Recently Mentioned Books

4. Javier Cercas, La verdad de Agamenón , selected essays about literature, Borges, Tijuana, Spanish political culture as expressed through history, and the life of an author.  About half of them are excellent, none of them bad.  Could Cercas be the least-known (in America) great author in the world today?

3. Jonathan Abrams, Boys Among Men: How the Prep-to-Pro Generation Redefined the NBA and Sparked a Basketball Revolution .  A study of youth vs. experience, you can think of this as an excellent management book in addition to its basketball virtues.

2. Susan Southard, Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War .  What is a city like after a nuclear bomb hits?  Beautifully written, both historical and anecdotal, and the ignoble record of the American government in this episode, with respect to cover-ups and poor treatment of survivors, extends well into the recovery period.

1. Gunther S. Stent, The Coming of the Golden Age: a view of the end of progress .  Starting on p.84 (!), this short 1969 tract becomes a remarkable disquisition on stagnation, through the lens of “Faustian Man,” the decline of romanticism, Ortega y Gasset, Kierkegaard, and the hippie beats of San Francisco.  At some point the social sciences won’t make that much more progress, and Stent portrays the Maori as the non-complacent branch of the Polynesians.

That is the new James C. Scott book , and so far it is the most interesting non-fiction read of the year (I am about halfway through).  You can think of it as an extended essay on which technologies actually gave rise to economies of scale, expressed through governance but not only.  Ultimately the focus settles on Mesopotamia, but the discussion is wide-ranging and the lessons are applicable to much of human history.  Here is an opening summary bit:

I’ll be interviewing Ed on June 13, 6-8 p.m., GMU Arlington campus, including about his new and very interesting book The Retreat of Western Liberalism .  Ed is also “chief American commentator” for The Financial Times , and author of one of the best general introductions to India, In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India .  Here is Ed’s Wikipedia page .  Here are event details .

I’ll be interviewing Ed on June 13, 6-8 p.m., GMU Arlington campus, including about his new and very interesting book The Retreat of Western Liberalism .  Ed is also “chief American commentator” for The Financial Times , and author of one of the best general introductions to India, In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India .  Here is Ed’s Wikipedia page .  Here are event details .

That is from Proust and His Banker: In Search of Time Squandered , by Gian Balsamo, via Ray Lopez.  Ray also passes along this from the book summary:

Arnold Kling, The Three Languages of Politics: Talking Across the Political Divides .  This short book, revised, improved, and expanded, is so good it is wasted on almost all of you.  Here are various pieces of background information .

Rick Wartzman, The End of Loyalty: The Rise and Fall of Good Jobs in America , is a densely-written but nonetheless useful history of how America moved from paternalistic big businesses to lower-benefit jobs.

4. Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America .  An intelligent and indeed reasonable basic approach to answering questions about class, including “Why don’t they push their kids harder to succeed?” and “Why don’t the people who benefit most from government help seem to appreciate it?”  I am not the intended audience, but still this was better than I was expecting.

3. Justin Yifu Lin and Celestin Monga, Beating the Odds: Jump-Starting Developing Countries .  An instructive look at how countries have to start growing before the right institutional framework is in place, and how they can get around that.  Haven’t you wondered how China racked up so many years of stellar growth with such a bad “Doing Business” ranking from the World Bank?  One of the better books on developing economies in the last few years.

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...