Results for “best book”

1948 found

If you think my theory is unnecessarily complex, just wait till you see what the theories will be like fifty years from now.

An excellent line but also a sign of trouble.  The final sentence is:

Making a virtue of necessity, I will leave it to other people to test my theory [TC: in fairness to Harris, she may be referring to her medical problems].

Nonetheless I like virtually everything she says.  The key point is that when it comes to environmental influences on our behavior, we are highly malleable avatars.  Tests which don’t recognize this will be misleading.  For instance if you are testing "birth rank" theories, submission within the family does not imply submissive behavior toward the outside world.  Of course the theory immediately gains an additional degree of freedom, both its blessing and curse.

The book is full of fascinating facts and interludes:

…people who are married to one of a pair of twins feel, on average, only so-so about the other twin; only 13 percent of the men and 7 percent of the women feel they could have fallen for their spouse’s twin.

Dead Ringers anyone?  Here is my previous post on the book.

The bottom line: All those young, anti-theocratic, and sometimes pro-democratic Iranian hotheads, for all their rebellious behavior against their parents, when push comes to shove will embrace nuclear weapons and a maximal sphere of regional influence.

This is from William Saletan’s New York Times review of Judith Harris’s No Two Alike:

Ultimately, however, long-term behavior modification is at odds with
itself. As our minds become subtler and our occupations less stable,
short-term modifications suited to the situation at hand become more
advantageous than permanent modifications. This is already happening,
according to her theory. The reason parental influence doesn’t control
children’s behavior outside the home is that they adjust to context.
"Children are capable of generalizing – of learning something in one
context and applying it in another – but they do not do it blindly,"
Harris observes. At home, where you’re the younger sibling, you yield.
At school, where you’re one of the bigger kids, you don’t. And unlike
other animals, you can shuffle your self-classifications. In seconds,
you can go from acting like a girl to acting like a child to acting
like a New Yorker.

In short, the evolutionary logic that makes
us different from one another will gradually make us different from
ourselves, context by context. Personality – behavior that is
"consistent across time and place," as one textbook puts it – will
fade. We’ll miss characters like Harris, the little woman from New
Jersey who boasted of giving psychologists a "wedgie" and tried to
solve the puzzle of human nature.

But is it true?  Cannot evolutionary pressures favor extreme constancy, for purposes of precommitting to transparency and attracting a better mate?

By the way, I’ll give "best sentence of the day" honor to Daniel Akst: "Any benefit from shining the cleansing light of day on executive greed
will probably be outweighed by the inflationary effect of additional
disclosure, which will provide more ammunition for executives and
consultants seeking to justify additional increases."

Driven partly by pressure from incessant literary prize shortlists, more than one in three consumers in London and the south-east admit having bought a book "solely to look intelligent", the YouGov survey says.

It finds one in every eight young people confessing to choosing a book "simply to be seen with the latest shortlisted title". This herd instinct dwindles to affect only one in 20 over-50 year-olds…

…the results indicate that "reading" is a relative term. When asked about specific titles, only one in 25 people turn out to have read the novel chosen as the best in the Booker prize’s 25-year history, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children – and half these had failed to finish it.

Only one in 100 had read Andrew Levy’s Small Island, picked earlier this month as the best of all Orange prize winners. Not a single reader had yet opened this month’s Booker winner, John Banville’s The Sea.

Other strongly publicised titles endorsed by literary panels fare only slightly better. One in 20 members of the public has read Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and only one in 25 Yann Martel’s Life of Pi or Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist.

Some consumers hedge their bets by keeping two titles on the go – one an impressive book to show other people, the other an escapist work to enjoy.

The biggest group, more than two in every five people, follows the traditional method of choosing their reading; relying on recommendations from close family and friends.

The sample’s own top 10 titles, a mixture of classic and popular, is: the Bible, Lord of the Rings, one or other of the Harry Potter stories, Catch-22, Animal Farm, The Hobbit, Pride and Prejudice, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Da Vinci Code, Wuthering Heights.

Here is the story.  By the way, why do you read blogs? 

Addendum: http://kottke.org refers us to some selected one-star Amazon reviews of the classic works.

