Recently Mentioned Books

2. William Rosen, Miracle Cure: The Creation of Antibiotics and the Birth of Modern Medicine .  A good book on exactly what the title promises, my favorite sentence was this: “Before penicillin,  three-quarters of all prescriptions were still compounded by pharmacists using physician-supplied recipes and instructions, with only a quarter ordered directly from a drug catalog.  Twelve years later, nine-tenths of all prescribed medicines were for branded products.”

1. Harold James, The German Slump: Politics and Economics 1924-1936 .  Not economic history in the post-cliometrics sense, but a history of economic issues, very high quality, full of good information on just about every page.

The author is Alexander Todorov, and the subtitle is The Irresistible Influence of First Impressions .  Here is one short excerpt:

6. I do take the William James arguments about personal experience of God seriously, and I recommend his The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature to everybody — it’s one of the best books period.  But these personal accounts contradict each other in many cases, we know at least some of them are wrong or delusional, and overall I think the capacity of human beings to believe things — some would call it self-deception but that term assumes a neutral, objective base more than ...

The author is Doug Woodham, and the subtitle is Market Insights for Everyone Passionate About Art .

Here is Wikipedia on Ben Sasse .  In addition to being a Senator from Nebraska, he has extensive experience in government, was an assistant professor, president of Midland University, and he has a Ph.d. in history from Yale University, with a prize-winning dissertation on religious liberty and the origins of the conservative movement as it relates to the battle over school prayer.  He also now has the #1 best-selling book, on raising kids .

That is from the new and excellent Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve , by Ben Blatt.  Here is my earlier post on the book .

That is from the new and interesting Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve , by Ben Blatt.  The Hemingway book with the highest usage rate for -ly adverbs, True at First Light , was released only after his death and is considered one of his worst works.  The same pattern is true for Faulkner and Steinbeck, namely that the most highly praised works have relatively low rates of -ly adverb usage.  Among other notable authors surveyed, D.H. Lawrence seems to be the most obvious exception to this regulari...

Robert Wright’s new book is Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment .  I am not sure how amenable Buddhism is to bookish treatment, and furthermore the word “true” makes me nervous in this title (“useful”?), but still this book reaches a local maximum of sorts.  If you want a book from a smart Westerner defending Buddhism, this is it.

There is a new, expanded edition of Amartya Sen’s Collective Choice and Social Welfare , still the best place to go for his views on normative economics.

4. Thomas Hardy, Unexpected Elegies: “Poems of 1912-1913” and Other Poems About Emma .  Some of Hardy’s best poetic work, it mixes “passion, memory, love, remorse, regret, self-awareness and self-flagellation…to serve a speech of intense emotional candor, all in celebration of his dead (and for many years estranged) wife, Emma,” by one account.

3. Invisible Planets: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese SF in Translation , edited and translated by Ken Liu.  A strong collection, with two stories by Cixin Liu.  Here is a new article on Chinese science fiction .

2. Richard O. Prum, The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World — And Us .  The word “forgotten” is misleading in the title, but nonetheless an excellent look at how signaling theories work when the signal is distributed across a quality that is neither useful nor especially burdensome and costly.  In other words, it’s not all about the peacock’s tail.  The result is aesthetic beauty, and competition across that beauty for its own sake.  This boo...

1. David Der-Wei Wang, editor. A New Literary History of Modern China .  Almost one thousand pages, and aren’t edited volumes so often poison?  Still, these short, collated excerpts provide one of the most useful and readable entry points into modern Chinese intellectual history; this will be making my “year’s best” list.  Every year you should be reading multiple books about China, all of you.  Here is a sentence from the work, from Andrea Bachner: “In a brothel in Singapore at the beginning of...

And Thomas W. Hazlett, The Political Spectrum: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology, from Herbert Hoover to the Smartphone , is a very learned, market-oriented look at what the title promises.

Eric Barker, Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong .

Ulrich Boser, Learn Better: Mastering the Skills for Success in Life, Business, and School, or, How to Become an Expert in Just About Anything , and

5. The Great Inka Road: Engineering an Empire , assorted authors and editors and photographers.  One of the best and most readable introductions to Incan civilization.  I’ll say it again: you all should be reading more picture books!  They are one of the best ways to actually learn.

4. Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech .  The title says it all.  I disagreed with almost everything in this book, still it is useful to see where the Zeitgeist is headed.

3. David J. Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama .  So far I’ve only read bits and pieces of it, but I am surprised it is not receiving more positive attention.  It seems like one of the most thorough and smart and thoughtful biographies of any American president.  It has plenty of detail on Obama’s life and career, and you can learn what Obama’s ex-girlfriend says about how he was in bed at age 22 (“he neither came off as experienced nor inexperienced”, [FU Aristotle !])  Yes, at 108...

2. Ge Fei, The Invisibility Cloak .  This short Chinese noir novel, with a dash of Murakami, is one of my year’s favorites and also one of this year’s “cool books.”  I finished it in one sitting.  Set in Beijing, the protagonist sells audio equipment, and then strange things happen.  Here is a good interview with the author .

1. William Vaughan, Samuel Palmer: Shadows on the Wall .  Another first-rate Yale University Press book of art plates and art history, for this they are the best.  Get a hold of as many of them as you can.

The subtitle is The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst .  Sapolsky is tenured in biology and neuroscience at Stanford, and winner of a MacArthur genius grant.  This book is a very impressive compendium of what we know about the social sciences, as might be rooted in behavioral biology and related fields.  The topics include violence, altruism, cooperation, gene-environment interactions, and many more topics along the usual lines.  It’s not a “here is my big idea” book, but rather “here is h...

That is a splendid 1996 book on mathematics and mathematical researchers , by Gian-Carlo Rota.  I found philosophical, mathematical, and also managerial insights on most of the pages.  It is playful and yet earnestly serious at the same time.  Here is one bit:

Yes, the Garry Kasparov, here is the link to the podcast and transcript .  We talked about AI, his new book Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins , why he has become more optimistic, how education will have to adjust to smart software, Russian history and Putin, his favorites in Russian and American literature, Tarkovsky, his favorite city to play chess in, his match against Deep Blue, Ken Rogoff, who are the three most likely challengers to Magnus Carlsen (r...