, stresses just how interesting a place was pre-canal Panama, contrary to what I had thought.

Vernon Smith, The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Reflections on Faith, Science, and Economics.  Published by the Acton Institute, this is Vernon on his conversion to Christianity, Kahlil Gibran, and why science and religion are compatible.  Short, of interest to those looking to understand the man.

Joel Waldfogel, Digital Renaissance: What Data and Economics Tell Us about the Future of Popular Culture.  My blurb is: “Digital Renaissance makes a real contribution to the economics of the Internet and the economics of art and culture.”

What I’ve been reading

1. Sevket Pamuk, Uneven Centuries: Economic Development of Turkey since 1820.  The best economic history of Turkey I know, it comes with strong recommendations from Daron Acemoglu and Dani Rodrik.  Not an engaging read, but a useful survey.

2. Nell Dunn, Talking to Women.  Interviews with British (and Irish) women, circa 1964, remarkably frank and open, “witty, anarchic, and sexually frank.”  Strongly recommended, is it possible that the quality of discourse on these matters has not much advanced or even declined?

3. Charles Allen, Coromandel: A Personal History of South India.  “I have called this book Coromandel chiefly for sentimental reasons.  I first became aware of that sonorous word as a fifteen-year-old schoolboy exiled in England.  Coromandel! was the title of the third in a series of Boy’s Own-style adventure stories set in India written by John Masters, an ex-Indian Army officer turned popular novelist.  It was all about a West Country lad who sails to India with a map to find the legendary Coromandel and make his fortune.  I reread it recently and found it not half as good as I thought it was — but the magic of that word Coromandel has always stayed with me, as the very essence of South India in all its elusiveness and allure.  I’m not alone in thinking this.”

4. Sally Rooney, Normal People.  A novel, they’re not, Irish, recommended.

Louise I. Shelley, Dark Commerce: How a New Illicit Economy is Threatening Our Future, is a useful survey of varying kinds of black and dark markets.

M. Todd Henderson, Mental State, “When conservative law professor Alex Johnson is found dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound at his house in Chicago, everyone thinks it is suicide.  Everyone except his brother, Royce, an FBI agent.”

Kimberly Clausing, Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital delivers exactly what its subtitle promises.

Jeffrey Lane, The Digital Street, is an interesting and original urban ethnography of how digitalized media, and the recording of street interactions, affect gang norms and patterns of violence.

What I’ve been reading

1. Richard A. Arenberg, Congressional Procedure: A Practical Guide to the Legislative Process in the U.S. Congress.  You know, this stuff matters a lot more than it used to.

2. Timothy Larsen, John Stuart Mill: A Secular Life.  Covers the evolution of religion in Mill’s life, and stresses that toward the very life he turned back to a religiously-oriented world view.  Arguably all of the (< 12) people at Mill’s funeral were Christians.  As a side benefit, the book has an illuminating treatment of the romance with Harriet Taylor.  I’ve since ordered four other of Larsen’s books, the ultimate compliment.

3. Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs.  An excellent history book in its own right, this is also one of the best sources for understanding the 19th century roots of our current dilemma.  Reading everything by Daniel Walker Howe is in fact a good algorithm for proceeding in life.

Daniel S. Hamermesh, Spending Time: The Most Valuable Resource is a good introduction to what economists know about the allocation of time, both evidence and theory.

Adam Zamoyski, Napoleon: A Life I read only some parts of, and found very well-written and entertaining, but it wasn’t sufficiently conceptually innovative to hold my interest.

Jacy Reese has a new book The End of Animal Farming: How Scientists, Entrepreneurs, and Activists are Building an Animal-Free Food System.  It is overstated, but still better than the near-unanimous ignoring of these issues which goes on in the economics profession.

What I’ve been reading

1. Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom.  I hadn’t realized that so much was known about her life, or that she spent so much time in Canada, or that she fell into such obscurity during the early part of the twentieth century.  She died the same year Rosa Parks was born.  I liked this book very much.

2. Tom Miller, China’s Asian Dream: Empire Building Along the New Silk Road.  A good look at the new conflicts between China and its southeast Asian and central Asian neighbors.  Clear enough to be a good introduction, detailed enough to be useful to those who already know something about the topic.

3. Robert Alter, The Art of Bible Translation.  Alter is one of today’s most important doers, and his forthcoming Hebrew Bible translation is likely to be definitive and the most important act of publication this year.  This short volume presents his perspective on what he has done, most of all focusing on how to turn Hebrew into English.

4. Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny.  How does human psychological growth run in the first seven years, in particular how does it instill “culture” in us?  Tomasello address this question in a Belknap Press book by comparing us to chimpanzees and bonobos.  Most of all, how does the capacity for shared intentionality and self-regulation evolve in people?  This is a very thoughtful and also important book, but I’m not sure it finally succeeds into tying up all the pieces into a broader picture of…shared intentionality.

