Recently Mentioned Books

The author is Michael North, and this new and excellent book , when it comes to the earlier centuries, emphasizes the role of Swedes and Germans in shaping a region of prosperity and trade.  The most interesting section (starts p.239) is about the 1920s, when the Baltic nations underwent a radical deindustrialization, due to their severing from the Russian empire.  That is when they deviated from the Nordic economies, which for the most part continued their industrialization.

That is the new Anders Aslund book , and it is instructive throughout.  Here are a few things I learned:

4. Jane Alpert, Growing up Underground .  One of the best 1960s memoirs, she goes from being a Swarthmore radical to a bomber who tries too hard to please her boyfriend, to a reconstructed peaceful feminist.  This book is notable for how it combines extreme self-awareness and extreme self-delusion, often on the same page.

3. Walter Scott, Ivanhoe .  This isn’t just of fusty, antiquarian interest, rather the book comes alive on virtually every page.  The plot is gripping, there are neat twists on “multicultural” themes, the descriptions of clothing are wonderful, and the whole thing can be read as extended commentary on Shakespeare, most of all Merchant of Venice and Richard.

2. The New World: A Novel , by Chris Adrian and Eli Horowitz.  Imagine a husband who wants his head frozen cryogenically, and a wife who wants something else.  I resisted this one at first, for fear it would be schlocky and gimmicky, but I ended up thinking it was quite good.  Here is a brief NPR review , they liked it too.

1. Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America , by Peniel E. Joseph.  The best single book I know of on what the title indicates.

That is the recent book by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who has been held at Guantánamo for many years.  This is a classic of prison literature, and I will teach it next year in my Law and Literature class.  Almost every page is interesting:

And I just downloaded Hugo Dixon’s The In/Out Question , which argues the UK should try to stay in the European Union…

Jeffrey Towson and Jonathan Woetzel, The One Hour China Consumer Book: Five Short Stories That Explain the Brutal Fight for One Billion Customers .  The short tale of why the most successful beer companies are the state-owned enterprises is alone worth the price of this book.

Jonathan Rauch, Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy .  The tag “self-recommending” was made for books like this one.  According to Rauch, transparency is overrated and politics should be more transactional.

That is from Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City , by Antero Pietila.  Anyone interested in the roots of current problems in Baltimore should read this book

That is from her new and excellent The Long Process of Development: Building Markets and States in Pre-industrial England, Spain and their Colonies , recommended.  This is essential reading for the history of colonial Mexico in particular.

Marshall Sahlins, Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa .

Kevin Madigan, Medieval Christianity: A New History .

Alexander Klose, The Container Principle: How a Box Changes the Way We Think .

Ian Zack, Say No To The Devil: The Life and Musical Genius of Rev. Gary Davis .

The author is Nathaniel Popper and the subtitle is Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money .

That is all from Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party , pp.2-3.  Here is my previous post about the Black Panthers .

That is from the new and excellent book The Final Pagan Generation , by Edward J. Watts.  Watts tries to reconstruct the worldviews and impressions of the pagans who witnessed the onset of Roman state-sanctioned Christianity; an underlying theme of the work is how weak a sense we have of what is truly significant in our time, or not.  I often find Roman histories to be difficult to parse, but this one is a model of lucidity.

Ratner has a new study titled ‘Inhibited from Bowling Alone,’ a nod to Robert Putnam’s book about Americans’ waning participation in group activities, that’s set to publish in the Journal of Consumer Research in August . In it, she and co-writer Rebecca Hamilton, a professor marketing at the McDonough School of Business, describe their findings: that people consistently underestimate how much they will enjoy seeing a show, going to a museum, visiting a theater, or eating at a restaurant alone. T...

In my spare time I was reading some Huey Newton, and it struck me how contemporary his ideas were in some regards, in particular the risk of arbitrary violence at the hands of the police.  Here is an excerpt from Revolutionary Suicide :

François Bourguignon has a very good and readable new book on the international dimension of inequality, The Globalization of Inequality .

His new book Inequality: What Can Be Done? , is out mid-May but already available in some bookstores.  Here is an interview with Atkinson .  I thought this book did not take sufficient care with some very basic distinctions, such as the difference between a problem of poverty and a problem of inequality.   Nor does it put enough emphasis on wealth creation, or explain why Korean-Americans have done pretty well over the last thirty years, among other possible examples.

Vishaal Kishore, Ricardo’s Gauntlet: Economic Fiction and the Flawed Case for Free Trade .

Arnold Thackray, David C. Brock, and Rachel Jones, Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley’s Quiet Revolutionary .  Appears to be the most thorough and comprehensive treatment to date.