Recently Mentioned Books
Showing 25 of 6685 mentions, ordered by most recent.
Greg Ip presented his new book Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe at Mercatus/GMU, with an emphasis on financial crises and a bit on forest fires too. I was the moderator, and the commentators were Alex J. Pollock and Jared Bernstein.
9. This won’t end well. Now go read a book on the Taiping rebellion .
That is the forthcoming book by Scott Sumner, and the subtitle is Financial Markets, Government Policy Shocks, and the Great Depression . Here is one of Scott’s brief capsule descriptions of the book:
Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: At her Zenith: In London, Washington, and Moscow , vol.2 of the biography, 1984-1987. This one I haven’t finished yet. I ordered my copy advance from UK Amazon, it doesn’t come out in the U.S. until early January. There is some chance this is the very best book of the year.
Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World . The best of the various recent books on Humboldt.
Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine , a good general history of the country.
Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, Bewilderments: Reflections on the Book of Numbers . You can never read enough commentary on the Torah.
Michael Meyer, In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China . Adam Minter has a very good and useful review of a good book.
Scott Sumner, The Midas Paradox . Boo to the gold standard during the Great Depression.
Mastering ‘Metrics: The Path from Cause to Effect , by Joshua D. Angrist and Jörn Steffen-Pischke, technically late 2014 but it was too late to make that list.
Homer’s Iliad , translated by Peter Green. Also gets rave reviews.
Tale of Genji , by Murasaki Shikibu, translated by Dennis Washburn.
The Poems of T.S. Eliot, volume 1 and volume 2 , annotated. Rave reviews for those.
The Poems of T.S. Eliot, volume 1 and volume 2 , annotated. Rave reviews for those.
Nnedi Okorafor, Binti . Okorafor is American but born to two Nigerian parents, this science fiction novella is creative and fun to read. Ursula K. Le Guin likes her too.
Eka Kurniawan, Beauty is a Wound . It’s been called the Garcia Marquez of Indonesia, and it is one of the country’s classic novels, newly translated into English. Here is a good NYT review .
Elena Ferrante, volume four, The Story of the Lost Child . See my various posts about her series here , one of the prime literary achievements of the last twenty years.
Vendela Vida, The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty . Fun without being trivial.
Chris Adrian and Eli Horowitz, New World , “An innovative story of love, decapitation, cryogenics, and memory by two of our most creative literary minds.”
The Seventh Day , by Yu Hua. Perhaps my favorite of all the contemporary Chinese novels I have read: “Lacking the money for a burial plot, he must roam the afterworld aimlessly, without rest.”
I found Pierre Razoux’s The Iran-Iraq War to be a highly readable and useful account, translated from the French, Harvard Belknap Press. I can’t judge the details of the substance, but I never had the feeling it was overreaching or implausible. Here is one quick excerpt, of relevance to contemporary events:
2. Mary Gaitskill by the book . I am enjoying her new novel The Mare .
That is from the new and interesting The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923 , by Sean McMeekin.
ASNESS: I could have gone with the obvious. I’m a bit of a libertarian. I could have gone with, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress . It’s his most famously libertarian book.
ASNESS: That is a really — Methuselah’s Children .