Professors Ghose, Smith and Telang chose a random sample of books in print and studied how often used copies were available on Amazon. In their sample, they found, on average, more than 22 competitive offers to sell used books, with a striking 241 competitive offers for used best sellers. The prices of the secondhand books were substantially cheaper than the new, but of course the quality of the used books (in terms of wear and tear) varied considerably.

According to the researchers’ calculations, Amazon earns, on average, $5.29 for a new book and about $2.94 on a used book. If each used sale displaced one new sale, this would be a less profitable proposition for Amazon.

But Mr. Bezos is not foolish. Used books, the economists found, are not strong substitutes for new books. An increase of 10 percent in new book prices would raise used sales by less than 1 percent. In economics jargon, the cross-price elasticity of demand is small.

One plausible explanation of this finding is that there are two distinct types of buyers: some purchase only new books, while others are quite happy to buy used books. As a result, the used market does not have a big impact in terms of lost sales in the new market.

Moreover, the presence of lower-priced books on the Amazon Web site, Mr. Bezos has noted, may lead customers to "visit our site more frequently, which in turn leads to higher sales of new books." The data appear to support Mr. Bezos on this point.

Applying the authors’ estimate of the displaced sales effect to Amazon’s sales, it appears that only about 16 percent of the used book sales directly cannibalized new book sales, suggesting that Amazon’s used-book market added $63.2 million to its profits.

Furthermore, consumers greatly benefit from this market: the study’s authors estimate that consumers gain about $67.6 million. Adding in Amazon’s profits and subtracting out the $45.3 million of losses to authors and publishers leaves a net gain of $85.5 million.

Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed came out this weekend.

In essence Diamond’s book consists of two parts.  The first and lengthiest part (416 of 525 text pages) examines how several past societies — including the Mayans and Easter Island — met their doom.  In every studied case deforestation and soil erosion played important roles.  This part of the book could have been published on a stand-alone basis with the title How Poor and Backward Societies Suffer From Deforestation and Ill-Defined Property Rights.  Specialists might carp that the material relies on secondary sources, but I found it to be stimulating and informative throughout.

The second part of the book is brief, and details major environmental problems faced today.  This includes overpopulation, vanishing energy supplies, the loss of biodiversity, and so on.  The material was well-presented but the overall level was not much above what you would find in a good magazine article.

The key to the "meta-book" is Diamond’s claim that part one — the history of deforestation — means we should worry more about part two, namely current environmental problems.  The meta-book fails.

Yes we should worry about the environment today, but largely because of current data and analysis, not because of past history.  If you look at the past, the single overwhelming fact is that all previous environmental problems, at the highest macro level, were overcome.  We moved from the squalor of year 1000 to the mixed but impressive successes of 2005, a huge step forward.  Environmental problems, however severe, did not prevent this progress.  We may not arrive in 3005 with equal ease, but if you are a pessimist you should be concerned with the uniqueness of the contemporary world, not its similarities to the past.

Today’s world is indeed different.  We are much wealthier, we have (partially) responsive democratic governments, reasonably effective government regulations, much higher population, an astonishing command over science, we are globally connected, and of course we use resources at a much higher clip.  Whether you are an optimist or pessimist about modernity, the history of Greenland or the Pitcairn Islands should not much revise your priors about our future.

Here is Diamond’s recent NYT Op-Ed; Cafe Hayek has a negative reaction.  Here is a quasi-review of the book from Matt Yglesias.  Here is Alex on a fishy fact in the book.  Here is my previous post on the book, which links to an interview with Diamond and a Malcolm Gladwell review.

The claim in the book I would most like to bet against:

"In the long run it is doubtful that Australia can even support its present population: the best estimate of a population sustainable at the present standard of living is 8 million people, less than half of the present population." 

Any takers?

Read more here, and good luck to Larry Lessig, I am cautiously bullish about this experiment.  Wikis cannot always be trusted; what I like best is that the continual back-and-forth tends to keep the links fresh.  They are complements to other sources, not substitutes.

