Recently Mentioned Books
Showing 25 of 6797 mentions, ordered by most recent.
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 .
2. John Gimlette, Elephant Complex: Travels in Sri Lanka . An informative and entertaining look at an under-covered country. (If you’d like a critical review instead, try this one , but I followed up on some of the criticisms and was not persuaded by the attempted takedown.) This NYT article suggests (correctly) that now is the time to visit Sri Lanka.
1. Ronald Bailey, The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century . Good arguments all around, and he covers climate change too. My worry is a political economy one: if we can’t handle small amounts of immigration or trade competition from China without flipping out, how will we fare with forthcoming environmental problems?
The authors are Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog and the subtitle is The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education . This is an interesting and important book, and the core message is pretty simple:
That is his new book and the subtitle is A New Approach for the Age of Globalization .
Erwin Dekker’s The Viennese Students of Civilization: The Meaning and Context of Austrian Economics Reconsidered is an original and interesting look at the foundations of the Austrian School of Economics, properly situating it in the context of its time. Here is one bit:
That is the new book by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, and the subtitle is How the War on Government Led Us To Forget What Made America Prosper . It is well written and will appeal to many people. It is somewhat at variance with my own views, however. Most of all I would challenge the premise of a “war on government,” at least a successful war. How about a “Dunkirk on government”?
3. The twenty best Taiwanese movies ? By the way, Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day is being released soon on disc for the U.S. market.
Richard L. McCormick discusses this question in his The Party Period and Public Policy (the quoted chapter is reproduced in jstor ):
5. Frits Gierstberg, European Portrait Photography Since 1990 . Mostly photos, not much text, the artists include Rineke Dijkstra, Jurgen Teller, Thomas Ruff, Nikos Markou, Anders Petersen, and Clare Strand. This book made a strong impression on me, and I find it to be one of the best meditative tools for thinking about what Europe really is these days. By the way, the under-representation of Islam (not popular with collectors?) is striking.
4. David Stubbs, Future Days: Krautrock and the Birth of a Revolutionary New Music . Self-recommending.
3. Leila S. Chudori, Home . A classic Indonesian novel, recently translated, about Indonesian exiles in Paris, post-1965, and how they are unable to cut their emotional ties with the homeland. If you are only going to read a few Indonesian novels, this should be one of them.
2. Clyde Prestowitz, Japan Restored: How Japan Can Reinvent Itself and Why This is Important for America and the World . A not-absurd view of how Japan could be fully back on its feet by 2050. Imagine a Japan which employs women at an especially high rate, moves almost completely to green energy independence, and revitalizes its investment and corporate governance; I found the chapter on “Englishnization” least plausible, however.
1. Euny Hong, The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture . A genuinely good and fun introduction to South Korea today.