Recently Mentioned Books

1. Deep South , by Paul Theroux.  It’s OK enough, but Theroux’s best writing was motivated by bile and unfortunately he has matured.  Still, he can’t get past p.9 without mention Naipaul’s “rival book” A Turn in the South .  My favorite Theroux book is his Sir Vidia’s Shadow , a delicious story of human rivalry and one of my favorite non-fiction books period.

I read about thirty pages of the new Salman Rushdie .  While it was better than expected, I didn’t feel compelled to continue; it is odd to tell a rationalist story through magical realist means.  Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life is turning out to be one of the year’s sensations.  I’ve read about one hundred pages and seems to be of high quality but its themes don’t grab me (New York City, child abuse), and it is taking too long to become conceptual.  And for another recent novel on child abuse ...

I read about thirty pages of the new Salman Rushdie .  While it was better than expected, I didn’t feel compelled to continue; it is odd to tell a rationalist story through magical realist means.  Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life is turning out to be one of the year’s sensations.  I’ve read about one hundred pages and seems to be of high quality but its themes don’t grab me (New York City, child abuse), and it is taking too long to become conceptual.  And for another recent novel on child abuse ...

I read about thirty pages of the new Salman Rushdie .  While it was better than expected, I didn’t feel compelled to continue; it is odd to tell a rationalist story through magical realist means.  Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life is turning out to be one of the year’s sensations.  I’ve read about one hundred pages and seems to be of high quality but its themes don’t grab me (New York City, child abuse), and it is taking too long to become conceptual.  And for another recent novel on child abuse ...

5. Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World , it is out already in the UK , which was my source.  My main objection to this book is the overselling in the subtitle.  It is a nice, readable account of Silk Road history and the importance of Eastern land transport for global economic history.  I liked it, but didn’t feel it revised my worldview in any big way or even tried to.  The material on the twentieth century struck me as too familiar.  Here is one useful review .

4. Andrew Wender Cohen, Contraband: Smuggling and the Birth of the American Century .  A good look at how America really ran its nineteenth century trade policies, full of good anecdotes and examples.

3. Lillian Faderman, The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle .  A good, readable, even-tempered treatment of what the title promises.  I learned a good deal about the 1940s and 50s most of all, recommended.  It is 816 pp. but never a drag.  I am surprised it is not being reviewed more prominently.

2. Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World .  This 1815 volcanic eruption in Indonesia had a bigger impact on global history than you might think.  Be afraid, be very afraid.

1. Lavinia Greenlaw, A Double Sorrow .  A deeply sad but very affecting poem, based loosely on Chaucer’s Troilus and Cressida .  Here is a useful review of the work , and unlike many poems it is very easy to read.

This is no dull, ghost-written tome, rather it is interesting throughout .  You can pre-order the book here .

The author is Timothy Snyder and the subtitle is The Holocaust as History and Warning .  Here is one bit:

The new Greg Ip book is coming out soon , I just bought my copy…

I learned a good deal reading Ramon H. Myers’s essay “The World Depression and the Chinese Economy 1930-6” in Ian Brown’s The Economies of Africa and Asia in the Inter-war Depression .  Here are a few of his points:

Overall, after sixty-one pages of reading, I would not dissuade the eager, nor would I attempt to convert the skeptical.  I am closer to the latter group, as the main theme, described by Sam Tanenhaus as “the false idolatry of the digital age,” is too close to my daily life to interest me further; it’s Raskolnikov, Captain Ahab, and Colonel Kurtz for me.  It is Beauty is a Wound , by Eka Kurniawan from Indonesia, that I am waiting for: “ There is much dying in the novel .”

Her new The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers is a tour de force of economics, anthropology, Pierre Bourdieu, management theory, and anecdotes about Sony and Facebook and UBS and Cleveland Clinic.

Jeremiah D. Lambert’s The Power Brokers: The Struggle to Shape and Control the Electric Power Industry is full of useful and interesting facts, organized by the stories of various personalities, including Paul Joskow and Kenneth Lay.  Cintra Wilson’s Fear and Clothing: Unbuckling American Style is written in exactly the opposite manner, breezy and fun but at times could use more facts.

Jeremiah D. Lambert’s The Power Brokers: The Struggle to Shape and Control the Electric Power Industry is full of useful and interesting facts, organized by the stories of various personalities, including Paul Joskow and Kenneth Lay.  Cintra Wilson’s Fear and Clothing: Unbuckling American Style is written in exactly the opposite manner, breezy and fun but at times could use more facts.

Patrick Modiano’s newly translated Pedigree: A Memoir is perhaps excellent in the original French, but I found very little in it to hold my attention.

I don’t currently have time to read it, but Robin Lane Fox’s forthcoming Augustine: Conversions to Confessions looks quite good.

4. Barry Allen, Vanishing into Things: Knowledge in Chinese Tradition , is a consistently interesting take on the history of ideas in China, including Daoism, Chan Buddhism, and much more.  It is unusual for a book to both make scholarly contributions and engage the common educated reader, most of all on these sometimes arcane topics.

3. Padraig O’Malley, The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine — A Tale of Two Narratives .  This “substance on every page” book can be read profitably no matter what your point of view on this conflict.  It has lots of economics too, most of all a good discussion of what it would take for a Palestinian state to be economically viable.  Definitely recommended.

2. Bill Hayton, The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia .  If you wish to be convinced that no one has much of a good claim to the Spratlys, this is the place to go.  The best guide to current disputes.

1. William Skidelsky, Federer and Me: A Story of Obsession .  An excellent short book on how tennis has changed through technology, the nature of excellence in human performance, and why fans are interested in sports and sports stars at all.  There is no great tennis stagnation.

That is the new forthcoming Richard Posner book and the subtitle is The Academy and the Judiciary .  Virtually everything by Posner is worth reading, and this comparison of the worlds of the professor and the judge is no exception.

That is from the new and interesting The End of Tsarist Russia: The March to World War I & Revolution , by Dominic Lieven.  I liked the first sentence of the book: