Recently Mentioned Books
Showing 25 of 6685 mentions, ordered by most recent.
Miriam Makeba, Indispensable 1955-1962 .
Faransiskiyo Somaliland , Sahra Halgan Trio. And on YouTube .
Tanbou Toulou Lou: Meringue, Kompa, Kreyol, Vodou Jazz & Electric Folklore from Haiti 1960-1981 , one of the best collections. And here on YouTube .
Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, Dois Amigos, Um Século de Música: Multishow Live , it is remarkable how fresh these guys still sound.
Arrived in my pile is Yuval Noah Harati, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow .
Guillermo A. Calvo, Macroeconomics in Times of Liquidity Crises is a useful book on sudden stops and related ideas.
Chris Hayes’s A Colony in a Nation , due out in March, he argues that racial equality really hasn’t improved much since 1968.
Marc Levinson’s An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy details what made the post World War II era so special in terms of its economics and income distribution and why it will be so hard to recreate.
I have only perused John H. Kagel and Alvin E. Roth, Handbook of Experimental Economics, volume 2 , but it appears to be an extremely impressive contribution.
My copy of Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy has arrived. It is a very good statement of how political fragmentation and intensified intellectual competition drove modernity and the Industrial Revolution.
4. Miriam J. Laugesen, F ixing Medical Prices: How Physicians are Paid . Will people still care about these issues for the next four years? I hope so, because this is the best book I know of on Medicare pricing and its influence on pricing throughout the broader U.S. health care system.
3. Elsa Morante, History . In America, this is one of the least frequently read and discussed great European novels of the 20th century.
2. Haruki Murakami, Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa . More for classical music and Ojawa fans than Murakami readers, this is nonetheless an easy to read and stimulating set of interviews for any serious classical music listener. They are most interesting on Mahler.
1. Incarnations: A History of India in Fifty Lives , by Sunil Khilnani. A highly readable introduction to Indian history, structured around the lives of some of its major figures. I passed along my copy to Alex.
Tim Harford, Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives .
Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton, Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders . Short descriptions of places you ought to visit, such as ossuaries, micronations, museums of invisible microbes, the floating school of Lagos, the Mistake House of Elsah, Illinois , Bangkok’s Museum of Counterfeit Goods, and the world’s largest Tesla coil in Makarau , controlled by Alan Gibbs of New Zealand. The selection is conceptual, so I like it. I will keep this book.
Christopher Goscha, The Penguin History of Modern Vietnam . The best general history of Vietnam I know, and it does not obsess over “the Vietnam War.” Readable and instructive on pretty much every page.
Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet . Due out in February , the UK edition is already out. Substantive and delightful on every page.
Peter Parker, Housman Country: Into the Heart of England . It’s already out in the UK, which is where I bought my copy.
Tom Bissell, Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve . Fun, engaging, and informative, worthy of the “best of the year non-fiction” list.
Ji Xianlin, The Cowshed: Memoirs of the Chinese Cultural Revolution . The classic account of its kind, in this edition brilliantly translated and presented.
Robert J. Gordon, Rise and Fall of American Growth , my review is here .
Buy Richard E. Feinberg, Open for Business: Building the New Cuban Economy . It also will make my best non-fiction books of the year list. See also his Miami Herald interview , and his long Brookings paper on FDI in Cuba .
A few I didn’t get to read yet, but have hopes for are Alan Moore’s Jerusalem , and Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk , caveat emptor in both cases, plus Invisible Planets , edited by Ken Liu, a collection of Chinese science fiction.
A few I didn’t get to read yet, but have hopes for are Alan Moore’s Jerusalem , and Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk , caveat emptor in both cases, plus Invisible Planets , edited by Ken Liu, a collection of Chinese science fiction.