Recently Mentioned Books

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 .

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.