Recently Mentioned Books

3. Yuri Herrara, Signs Preceding the End of the World .  Sometimes considered Mexico’s greatest active writer, this novella draws upon the Juan Rulfo-Dante-Dia de los muertos tradition to create a convincing moral universe in 128 pages.  I find this more vivid and arresting than Cormac McCarthy’s treatment of the other side of the border.

2. China Mi é ville, Embassytown .  The first of his novels that has clicked with me, perhaps because it is the one that comes closest to being a true novel of ideas, Heideggerian ideas in this case.  A new prophecy is needed, and the nature of the new prophecy, like the old, will be shaped by language.  Just accept that upon your first reading you won’t enjoy the first one hundred pages and you should at some point go back and read them again.

1. Tom Bissell, Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve .  Fun, engaging, and informative, worthy of the “best of the year non-fiction” list.

2. Ryan Avent has a book coming out in September .

You can order the book here .  Here is my earlier review .

I am looking forward to my copy, here is the Amazon link .

That is the title of his posthumous memoir , highly recommended.  It is one of the best books on the charm of studying Southeast Asia, and also a very good look at how American academia rose from mediocre to excellent in the postwar era.  It is short and can be consumed in a single gulp.

Recommended, due out in June from Princeton University Press .  And here is Timothy Taylor on polarization .

Sweet Tea Apothecaries sells Dead Writers Perfume , which promises to evoke the aroma of books old enough for their authors to have passed to the great writers’ retreat in the sky. Perfumer Christopher Brosius’s “ In the Library ” product line makes your home and body smell just like that. The high-end fragrance Paper Passion claims to capture the “unique olfactory pleasures of the freshly printed book,” though for roughly $200 per bottle it’s a lot cheaper to just buy a freshly printed book.

That is all from Krishnendu Ray, The Ethnic Restaurateur , which is intermittently quite interesting.  Here is the Google Books page .

3.George J. Borjas, We Wanted Workers: Unraveling the Immigration Narrative .  My favorite two-sentence sequence in this book is: “It is worth emphasizing that the distributional pain is the flip side of the economic gain.  And ironically, the greater the distributional pain, the greater the economic gain .”  Good for fans, etc.

2. Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe .  Recall that while Krugman is much more influential in America, Stiglitz is more influential in Europe and in most of the developing world, thus the topic of this book makes sense.  I agree with most of the arguments, though not the view that trade surpluses are essential for understanding the problem .  This book is good for fans, at the very least, but it will not convert the uninitiated.

1. Philip Norman, Paul McCartney: The Life .  From this book one learns that young Beatle Paul had more sex with more women than most people had thought, his daily pot habit started earlier than most people had thought (it inspired “Got to Get You Into My Life”), and Paul not John was the musical innovator (duh).  I enjoyed this book (duh) and it had a reasonable amount of detail about his last twenty years.  Good for fans, at the very least, but it will not convert the uninitiated.

There is a new and intriguing book out by Benjamin Peters called How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet , which outlines exactly what it claims to.  Here is one introductory excerpt:

This 174-page book , from 1974, is probably the best I have read this year so far.  The main tale is the author’s pioneering transgender experiences, but it’s far broader than that, also being an excellent travel book, romance, family story, and tale of ineradicable obsession.  Everything is pitch perfect, and you can finish it in a sitting, these are the kinds of books I wish people recommended to me.  Here is the end of the story , quite romantic.  Here is an interview with Morris .

James T. Bennett, Subsidizing Culture: Taxpayer Enrichment of the Creative Class , the subtitle says it all.

Don and Alex Tapscott, Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business, and the World lists more possible uses for blockchains than you would have thought possible.

There is Don Watkins and Yaron Brook, Equal is Unfair: America’s Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality , by no means do I go all the way with them, but still this a useful corrective to some current obsessions.

David L. Ulin’s Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles is a meditation on to what extent Los Angeles succeeds as a walkable city , or someday might get there.

3. Aileen M. Kelly, The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen .  Beautifully written, and full of interesting history, but it never quite convinces the reader that Herzen is an interesting and worthwhile intellect for 2016.  Maybe he isn’t — does that make this book better or worse?

And I am happy to praise Frank Dik ö tter’s The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History 1962-1976 , but I did not find it as revelatory as his earlier books on China .  Here is a Judith Shapiro NYT review .

2. Ji Xianlin, The Cowshed: Memoirs of the Chinese Cultural Revolution .  The classic account of its kind, in this edition brilliantly translated and presented.

1. Jason Brennan, Against Democracy .  He is a epistocrat . P.S. voters are ignorant and irrational.  Furthermore “Politics is not a Poem.”  I agree with most of the debunking arguments in this book, but I am not convinced epistocracy ends up being better; Brennan’s examples of epistocracy include restricted franchise, plural voting, voting by lottery, epistocratic veto (the Senate, but more so), and weighted voting.  I see big advantages to a strict normative ideal of legal egalitarianism of ci...

That is from Arthur Kroeber, China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know , a new and useful introductory guide to what the title suggests.  This parallel of course is one reason why the early years of Soviet communism went as well economically as they did.

1. A new and significantly revised edition of Ilya Somin’s Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter , is coming out in June.