Recently Mentioned Books

3. Black Silent Majority .  Pre-order the book here , I just did.

3. Author : Danilo Kiš , the Serbian Borges.  Or how about Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars , which somehow seems to have fallen through the cracks since the time of its publication.  Ivan “Ivo” Andrić is the Serbian Nobel Laureate, sort of, he espoused a Serbian identity but actually was Bosnian .

Josiah Ober, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece .  This new history of ancient Greece has an intriguing estimate of living standards during that time, I hope to spend more time with it soon.  Ober argues there was plenty of economic growth at the time and that the Greeks lived at well above subsistence; I agree with both of those claims.

This new book, by Algerian writer Kamel Daoud , starts with Camus’s The Stranger , and then retells the story from the point of view of the brother of the Arab murder victim.  It’s both commentary on the original and a compelling narrative in its own right.  The Guardian called it “an instant classic and Michiko Kakutani described it as “stunning.” Here is Roger Cohen on the novel .  You can buy it on Amazon here .  Unless your memory is very good, I recommend a refresher on The Stranger first. ...

That is the new and excellent book by Sebastian Strangio , which you can think of as a post-Sihanouk look at the country from a political economy point of view.  Here are just a few bits:

The subtitle is Essential Writings by Our Greatest Thinkers , and the editor is Elizabeth D. Samet.  Here’s the shocking truth: these really are writings by our greatest thinkers!  Usually I am allergic to the topic of leadership and all the more allergic to edited volumes.  But this book has well chosen excerpts from Thucydides, Cervantes, Borges, Marcus Aurelius, Tolstoy, Milton, Plutarch, and Shakespeare, among many others, and a variety of moderns, including Mandela, Gandhi, Frederick Dougla...

Arthur C. Brooks, The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Prosperous America .

1. Novelist : Help!  I do own a copy of Sarah Nović’s Girl at War , but haven’t yet read it.

A Soccernomics Guide: Why Chievo Verona, Unterhaching, and Scunthorpe United Will Never Win the Champions League, Why Manchester City, Roma, and Paris Saint-Germain can, and why Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, and Manchester United Cannot Be Stopped

The author is Edward Peter Stringham and the subtitle is Creating Order in Economic and Social Life .  I haven’t looked through this book yet, but I am very much an admirer of the underlying research by Ed.  Here is Peter Thiel’s blurb:

An excellent collection , edited by Jonathan Anomaly , Geoffrey Brennan, Michael C. Munger, and Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, self-recommending.  If I wanted a one-stop collection on PPE for teaching purposes, this exactly what I would use.

4. Robert F. Graboyes, Fortress and Frontier in American Health Care , a new eBook.

John Kay, Other People’s Money: The Real Business of Finance .  This seems to be a book on what is wrong with finance and how to fix it.

The authors are Nobel Laureates George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller and the subtitle is The Economics of Manipulation and Deception .  It’s a popular take on how markets trap you and your preferences in places you don’t want to be.  Self-recommending of course.

That is the new — well sort of new — Thomas Piketty book .  It was first published in France in 1997 and then updated several times through 2014, though we are told most of the book has kept its original structure.  It is a good, short read and will appeal to anyone with an interest in Piketty and “that sort of thing.”  The full-blown g > r model is not here, but you can see Piketty edging into being Piketty, with plenty of talk about capital-labor substitutability.

The book is Crazy Rich Asians , and the author is Kevin Kwan , who grew up in Singapore and also Texas.  It is a fun and popular “beach read” in its own right, but also more subtle and sociologically intriguing if you know a bit about Singapore.  I found it difficult to put down and it even made me laugh in a few places, which few novels do.  By the way, the female protagonist is an economics professor at NYU.

That was my response to reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me .  We all overinvest in non-diversified mood affiliation portfolios, so why not read someone else’s non-diversified mood affiliation portfolio from a less common point of view?

That is from Jim Goodman’s The Exploration of Yunnan , a useful and appealing book about one of the world’s most attractive regions.

From the Other Side of the World: Extraordinary Entrepreneurs, Unlikely Places , by Elmira Bayrasli .

Murat Iyigun has a new book out titled War, Peace & Prosperity in the Name of God .  I haven’t read it yet, but Timur Kuran’s blurb seems helpful:

That is the new book by Jason F. Brennan and Peter Jaworski .  I like my own blurb for it:

4. Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend .  This writer has been called a “female Neapolitan Knausgaard,” arguably a deliberate oxymoron.  It took me my second read through to “get it,” which I suppose means I am not the natural target audience.  But I am very glad I gave it that second read, and this is in fact the female Neapolitan Knausgaard, in four volumes by the way.

3. Vendela Vida, The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty: A Novel .  To the point and lots of fun.  A recently divorced woman travels to Morocco and surprises start to happen.  Occupies that intriguing space between “not deep” but also “not superficial.”

2. P.W. Singer and August Cole, Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War .  More of a speculative exercise than a traditional novel — what if the Chinese could beat the Americans? — but still a fun read and a book that people are talking about at high levels.

1. Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy .  Most of all, Learned how much hard work and ingenuity was behind the MP3 standard, in any case a good and useful book.