Recently Mentioned Books

Joshua Clark Davis, From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs .  Covers African American bookstores, head shops, businesses in the women’s movement, and natural foods stores, a good revision of Milton Friedman on the social responsibility of business.

Jason Brennan, Bas van der Vossen, and David Schmidtz, editors, The Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism , my blurb reads: “This is the best contemporary anthology introducing the reader to the basics of libertarianism.”

4. Augustine, Confessions , new translation by Sarah Ruden.  This is the most readable translation I have encountered.  While I cannot vouch for the accuracy, Ruden has very strong qualifications as a classical translator.

3. George William Van Cleve, We Have Not a Government: The Articles of Confederation and the Road to the Constitution .  The best book I’ve read on the Articles period, most of all a revision of Merrill Jensen.  Van Cleve details clearly and analytically why the Articles did a poor job on fiscal, trade, foreign policy, and Western settlement issues.

2. Gordon S. Wood, Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson .  This is a high quality work, as you might expect.  Still, I am numb from the oversupply of material on the Founding Fathers, and so I could read no more than a third of this one.  If only it had come out twenty years ago.

1. Andrea Dworkin, Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant .  Published in 2002, this sure sounds like 2017.  Your mileage may vary, but it has a strong, unique voice and it looks more relevant than ever.  It reminds me of the in-your-face directness of Amiri Baraka, another underrated figure who ought to be rediscovered just about now.  If you are going to read only one Dworkin book, this is the one.

This is an out-of-synch bonus episode, rushed out because I think their new, just-out book — The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Slow Down Growth, Enrich Themselves, and Increase Inequality — is so important.  You will find the podcast here , lots of rapid fire back and forth.

I will be having a Conversations with Tyler with Andy Weir, author of The Martian and assorted on-line works (many of which appear to be off-line at the moment).  He has a new book coming out, Artemis .  Here is Andy’s Wikipedia page .

I will be having a Conversations with Tyler with Andy Weir, author of The Martian and assorted on-line works (many of which appear to be off-line at the moment).  He has a new book coming out, Artemis .  Here is Andy’s Wikipedia page .

You can order the volume here .

I have read only a few hundred pages of it, and may not read it all, but am likely to read more than half of it.  Strongly recommended, it’s also one of the best books on American history period.  You can order it here .

Dani Rodrik’s Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy is a very good introduction to Rodrik’s basic ideas on trade.

Eric A. Posner has the forthcoming Last Resort: The Financial Crisis and the Future of Bailouts .  He argues that much of what was done was not fully legal.

Harvey Sachs, Toscanini: A Musician of Conscience , is a very high quality book, I would have read more of it except I can’t stand listening to Toscanini.

I have only browsed Abbas Amanat’s Iran: A Modern History , but it appears to be a very readable and highly useful 908 pp. overview of Persian/Iranian history, though less theoretical and conceptual than what an economist might be looking for.

3. Aaron Carroll, The Bad Food Bible: How and Why to Eat Sinfully .  Yes, that is the Aaron Carroll, the one who writes about health care policy.  What does the evidence actually say about which foods are good and bad for you?  I’ll just say my diet is healthier than I had thought, and beware added sugar.

2. Olivier Roy, In Search of the Lost Orient: An Interview .  There should be a book like this for every substantive thinker, namely a very long, book-length interview with frank rather than perfunctory answers.  The dialog covers Afghanistan, Yemen, 1968 Paris and radicalism, China, “political Islam,” and women (ahem), among other topics.  Recommended.

1. Building the Intentional University: Minerva and the Future of Higher Education , edited by Stephen M. Kosslyn and Ben Nelson.  The new university Minerva explains its educational philosophy, imagining redesigning higher ed from scratch.  I would do something very similar to what they did, and this book explains the curricular philosophy and practice in great detail.

The subtitle is How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won , and the author is Victor Davis Hanson.  I loved this book, even though before I started I felt I didn’t want to read yet another tract on WWII.  Most of the focus is on the logistics and management side:

That is the new Peter Leeson book , and it is just out.  Here is the Amazon summary:

Here is the book on Amazon .  Here is Kyle Harper on Twitter .  Here is Harper on scholar.google.com ; he is also Provost at the University of Oklahoma.

I can recommend Walter Isaacson’s new book on Leonardo as a wonderful introduction, but it does not change my mind on these points.

This excellent book is titled Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times .  Here is one good bit:

I loved this book , by Ben Horowitz of Andreessen-Horowitz, the venture capital firm.  While it is hard to pull bits from the broader stories, here are a few:

The subtitle is A History of U.S. Federal Entitlement Programs , and the author of this new and excellent book is John F. Cogan of Stanford University and the Hoover Institution.  It is the single best history of what it covers, and thus one of the best books to read on the history of U.S. government or for that matter American economic history more generally.