5. Camille Paglia, Provocations.  At first I was discouraged by the notion of a recycled Paglia compilation, but the quality of these pieces is often high and many of them are not readily available elsewhere.  The now-classic  Sexual Personae is still the best introduction to her work, but if you think you might be tempted by this one, you should buy it.  I would put the hit rate at about fifty percent (who else will give you running commentary on the main cinematic adaptations of Homer’s Odyssey?), and it is sad to see so far it has not been seriously reviewed.

What I’ve been reading

1. Nate Chinen, Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century.  Chinen mounts a persuasive argument that the “golden age of jazz” is in fact today, and fills in the background knowledge you might need to grasp such a claim.  I’ve long suggested that if you enjoy live performance, the access/price/talent gradient is truly remarkable.  You can see virtually any world class performer, from an A+ quality seat, for a mere pittance.  Except in London.  The bottom line is that I will keep this book, hardly ever the case.

2. James Mustich, 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die: A Life-Changing List.  Paging through this book, from beginning to end, or just browsing it, and buying the attractive-sounding titles is in fact a good (but expensive) way to find new reading.  I see no reason why such volumes should be regarded as absurd.  Right now I am on “Bradley,” and while I don’t agree with all of the selections, they are unfailingly intelligent and at least plausible.

3. Can Xue, Love in the New Millennium.  Is she the Chinese writer most likely to next win a Nobel Prize?  “In this darkly comic novel, a group of women inhabits a world of constant surveillance, where informants lurk in the flowerbeds and false reports fly.”  Much of the story is set in a brothel, with a rotating cast of characters.  Parts remind me of The Dream of the Red Chamber, in any case this is definitely a new fictional work of note.  Here is an atypical excerpt: “He and Xiao Yuan had one thing in common: they both valued sensual pleasures.  His greatest wish was to sit in the darkened National Theater and listen to La Traviata with her.  He thought that after experiencing that atmosphere, their sex life would become satisfying.  His idea was naive; Xiao Yuan said he was “too practical.”  She added, “Sex is a black hole.  People can’t understand all of its implications within a lifetime.”

4. Thomas J. Bollyky, Plagues and the Paradox of Progress: Why the World is Getting Healthier in Worrisome Ways is a good history of public health advances, but also how they have led to what are now plague-prone poor megacities.  Here is the author’s piece in Foreign Affairs.

What I’ve been reading

1. Santiago Levy, Under-Rewarded Efforts: The Elusive Quest for Prosperity in Mexico.  Probably the best current book on Mexico’s economy and why it has not grown more rapidly.  Most of all, Levy blames misallocation, and more specifically the attachment of too many workers to the low-productivity informal sector.  The author notes (p.34) that both the top 20 percent of the wage distribution, or even the top 1 percent, saw no wage growth from 1996 to 2015.

2. Sriya Iyer, The Economics of Religion in India.  A useful survey, which delivers on what the title promises.

3. Howard Sounes, Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney.  One of my favorite biographies, this book is also excellent on outlining the history of the Beatles (and subsequent McCartney groups) as problems in the theory and practice of management.  I now have ordered the author’s other books on music history.

4. Jeffrey D. Sachs, A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism.  This book is somewhat less radical than I had been expecting, mostly concentrating on the potential gains from multilateralism, international cooperation, and international law.  Or is that the truly radical view?

5. Roger Scruton, Music as an Art.  The chapter on Schubert is the highlight, and perhaps the best explanation of that composer’s beauty and importance.  The book is otherwise high variance, with the remarks on morals and aesthetic philosophy much weaker.  At times he pops open an insight when it is least expected, such as on heavy metal music: “In the realm of pop they were the modernists, undergoing in their own way that revolution against kitsch and cliche that had set Schoenberg and Adorno on the path towards 12-tone serialism.”

Helene Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century, presents liberals as moralists and debunks the notion of liberalism as so exclusively an Anglo-American phenomenon.

Dean Keith Simonton, The Genius Checklist: Nine Paradoxical Tips on How You! Can Become a Creative Genius, is a popularization of some of his earlier research on genius and creative achievement.

Notable is Stephen L. Carter’s new biography of his grandmother, Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster.

What I’ve been reading

1. Donna Zuckerberg, Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age.  Ten or fifteen years ago, would I have predicted that Harvard University Press would publish a serious academic argument claiming that on-line pick-up artists misread the classic texts they cite?

2. Cass R. Sunstein, The Cost-Benefit Revolution.  One of the very best Cass Sunstein books, the product of decades of reflection, remarkably well thought out on every page to an extent which is rare these days.

3. William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era.  Winner of a Pulitzer, this remains one of the essential takes on mid-20th century Soviet history and is highly readable as well.

