Recently Mentioned Books

5. Harry G. Gelber, The Dragon and the Foreign Devils: China and the World, 1100 B.C. to the Present .  No, this isn’t the best Chinese history book.  But it is the one most written in a way that you will remember its contents, and in this context that is worth a lot.

4. Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking .  He is one of the best non-fiction essay writers, and he remains oddly underrated in the United States.  It is no mistake to simply buy his books sight unseen.  I think of this book as “happiness for grumps.”

2. John Gray, The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry into Human Freedom .  The usual dose of pessimism, with a choppier argument and a slightly larger typeface than usual.  It induced me to order Mr. Weston’s Good Wine .  In any case, I’ll still buy the next one, engaging with John Gray if nothing else has become a ritual.  I once predicted to Jim Buchanan that John would end up converting to Catholicism, but I still am waiting.

1. David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: on Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy .  Don’t judge Graeber by his mistakes or by how he responds (doesn’t respond) to criticism.  This one is still more interesting to read than most books.  In fact, most of us quite like bureaucracy.

Eric Rauchway, The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace .

That is from Philip T. Hoffman’s new and interesting Why Did Europe Conquer the World? , here is the book’s home page .  Hoffman does note, however, that if we count empires the Spanish empire was during that time larger than China.

Do read the entire article, and while you’re at it Adam Minter’s Junkyard Planet .

Here you can buy The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy .

I would someday like to read a Big Data paper on what predicts which neologisms will fail .  In any case, that information is from Hugh Aldersey-Williams’s new book The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century , for fans of Browne only but yes I am one.

By the way, the fourth edition of Doug Irwin’s trade book is coming out .

No further information on those markets is offered, do any of you know more about this?  The passage is from Huan Hsu’s new and noteworthy The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China .  It’s not so much a book about porcelain, rather it is an excellent look at China and also the idea of a quest to discover one’s family history, recommended.

In any case, my clear first choice pick is Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers , which I started reading a few days ago.  Here is the first sentence of the Amazon.com review:

Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is in the running, as are John Le Carre, Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace.  Here is a discussion of Dickens, Orwell, and other classics .  Here is a jstor-gated survey of the topic .  There are plenty of novels about universities, very few of which I can endure.

There are post-war Eastern European novels galore, where to start? In the First Circle ?  Still, communist bureaucracies are no longer so typical, so I am not ready to award any of these novels first prize.  Gogol’s earlier Dead Souls also stands out as a Russian candidate.

You can pre-order the book here , the book’s home page is here .

That is the Italian edition of Average is Over , the subtitle is “ Ipermeritocrazie e futuro del lavoro ,” and you can find a copy here .

Alvin Roth, Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design .

Brendan O’Flaherty, The Economics of Race in the United States .

Dan Ariely, Irrationally Yours: On Missing Socks, Pickup Lines, and Other Existential Puzzles .

Steven J. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, When to Rob a Bank…and 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants .

Dirk Philipsen, The Little Big Number: How GDP Came to Rule the World and What to Do About It .

Adrian Wooldridge, The Great Disruption: How Business is Coping with Turbulent Times .

That is the new book by Ashlee Vance , and so far it is the book I have enjoyed most this year.  Highly recommended.

I also recommend Sverre Bagge, Cross & Scepter: The Rise of the Scandinavian Kingdoms from the Vikings to the Reformation .  If nothing else, this book will make you wonder if the recent success of the Nordic nations are in fact so deeply historically rooted after all.  As North (p.205) points out: “Industrialization arrived in all of these countries relatively late.”  Tom Buk-Swienty’s 1864: The Forgotten War That Shaped Modern Europe is a good book on how and why Denmark lost so much territory...

I also recommend Sverre Bagge, Cross & Scepter: The Rise of the Scandinavian Kingdoms from the Vikings to the Reformation .  If nothing else, this book will make you wonder if the recent success of the Nordic nations are in fact so deeply historically rooted after all.  As North (p.205) points out: “Industrialization arrived in all of these countries relatively late.”  Tom Buk-Swienty’s 1864: The Forgotten War That Shaped Modern Europe is a good book on how and why Denmark lost so much territory...