Recently Mentioned Books

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.

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.