Recently Mentioned Books

Here is a Guardian review , John Banville in the FT raves about it , and here is The Paris Review .  I believe I ordered it on Amazon.uk , all five-star reviews by the way.  Here is the U.S. Amazon listing , with access to used copies, I am not sure when the American edition comes out.

4. Daniel Drezner, The Ideas Industry, due out in April you can now pre-order .

1. New Camille Paglia book coming out in March .

It is an edited collection, I have an essay on inequality in the volume.  Here is the Amazon link .  Here is the book’s home page , which includes a full, free pdf.  There are many famous contributors, including Jason Furman and Betsey Stevenson, Martin Feldstein, Justin Wolfers, Glenn Hubbard, George Borjas, Melissa Kearney, Casey Mulligan, and others.  Here is Strain’s introduction and an organization of the book in sections .  Self-recommending!

That is from new and useful Gaining Currency: The Rise of the Renminbi , by Eswar S. Prasad.

Minxin Pei, China’s Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay , takes a close look at Chinese corruption, based on a detailed study of two hundred cases.

I have only browsed Milan Vaishnav, When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics , but it appears to be a quite interesting political economy take on the (non-optimal) transactional economies from having criminals so deeply involved in Indian politics.

William Mellor and Dick M. Carpenter II, Bottleneckers: Gaming the Government for Power and Private Profit , is a very useful look at how laws and regulation block progress and create barriers to advancement.

Forthcoming is Joe Quirk, with Patri Friedman, Seasteading: How Ocean Cities Will Change the World .  Comprehensive and readable, though I am not a convert.

3. Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and its Demons .  Fresh and stimulating throughout, I found most interesting the parts of how the Commander in Chief role of the president evolved under Lincoln, and Lincoln as the first “media president.”  Highly relevant for current politics too.

2. Antonio Di Benedetto, Zama .  A 1950s Argentinean novel set in colonial times, and beloved by Roberto Bolaño; the introduction describes the author as “a would-be magical realist who can’t quite detach himself from reality.”  For fans of the disjointed tragic.  I very much liked it, but had to read the first half twice in a row to grab hold of what was going on.

1. Peter Ames Carlin, Homeward Bound: The Life of Paul Simon .  I hadn’t known that Simon originally recorded the Hearts and Bones album with Garfunkel, but later erased his partner’s contributions to the songs.  Nor had I known that Simon produced a stripped-down, acoustic guitar version of “ Surfer Girl .”  For fans, the book is interesting throughout, and most of all the story is of an ongoing rivalry — with Art — that never became functional again once it collapsed.

The author is Julian Gewirtz and the subtitle is Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China .  I loved this book.  It is a tour de force on China, the theory of policy advising, and the history of economic thought, all rolled into one.  Here is one bit:

One criticism is that the tribunals could force governments to pay compensatory “takings” to foreign companies that incur costs as a result of safety or environmental regulations. But it has long been standard practice for trade treaties to protect foreign companies, for example by limiting the nationalization of foreign investment. Investors don’t always trust the courts of the nations they are investing in, and indeed from 1990 to 2013, at least 150 foreign-owned firms were nationalized , typi...

That is from Jon Wilson, The Chaos of Empire: The British Raj and the Conquest of India , a new and excellent book that stresses how much British rule of India was rooted in chaos and violence, rather than the smooth operation of a colonial elite.

Here are my previous posts about Fuchsia Dunlop .  And I can strongly recommend to you her very latest book Land of Fish and Rice , on the food in and near Shanghai, both recipes and text.

6. If you could get everyone to read one book, what would it be ?  I find most of the listed answers strange, and overly specific, and dependent on the readers already knowing plenty of other books.  Surely your selection needs to be a bestseller if indeed by “everyone” you mean everyone .  I find The Bible, Krishnamurti’s Think on These Things , or even Jonathan Livingston Seagull , or perhaps a book about the enjoyment of sex, to be more plausible picks.  Which book would you recommend?

6. If you could get everyone to read one book, what would it be ?  I find most of the listed answers strange, and overly specific, and dependent on the readers already knowing plenty of other books.  Surely your selection needs to be a bestseller if indeed by “everyone” you mean everyone .  I find The Bible, Krishnamurti’s Think on These Things , or even Jonathan Livingston Seagull , or perhaps a book about the enjoyment of sex, to be more plausible picks.  Which book would you recommend?

Similar claims are very much a theme in my last book, Average is Over , so I am happy to see them verified in a more definitive manner.

Rabbi Mark Glickman, Stolen Words: The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books .  I found this moving and extremely well-presented.

I can apply that same description to Joseph Turow, The Aisles Have Eyes: How Retailers Track Your Shopping, Strip Your Privacy, and Define Your Power .

Frank Ahrens, Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan .  A fun take on exactly what the subtitle promises.

4. Morton H. Christiansen and Nick Chater, Creating Language: Integrating Evolution, Acquisition, and Processing .  Have you ever wondered what is the actual professional status of Chomskyian linguistics and other claims you read in popular science books?  This is the go-to work to address that question, it is written at the right level of serious rigor yet readability for a non-linguist such as myself.

3. Afghan Modern: The History of a Global Nation , by Robert D. Crews.  The history of globalization in Afghanistan and of Afghanistan, highly intelligent and good material on just about every page.  A model for how to take a now somewhat cliched topic and make something original out of it.

2. William F. Buckley, edited by James Rosen, A Torch Kept Lit: Great Lives of the Twentieth Century .  Obituaries penned by WFB, fascinating throughout.  One forgets what a lucid writer he was, and some of the more unsettling entries (MLK, John Lennon) are some of the most interesting.