Recently Mentioned Books

I’ve now see the page proofs for Steven Pearlstein’s Can American Capitalism Survive?: Why Greed is Not Good, Opportunity is Not Equal, and Fairness Won’t Make Us Poor .  His view is not mine, but if you want his view this book is the place to get it…

Joshua Keating, Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood looks at Abkhazia, Kurdistan, Somaliland, Liberland, and a Mohawk reservation straddilng the U.S.-Canada border, as well as a Pacific Island that might disappear.  An interesting book for fans of alternative governance arrangements.

Linda Yueh’s What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today’s Biggest Problems , is probably the closest we will come to having an updated version of Robert Heilbroner.

David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History .  A very strong work about race relations on the other side of the Atlantic.  I had not known that “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” is Yoruba for “life goes on.”  The song as a whole was intended by Paul McCartney as a parable of the possibility of West Indian assimilation and it was a direct response to Enoch Powell.  Definitely recommended.

Peter Cozzens, The Earth is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West .  Very good overall history of the post-Civil War campaigns against Native Americans, still highly relevant for understanding American foreign policy, and attitudes toward guns, among other things.

Tarjei Vesaas, The Ice Palace .  Not well known in the United States, but still one of the better Norwegian novels.  Short, readable, concerns a boy who goes missing.

Gregory Claeys, Marx and Marxism , a better than expected take on where Marxism came from and how Marx’s different intellectual periods fit into his life.  One of the better introductions to Marx, noting that it does not stress issues of economic theory.

Definitely recommended, surprisingly gripping throughout, you can buy it here .

Bekelech Tola, Injera Variety from Crop Diversity .  She explains where all the different types of injera come from.  I hadn’t realized for instance that teff is sometimes mixed with maize, or sorghum flour, or cassava powder, all in the service of variety.

Emily Dufton, Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America .  I loved this book, which I also consider a paradigmatic example of how to write a wonderful non-fiction work.  Throughout it is clear, substantive, balanced, passes various ideological Turing tests, and it focuses on essentials, as well as framing everything in terms of broader theories of social change.  It is sure to make my best books of the year list, and if she had ten other books I would buy them all sight uns...

Allen C. Guelzo, Reconstruction: A Concise History .  Could this new book be the single best brief introduction to Reconstruction available?  Recommended.

Economic Science Fictions , edited by William Davies.  I didn’t quite come away with a takeaway from this book, but still I feel obliged to pass knowledge of it along to you.  It is a bunch of essays about economic themes in science fiction, and/or how the two “genres” might be more closely integrated, with a lead essay by Ha-Joon Chang.

1. Elinor Ostrom’s book Governing the Commons .  Ostrom dismantles the market / government dichotomy, sketching out ways common pool resources (and, to some extent, public goods) can be provided using non-market, non-government solutions.

6. David Warsh’s Harvard Russia book is back on Amazon .

That is from Jere Van Dyk, The Trade: My Journey into the Labyrinth of Political Kidnapping .

That is all from the excellent Harold G. Marcus, A History of Ethiopia .

That is from Sarah Howard’s Ethiopia: Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture .  An Ethiopian I had dinner with told me that Amharic is “eighty percent implication.”  Here is a research paper about ambiguity in Amharic .

3. Is there a new David Warsh book on Harvard and Russia ?

That is the title of a new and excellent book by Michael Zakim .  Here is one bit:

That is from Arkebe Oqubay’s Made in Africa: Industrial Policy in Ethiopia .  In Ethiopia, they sell this book for less than half of its Amazon list price.

That is from the new, excellent, and consistently interesting Finding Equilibrium: Arrow, Debreu, McKenzie and the Problem of Scientific Credit , by Till Düppe and E. Roy Weintraub.  Unlike many history of economic thought books, this one tells you “what actually happened,” such as how an Econometrica editor (Robert Strotz) decided to publish the McKenzie paper before the Arrow-Debreu paper, when he had both in hand.

That is the new and noteworthy book by Jürgen Osterhammel, and the subtitle is The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia .  Here is one good bit of many:

This book is very well done.  It is not revelatory to me, but it serve very well as the standard, up to date major biography of Marx.  You can order it here .

That is from the new, excellent, and short The Radical Fool of Capitalism: On Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon, and the Auto-Icon , by Christian Welzbacher.

The editors and co-creators are Benjamin Spall and Michael Xander, and the subtitle is How Successful People Start Every Day Inspired .