Recently Mentioned Books

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…”

3. Naomi Duguid, Taste of Persia: A Cook’s Travels Through Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran, and Kurdistan .  Not only an excellent cookbook, but a good regional study in its own right.

2. Jeffrey Edward Green, The Eyes of the People: Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship .  “The ocular model, by contrast, is grounded on the People’s eyes and its capacity for vision, rather than on the People’s voice and its capacity for speech.”  Think of it as Exit, View, and Loyalty, for the contemporary age.

1. Europe Since 1989: A History , by Philipp Ther.  And yet it is all told through the vantage point of central and eastern Europe.  Recommended, not just the usual and interesting to see “the West” treated as the periphery.  Makes you wonder if eastern Europe ever had a chance.

In 2003, long before Uber, Airbnb, or serious talk of driverless cars, Klein published The Half-Life of Policy Rationales: How New Technology Affects Old Policy Issues . This remarkable work explores how technological change keeps making old markets failures – and the regulations that arguably address them – obsolete.  (Here’s the intro , co-authored with Fred Foldvary).  Fourteen years later, the relevance of Klein’s thesis is all around us.  Transactions costs no longer preclude peakload prici...

In 1999, when internet commerce was still in its infancy, Klein published Reputation: Studies in the Voluntary Elicitation of Good Conduct . Seventeen years later, e-commerce towers before us, resting on a foundation of reputational incentives – everything from old-fashioned repeat business to two-sided smartphone reviews.

Daniel C. Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds .

I read only a fragment of Chris Wickham’s Medieval Europe , but found it well-written, to the point, and illuminating for both the specialist and general reader.

I don’t think I will have time to get to Lynne B. Sagalyn’s Power at Ground Zero: Politics, Money, and the Remaking of Lower Manhattan , but it looks very good.

4. William Domnarski, Richard Posner .  This biography focuses on Posner the infovore, and is itself a big pile of information.  We should not forget Posner’s role in founding the Journal of Legal Studies and Lexecon when awarding him a much-deserved Nobel Prize.  Every page of this book has information , recommended, even if (because?) it is a bit of a splat.  Here is one cited account of Judge Posner: “One of my favorite lines is when he would characterize a lawyer’s answer as “mere words” whe...

3. Harvey Cox, The Market as God .  Harvard theologian argues that economists have started to argue as theologians do.  The closing sentence is “When The Market does not have to be God anymore, it might be a lot happier.”

2. The Blind Photographer , edited by Julian Rothenstein and Mel Gooding.  Here is an article on Pedro Martinez , one such photographer from Oaxaca.  An excellent book, thought-provoking about both the nature of disability and photography, and also the mind’s eye.  Here is a good National Geographic article on the volume .

1. Against Everything , Essays, by Mark Greif.  The worst of these are still well-written and interesting, and the best are among the best essays being written today.  There are many good sentences: “Were “In the Penal Colony” to be written today, Kafka could only be speaking of an exercise machine.”

There is much more!  But that is a taste from the new and excellent Becoming Jane Jacobs , a runs-up-through 1972 biography by Peter L. Laurence, definitely one of the best books of the year.  This is the biography of Jacobs I have wanted to read for forty years.