The Economist and The New York Times (password required) have put out their "best books of the year" lists.  Each list is at the respective link, the common elements are:

Philip Roth – The Plot Against America

Anne Tyler – The Amateur Marriage

Colm Toibin – The Master

Alan Hollinghurst – Line of Beauty

David Mitchell – Cloud Atlas

Orhan Pamuk – Snow

Moving on to non-fiction, we have:

Ron Chernow – Alexander Hamilton

Seymour Hersh – Chain of Command

The 9-11 Commission Report, and

Stephen Greenblatt – Will in the World

As for my favorites in fiction, Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is my clear pick, with nods to Garcia Marquez and Alice Munro.  For non-fiction, my memory summons up Craig Seligman’s Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me, Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, and Bart Schulz’s Henry Sidgwick: An Intellectual Biography.  For science I’ll nominate Brian Greene’s Fabric of the Cosmos.  I’m leaving off everything that has made our "Books we Recommend" list over the months.

My apologies if I forget your book.  No, I haven’t forgotten its content (yet), I simply have no idea whether it came out this last year.  Age has compressed my sense of time into two rather gross categories: "my plans for the future" and "the distant past."

Most of all used bookstores; read more here.

And here are the most requested out-of-print books.

65 percent of Americans use the nation’s 16,000 libraries, and those libraries spend almost $2 billion on books each year, about a fifth of the total market.

So which library books are most popular? And does it mirror the bestseller lists?

Here is the list of the top fifteen, an Adobe reader is required. Number one is The South Beach Diet, followed by some of the usual political books and Eats, Shoots and Leaves. The first book I enjoyed comes at number six with Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos, here is my earlier summary.

My question is whether people are more likely to buy books and never read them, or take books out of the library and then never read them. The naive economist might think that you get more phoney-baloney behavior when the books are free. I suspect the opposite is true. If the book costs nothing, bringing it home involves little signaling or self-signaling. It might impress your neighbor to see a weighty tome on your bookshelves, but only if you had to spend money. So the good news would be that those people actually wanted to read the Greene book.

Here is the full story.

Here are some basic facts:

The popularity of religious titles has soared. Books such as Left Behind by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, the first in a popular series and No. 61 for the decade, used to be sold primarily in Christian bookstores. Now they’re stacked thigh-high at discount stores such as Wal-Mart.

Self-help, always a fixture of best-seller lists, is shifting the focus from improving people’s lives to improving their health as many baby boomers pass 50. [Diet books, most of all Atkins-related, have become especially popular.]

Brand-name series grabbed a growing share of the list. Chicken Soup for the Soul begat Chicken Soup for the Woman’s Soul, which begat Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul. All were among the decade’s 100 most popular titles.

With 12 novels on the list of 100, John Grisham staked out a nearly permanent spot on the weekly best-seller list. Only the titles changed. But if the familiar was popular, there were a few surprises. Previously unknown novelists such as Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code) and Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones) ended up among the decade’s best sellers.

Fiction, led by thrillers, staged a comeback, accounting for 72% of last year’s weekly best sellers, compared with 59% in 1998.

Here are other facts of import:

1. Never have so many books been published: in the U.S. more than 1,000 new titles a week, nearly double the rate in 1993.

2. Aggregate book sales are flat.

3. “last year the average American spent more time on the Internet (about three hours a week) than reading books (about two hours a week). And…the average American adult spent more money last year on movies, videos and DVDs ($166) than on books ($90).”

4. Bestsellers (top ten in the major categories) account for only 4% of book sales.

5. Amazon, Barnes&Noble.com and BookSense.com account for 8% of U.S. book sales.

6. Discount stores and price clubs account for 11% of U.S. book sales.

7. Humor books have fallen from 5.3% of the bestsellers market in 1995 to 0.6% today.

8. The Cliff Notes version of The Scarlet Letter outsells the real thing by 3 to 1.

9. In August dictionaries are 77% of all reference book sales. Otherwise they run less than five percent of the total.

Here is the the full story, noting that some of the facts are found in the paper edition only.

The bottom line? The book market works wonderfully. If you have any complaint, it should be with the quality of public taste.

USA Today (from Thursday) offers a list of the 100 best-selling books of the last ten years (not on-line). Once you get past Tolkien and Harry Potter, there is little to interest me. That being said, I find it easy to walk into my public libraries and every week find numerous good new books to read.