Recently Mentioned Books

So what should I ask?  I already know which is his favorite novel …and plan to ask about that…and of course we will cover his new forthcoming book The World According to Star Wars .

So what should I ask?  I already know which is his favorite novel …and plan to ask about that…and of course we will cover his new forthcoming book The World According to Star Wars .

That is from Greg Milner’s new and interesting book Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds .

I very much like this book , it is one of my favorites of the year so far.  It resists being excerpted, as it is an old-style think piece in the style of Montaigne, or for that matter Robert Burton .  Every page is idea-rich and should be read carefully and slowly, and that is rare these days.  Here is just one bit:

Rana Foroohar, Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business .

Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan, The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them — and They Shape Us .

Margaret Guroff, The Mechanical Horse: How the Bicycle Shaped American Life .

Heinz D. Kurz, Economic Thought: A Brief History .

That is all from the new and excellent book What is a Dog? , by Raymond Coppinger and Lorna Coppinger.  The best parts of this book draw inferences from what is observed in Mexican town dumps.

The pointer is through Ted Gioia , don’t forget his new and excellent book How to Listen to Jazz .

7. Lonnie Mack has passed away ; The Wham of that Memphis Man! is one of my favorite albums.

That will be the new Fuchsia Dunlop book , due out in October, July in the UK, self-recommending.  Her work is far more than recipes, but rather an extended meditation on food, history, culture and many other things.  She is one of my favorite authors on any subject.  Here is previous MR coverage of Fuchsia Dunlop .

5. Myra Strober, Sharing the Work: What My Family and Career Taught me About Breaking Through (and Holding the Door Open for Others) .  The memoir of a female economists who started her career teaching at Berkeley in the 1970s.  There should be many more books like this.  It is a micro-history of discrimination, and how it changed, in addition to looking at the profession through the lens of a “normal” economist rather than one of the super-famous.  Bravo.

4. Duncan Clark, Alibaba: The House that Jack Built .  Books on China, tech companies, and corporate leaders are all usually bad, but this one is pretty good.  Most of all a window into how Chinese entrepreneurs built up the country’s major tech companies.

3. Maya Lin, Topologies .  What has she done since the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial? Lots, though much of it is scattered widely and hard to see.  Pictured below is her Bell Tower at Shantou University. Here is the Box House in Telluride , and the Children’s Defense Fund in Tennessee .

2. Richard E. Feinberg, Open for Business: Building the New Cuban Economy .  A good introduction to where the Cuban economy is at right now, from Brookings , coming out in June.  Here is my earlier post on why I am skeptical about the country’s prospects .

1. Pieter M. Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History .  Belknap Press, a carefully researched take on the political history of a poorly understood era.  A bit dry, but very well done and full of information.

Here is the WSJ piece .  Ruchir has a new book coming out on emerging economies, The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World .  I have not yet read it, but it is surely of interest.

Another good way to read about Buddhism is to look at up through p.59 in Nicholas Ostler’s Passwords to Paradise: How Languages Have Re-Invented World Religions .  It covers the differential historical spread of Buddhism through the languages of Pali, Gandhari, Sanskrit, and Chinese.  Ostler himself claims to have a working knowledge of eighteen different languages.

That is the new book by John S. Strong , which I recommend highly.  It won’t charm you or interest you in the subject if you don’t already care, but the already-motivated can learn a great deal from it.

Here is her forthcoming novel,The Age of Consent .

His new book is titled Legislating Instability: Adam Smith, Free Banking, and the Financial Crisis of 1772 .  From Harvard University Press, here is one summary bit:

I say Singapore should inspire more social science.  Pararg Khanna, who lives in Singapore, also has a new book out on cities and the value of interconnectivity: Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civiliation .  I haven’t read it yet but here is his TED talk on the same .

That was the question I had reading Joel Kotkin’s new and interesting The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us .  Kotkin doesn’t himself come out and say that, but it is hard to avoid seeing how his arguments point in that direction.  He has two powerful arrows in his bow:

More guest are scheduled, including some Fed officials, but I would love to hear from you on what guests and topics you would like to see on the show. My first guest is Scott Sumner with whom I discuss his views on the Great Recession, NGDP targeting, and his new book on the Great Depression, The Midas Paradox .