Recently Mentioned Books
Showing 25 of 6685 mentions, ordered by most recent.
4. Despina Stratigakos, Where are the Women Architects ?
3. Michel De Vroey, A History of Macroeconomics: from Keynes to Lucas and Beyond .
2. Jürgen Kocka, Capitalism: A Short History .
1. Rowena Olegario, The Engine of Enterprise: Credit in America .
Definitely recommended, you can buy it here .
This is probably one of the most useful things you will learn from MR all year. It is from Maria Konnikova’s new book The Confidence Game :
That anecdote is from McKay Coppins, The Wilderness: Deep Inside the Republican Party’s Combative, Contentious, Chaotic Quest to Take Back the White House , a fun read with lots of background information I did not know.
6. James Baldwin, Collected Essays . My favorite Baldwin, not the novels. The biggest surprise in here is his film criticism, most of all the short essay on Bergman, or on Porgy and Bess. Here is an Atlantic piece appreciating Baldwin as a movie critic . Or how about this sentence?: “He [Langston Hughes] is not the first American Negro to find the war between his social and artistic responsibilities all but irreconcilable.”
5. Amiri Baraka, SOS Poems 1961-2013 . Is he actually one of America’s better poets? Imagine a mix of Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, and the Black Panthers. Truly original and full of energy, here is his NYT obituary .
4. Timur Vermes, Look Who’s Back . I don’t usually read books with “the Hitler gimmick,” but this recently translated German novel caught my eye in a London bookstore. Imagine that Hitler comes back (an unexplained plot twist), no one believes it is “the real Hitler,” and he is given his own TV show as a kind of crank celebrity imitator. It’s an interesting meditation on the commercial trivialization of evil, and how the modern world can process virtually any kind of message. Relevant for Am...
3. C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary . Many people consider this the best book on cricket ever written. I cannot judge that, but it is a stellar sports book, colonialism book, and most of all a Caribbean Bildungsroman (Trinidad), definitely recommended to anyone with interests in those areas. Beautifully written, I read this one to prepare for Kareem .
2. R.W. Johnson, How Long Will South Africa Survive?: The Looming Crisis . A stunning yet deeply pessimistic book about why the country is doing so badly. The rot seeps more badly than I had realized. The corruption, collapse of the legal system, and dismantling of the use of the government public to spend on public goods all are out of control and getting worse. Recommended. A bit idiosyncratic, but conceptual and original throughout.
1. Robert Trivers, Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist . A wild memoir, full of tales of bipolar, murders in Jamaica, study at Harvard, marijuana, knee symmetry as a key variable in sprinting success, and the Black Panthers. It has sentences like “Best way to put it, nobody fucked with Ernst Mayr.” From one of the leading evolutionary biologists, recommended if you are up for the offbeat and the exotic and not obsessed with coherence . Burial instructions are included.
The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World that Values Sameness , by Todd Rose.
The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth is Unattainable and the Global Economy is in Peril , by Satyajit Das, and
You can order the book here , recommended.
Here is an excerpt from the now published Tonio Andrade book, The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History :
That is the new Robert Trivers memoir , I just ordered my copy, sure to be outstanding.
Rick Shenkman, Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics .
Clement Fatovic, America’s Founding and the Struggle Over Economic Inequality .
Caroline Freund, assisted by Sarah Oliver. Rich People Poor Countries: The Rise of Emerging-Market Tycoons and their Mega Firms .
Steven Klepper, Experimental Capitalism: The Nanoeconomics of American High-Tech Industries .
Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making us Smarter ; both Robin and Bryan are fond of this one.
Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts .
To make it stranger yet, this book is Weizman’s response to Sheikh’s The Erasure Trilogy , which is structured as a tour of the ruins of the 1948 conflict. That book is I believe from a Palestinian point of view, and described as a “visual poem.” I just ordered it; note that Sheikh is the photographer for The Conflict Shoreline and thus listed as a co-author.