4. Maxwell King, The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers.  Yes, that is Mister Rogers.  If you’ve seen the movie, this book is the perfect complement.  I hadn’t know that Mister Rogers was born into wealth, self-financed his early work, and consistently turned down opportunities to market “Mister Rogers toys” to kids for large sums of money.  His email address by the way was [email protected], with the triple z’s indicating he slept soundly every night, and the 143 referring to the constant weight he kept throughout his adult life.

What I’ve been reading

1. Rob Reich, Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How it Can Do Better.  A sustained argument that current manifestations of philanthropy are not very egalitarian or necessarily realizing democratic ideals.  My views stand “to the right” of this book, but for some of you it will serve as a very good articulation of why philanthropy might be making you nervous.

2. Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading.  An exquisitely written book, yet his reading narrative leaves me cold (too much an insider? not eccentric enough?).  I found the chapter on his husband and their relationship extraordinarily compelling.  A highly intelligent book, at the very least.

3. Jason Brennan, When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice.  A well-argued libertarian take on exactly what the subtitle promises.

4. Robert Skidelsky, Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics.  The history of macro and money told through its historical development, which in my view is the right approach.  The coverage ranges from the classical economists up through the present day.  I hope this book does well.

5. Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer, A Crisis of Beliefs: Investor Psychology and Financial Fragility.  An “as smart as you would expect” take on the hypothesis that investor over-extrapolation of recent price trends can cause financial crises, including our recent financial crisis.

What I’ve been reading

1. David Foenkinos, Charlotte: A Novel.  A holocaust escape story, written in a kind of blank verse, this book was a bestseller in many countries but mostly ignored in the United States.  Original, recommended, and a quick but compelling read.

2. John Foot, Archipelago: Italy Since 1945.  There should be more books like this, namely giving you a smart overview of the recent history of an important country.  This one is especially strong on the nature of Italian corruption, the importance of connections in Italy, changes in the Italian education system, and the origins of the Northern League.

3. Holly Case, The Age of Questions.  Starting in the early nineteenth century, an “age of questions” began, including the Jewish question, the German question, the Bullion question, and many others: “The essence of the age of questions was the practical accommodation of physical reality to the attitude of interrelation that the age engendered.”  Books on abstract themes are often difficult to pull off, but this one expanded my thinking and historical understanding.

What I’ve been reading

1. Annie Lowrey, Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World.  A very good book, one of the hot books of the year, and much deeper and broader and balanced than the subtitle might imply.

2. George Magnus, Red Flags: Why Xi’s China Is In Jeopardy.  The case for pessimism, based on all possible reasons.  Worth reading, but who knows?

3. Devin Fergus, Land of the Fee: Hidden Costs and the Decline of the American Middle Class.  Not a balanced treatment, but a fact-rich and handy starting point for reading about this topic.  You won’t learn how many of those fees are efficiency-based, but you will go around asking the question more.

4. François Cusset, How the World Swung to the Right:Fifty Years of Counterrevolutions.  Full of generalizations and unsupported claims, but still a better guide to reality than most of what you will find from the other big think books.  An attempt at fresh thought, in pocket-sized form.

5. Paula Fredriksen, When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation.  Yet another good social and intellectual history of the early, formative period of Christianity.

Charles Silver and David A. Hyman, Overcharged: Why Americans Pay Too Much for Health Care.  I find most books on this topic too painful to read, including this one, but it does appear to be comprehensive and the new go-to coverage on this topic.

What I’ve been reading and browsing

1. Gaël Faye, Small Country.  Short, readable, and emotionally complex, one of my favorite novels so far this year.  Think Burundi, spillover from genocide, descent into madness, and “the eyes of a child caught in the maelstrom of history.”  Toss in a bit of romance as well.

2. David Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth Century History.  I’m only on p.34, but this one is spectacular and I expect to read it closely all the way through.  You’ll probably hear about it more in future blog posts.  He takes on many myths about British postwar decline, for instance, arguing that British business actually did pretty well in the 1950s and 60s.  Right now it is out only in the UK, but the above link still will get you a copy.  Here is a good Colin Kidd review in New Statesman: “Every so often a book comes along that the entire political class needs to read.”

3. Karl Ove Knausgaard, Inadvertent (Why I Write).  92 short pp. on how he thinks about writing, consistently high in quality, the contrast between Kundera and Hamsun was my favorite part.

Laurence M. Ball, The Fed and Lehman Brothers: Setting the Record Straight on a Financial Disaster is a very serious and useful book.  The Fed could have saved Lehman Brothers and didn’t, partly because of political pressures, and partly because they underestimated the damage it would cause to the economy.  Ball documents what I have supposed from the time of the event.

Cass R. Sunstein, The Cost-Benefit Revolution.  Not since the 1970s has cost-benefit analysis been as underrated as it is right now.

Joy Lisi Rankin, A People’s History of Computing in the United States appears to be interesting.  It tries to liberate the history of American computing from the usual emphasis on Silicon Valley, and offers greater focus on Dartmouth, Minnesota, and other less studied locales.