Recently Mentioned Books
Showing 25 of 6685 mentions, ordered by most recent.
That is the new book by M.A. Orthofer , out soon this April. If you measure book quality by the actual marginal product of the text, this is one of the best books written, ever. Reading the manuscript in draft form induced me to a) write an enthusiastic blurb, and b) order about forty items through Amazon, mostly used of course. The book is basically a comprehensive guide to what is valuable and interesting in recently translated world literature, a meta-book so to speak, with extensive cover...
I will reread it shortly, you can buy it here .
The authors are Jon A. Shields and Joshua M. Dunn Sr. and the subtitle is Conservative Professors in the Progressive University . I found this book subtle and thought-provoking throughout. Here is one good bit:
You can order the book here , it is titled And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe’s Crisis and America’s Future .
I also have been enjoying Robert Teitelman’s Bloodsport: When Ruthless Dealmakers, Shrewd Ideologues, and Brawling Lawyers Toppled the Corporate Establishment , a general history of American corporate deal-making.
The author is William N. Goetzmann, and the subtitle is How Finance Made Civilization Possible . This is a very good general history about the useful role finance has played through the ages.
6. Robert S. Levine, The Lives of Frederick Douglass , this one is excellent based on about thirty minutes of browsing.
5. Salil Tripathi, The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War and its Unquiet Legacy .
4. Justin Schmidt, The Sting of the Wild: The Story of the Man Who Got Stung for Science . A popular science book on insect stings, so far it is quite good.
3. Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice .
2. George Hawley, Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism . University Press of Kansas has been sending me more books lately, they are developing quite a nice line of publications.
1. George S. Yip and Bruce McKern, China’s Next Strategic Advantage: From Imitation to Innovation . Every book on this topic is worth reading, this one too.
That is from an interesting Geoff Manaugh NYT piece on aerial surveillance in Los Angeles . Here is Manaugh’s forthcoming book A Burglar’s Guide to the City , which I have pre-ordered.
That is from the new Dante biography by Marco Santagata , Belknap Press at Harvard, definitely recommended, it will make my best non-fiction of the year list for sure.
That is a question posed by Robert H. Frank in his forthcoming book Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy . The main point of this book is to illuminate the major role which luck plays in our lives and then to flesh out the social and policy implications of that fact.
10. Anthropologist : Claude Levi-Strauss. Tristes Tropiques remains a beautiful book to be read by all.
2. Playwright : Maurice Maeterlinck , read especially Blue Bird .
That is from Shawn Fury’s new and fun Rise and Fire: The Origins, Science, and Evolution of the Jump Shot — and How it Transformed Basketball Forever . Keep this in mind the next time you hear someone criticize Stephen Curry for taking (and making) so many three point shots. This is what I call “@pmarca bait.”
The author is Frank Trentmann and the very apt subtitle is How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First . I have only browsed this, but it appears both readable and well informed. It is a “big book” with 690 pp. of core text, bringing together many ideas from history and the social sciences yet in narrative form.
Cecil E. Bohanon and Michelle Albert Vachris, Pride and Profit: The Intersection of Jane Austen and Adam Smith , my blurb refers to it as a “tour de force [which] ties the worlds of economics and literature together, leaving the reader delighted and informed along the way.”
Jeff Gramm’s Dear Chairman: Boardroom Battles and the Rise of Shareholder Activism is a very useful and well-researched book, focusing on shareholder rights and control issues in the earlier history of corporate America.
Peter McPhee, Liberty or Death: The French Revolution . More of a browse so far, but I have positive impressions of this new Yale University Press book.
5. Stephen Stigler, The Seven Pillars of Statistical Wisdom . What are the seven foundational pillars of statistics? Beautifully written.
4. Joanna Masel, Bypass Wall St.: A Biologist’s Guide to the Rat Race . Darwin plus Fred Hirsch on positional goods as applied to finance and portfolios. Unorthodox, interesting.
3. Sally Denton, The Profiteers: Bechtel and the Men Who Built the World . A good history of one epicenter of crony capitalism. I had not known what an important role Bechtel played in the early construction of nuclear power plants. Here is a good T.J. Stiles NYT review of the book .