Recently Mentioned Books

The author is Nick Chater and the subtitle is The Illusion of Mental Depth and the Improvised Mind .  I found this to be one of the most interesting books on the mind I have read.  Overall the message is that your hidden inner life ain’t what you think:

Due out in August .

That is all from David Reich’s superb Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past .  Here is my earlier post on the book .

Their main point is that social tactics used in interventions abroad tend to come back and haunt us at home.  I am not nearly as non-interventionist in foreign policy questions as they are, but still I wish their perspective would receive a much broader hearing.  You can buy the book here .  Here is the book’s home page .  Here is a video related to the book .

Here you can buy her just-published book Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming .  You cannot follow her on Twitter.

That is the new book by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, due out September 4, you can now pre-order it here .  Here is my earlier Conversation with Jonathan .

The author is Edward Tenner and the subtitle is What Big Data Can’t Do .  Overall, I prefer to read Tenner on engineering more narrowly construed, but still I found some novel and interesting ideas in this book, as you might expect.

I spotted several intellectual and emotional fallacies in Zadie Smith’s Feel Free: Essays .

Self-recommending is Richard Sylla and David J. Cowen, Alexander Hamilton on Finance, Credit, and Debt .

Ge Zhaoguang, What is China?: Territory Ethnicity Culture & History is the result of a China scholar considering all the questions suggested in the subtitle.  I was not ever astonished, but it is about time we all read more books by the Chinese about China.

I have only browsed Fawaz A. Gerges, Making the Arab World: Nasser, Qutb, and the Clash that Shaped the Middle East , but it looks quite good.

David C. Engerman, The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India .

Michael J. Piore and Andrew Schrank, Root-Cause Regulation: Protecting Work and Workers in the Twenty-First Century is an interesting book, written under the premise that the Continental model of labor safety and labor market regulation is a good thing, including for Latin America.

Adam Winkler, We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights , is a useful and readable treatment of the history of how businesses acquired various kinds of “personhood.”

Sebastian Edwards has a new, forthcoming book American Default: The Untold Story of FDR, the Supreme Court, and the Battle Over Gold .

John Blair’s Building Anglo-Saxon England is a remarkable look at the archaeological and historical evidence on what went on before 9th century A.D.  This is not a book of irresponsible generalizations.

Linda Yueh, What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today’s Biggest Problems .  Think of this as the updated Heilbroner.

That is the new and excellent biography by Mark Eisner , here is one good bit:

Those are all from the newly forthcoming and entertaining Mark Kurlansky book Milk: A 10,000 Year Food Fracas .

Here is his earlier NYT essay (though I think the very first link in this post is the best place to start, do read that carefully), well done but not quite representative of the book either.  You can buy it here , this is definitely one of the books of the year and one of the best popular science books of any year.

I found this book by Sebastian Abbot very stimulating, though I wished for a more social-scientific treatment.  The focus is on Africa, here is one bit on the more conceptual side:

Buy it on Amazon here .  Here is a Heyes lecture on related ideas , also click through to part II .

The author is Thomas Piketty, and the subtitle is Inequality and Redistribution, 1901-1998 .  This is a reprint and translation of the author’s original French work from 2001.  It appears to be a very seriously researched volume.

That is from Katy Waldman in the NYT .  You will find similar themes discussed in my earlier book In Praise of Commercial Culture .  In her article I also enjoyed this part:

The authors are Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey and the subtitle is Garbage and Growth in India , here is one excerpt from this worthy book: