Recently Mentioned Books

1. Stephen M. Bainbridge and M. Todd Henderson. Limited Liability: A Legal and Economic Analysis .  One of this year’s sleeper books, it is probably the best extant treatment of corporate limited liability and one of the best books on the corporation from a law and economics point of view.  I do not understand how it ended up at $133 from Edward Elgar.

I have browsed the useful-seeming Johan A. Lybeck, The Future of Financial Regulation: Who Should Pay for the Failure of American and European Banks? Most books with titles like that are bad and boring, this seems to be a very useful collection of facts about previous bailouts.

4. John Richard Boren, For Intellectual Property: The Property Ideas of Andrew J. Galambos .  As far as I can tell from this intriguing but maddeningly vague book, and based on what I have heard , Galambos was a 1960s-70s libertarian astrophysicist who believed in intellectual property rights for all ideas, indeed in ideas and not just for the expression of ideas as under current law.  The rumor, possibly apocryphal, was that those who knew his true doctrines were forbidden to explain them to ot...

3. Andre Schlueter, Institutions and Small Settler Economies: A Comparative Study of New Zealand and Uruguay, 1870-2008 .  There should be more such books!  New Zealand and Uruguay had roughly comparable per capita incomes in 1920, yet New Zealand pulled away and never gave back much of that lead.  One factor, according to the author, was that the Kiwis had about 40% public ownership of farm land in 1930, resulting in a greater distribution of gains from agriculture and eventually a more egalita...

2. James T. Hamilton, Democracy’s Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism .  A highly original look at exactly what the subtitle promises, I thank Jay for keeping Cowen’s Second Law valid.  Has this topic ever been more important than this year?

1. 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.

As I’ve already written, it is Tim’s best and deepest book.  Here is the book’s home page .  You can order the book here , it is out today a messy day it must be.

I’m on p.194, more reports to follow.  You can buy the book here , it is one of the best of the year even from just the first 193 pp.

Adrian Goldsworthy, Pax Romana: War, Peace and Conquest in the Roman World.

Roger E.A. Farmer, Prosperity For All: How to Prevent Financial Crises .

Richard English, Does Terrorism Work? is a good, balanced historical look at what terrorists have and have not achieved.  The best chapter was on Ireland, and the book is mainly non-Muslim examples.

Also noteworthy is Leigh Eric Schmidt, Village Atheists: How America’s Unbelievers Made Their Way in a Godly Nation .

5. Williamson Murray and Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh, A Savage War: A Military History of the Civil War .  The best, clearest, and most instructive military history of the Civil War I have ever read; the pre-history summary of war origins is good too.  Someday I should write a full post on all the reasons why I find so many Civil War military history books unreadable, in the meantime this one hit a home run.  By the way, the two authors live in Fairfax, VA.

4. John Stubbs, Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel .  A good detailed biography, focusing more on Swift’s times, Ireland, and religious and political disputes, rather than Swift as writer per se .   A very useful supplement to the other major Swift biographies.

3. Alain Bresson, The Making of the Ancient Greek Economy .  I would not describe this as stirring narrative, but that is more the nature of the material than any fault of the author.  It is by far the most comprehensive treatment of what we know about the ancient Greek economy.  Here is Mark Koyama on theorizing about ancient economies . NB : I have only browsed this book.

2. Claire-Louise Bennett, Pond .  This is not a plot-based novel, rather it is Irish and poetic and much of it I read a second time.  Most of you would find it frustrating.

1. Robert Kanigel, Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs .  Lots of information about Jane Jacobs, so it has to be a good book and indeed it is.  I found Becoming Jane Jacobs more engaging to read, but this one covered the latter part of her life in great detail, unlike the previous bio.

Sebastian Mallaby, The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan .

The Chinese government estimates females found 55 percent of new Internet companies and more than a quarter of all entrepreneurs are women. In the U.S., only 22 percent of startups have one or more women on their founding teams, according to research by Vivek Wadhwa and Farai Chideya for their book ‘Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology.’

The author is Ben H. Shepherd and the subtitle is The German Army in the Third Reich .  That may seem like a timeworn topic, but I found this book consistently fresh and interesting, also well-written, analytic throughout, one of the year’s best non-fiction studies.  Here is one bit:

The descriptive subtitle is The romantic journals of Jean Lucey Pratt .  She was a British woman who started keeping a journal in 1925 at the age of fifteen, and continued until her death in 1986.  Usually books like this bore me after fifty pages (or less), but this one I am finding consistently entertaining.  Here is one bit from her cruise ship voyage at age 23:

That is Stephen Moss at The Guardian .  Along related lines, I very much enjoyed Daniel Gormally’s Insanity, Passion, and Addiction: A Year Inside the Chess World .  It’s one of my favorite books of the year so far, but it’s so miserable I can’t recommend it to anyone.  It’s a book about chess, and it doesn’t even focus on the great players.  It’s about the players who are good enough to make a living — ever so barely — but not do any better.  It serves up sentences such as:

The new Coetzee and McEwan novels are OK but they don’t thrill me.  There is also George J. Borjas, We Wanted Workers: Unraveling the Immigration Narrative , coming out soon.

5. Christine Woodside, Libertarians on the Prairie: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose Wilder Lane, and the Making of the Little House Books .  Fun and interesting, this gives you the real story behind those women and their connection to libertarianism.  Here is a short essay by the author excerpted from the book.  I cannot, however, say this book drove me to wish to read the original sources.

4. Paul Bloom, Against Empathy . “Singer goes further and argues that individuals like Kravinsky [an organ donor], motivated by their cold logic and reasoning, actually do more to help people than those who are gripped by empathic feelings…”