Recently Mentioned Books

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.

David Kynaston, Till Time’s Last Sand: A History of the Bank of England, 1694-2013 , seems to be a fine work of history, but it is not organized analytically in the way I might wish.  Still, some of you should be interested, as this is 796 pp. of well-written, carefully researched material on the BOE.

William Blake and the Age of Aquarius is a beautiful exhibition catalog, with text, edited by Stephen F. Eisenman, for a show currently on at Northwestern University.

I have only browsed my library copy of Masha Gessen’s The Future of History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia , but it looked very good and so I ordered it from Amazon.

4. Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine .  “As Dolot remembered it, the presence of the Soviet state in his village in the 1920s had been minimal.”  And “Initially, collectivization was supposed to be voluntary.”  And “When their potatoes were gone…people began to go to the Russian villages and to exchange their clothing for food.”

3. Neil Monnery, Architect of Prosperity: Sir John Cowperthwaite and the Making of Hong Kong .  I didn’t find this inspiring to read, but still it is a useful account of the under-covered early days of how Hong Kong evolved into a freedom-oriented economy after World War II.  Here is a review from The Economist .

2. Grant N. Havers, Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy: A Conservative Critique .  Havers argues against Strauss from “the Right,” but sympathetically.  He suggests Strauss underrated Christianity and had too high an opinion of antiquity, and was a true liberal democrat, while the American founders consciously rejected ancient political thought.

I will be having a Conversation with them, in part connected to their very important forthcoming book The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality .  But not only.  What should I ask these two leading lights?

That is from the quite interesting Two Tales of Crow and Sparrow: A Freudian Folkloristic Essay on Caste and Untouchability , by Alan Dundes.

She is the author of the new and superb Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India .  I will be interviewing her later in the month, with a podcast and transcript forthcoming, no public event.  Here is her Macmillan bio:

Sometimes I draw a distinction between “branching” books, whose arguments spread out in many different directions and draw many distinctions, and “channeling” books, which try to put the material into a narrower, common framework.  (Reading each requires quite distinct sets of skills!)  This is a branching book.  You can order it here .

For economic historians I can recommend Bruce M.S. Campbell, The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World .

Barry Eichengreen, Arnaud Mehl, and Livia Chitu, How Global Currencies Work: Past, Present, and Future .