Recently Mentioned Books

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.

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.