Recently Mentioned Books

That is the title of my current column at The Upshot .  I very much enjoyed my read of William MacCaskill’s Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference .  The point of course is to apply science, reason, and data analysis to our philanthropic giving.

In my view she overstates what are essentially some worthwhile points.  For more you can read her book The Entrepreneurial State .  Here is her home page .  Here is her Wikipedia page .  Here is her TED talk .  She is here on Twitter .

The subtitle of the book is What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will .

That is the new and highly intelligent book by Stephen Macedo, and the subtitle is Same-Sex Couples, Monogamy & the Future of Marriage .  I balk at only one of his conclusions: he is pro-gay marriage, where I agree, but he does not believe in legal polygamy.  For instance he argues there is no polygamous orientation comparable to a same-sex orientation, rather polygamy is a preference.  He views polygamy as unstable, and also as leading to distributive injustice, with high status males reaping e...

Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine , is a very good general history of the country.

Also of interest to some of you may be Helen Vendler, The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar, essays on poets and poetry .

5. Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot , by Mark Vanhoenacker.  The idea and method behind this book basically work — imagine an analytic version of “pilot tells all” — so I am surprised this genre has not been explored in more detail before.

4. George Yeo on Bonsai, Banyan, and the Tao .  Speeches and writings by a Singaporean politician about the vision behind the country and why it has worked out relatively well.

3. Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay .  Volume three of the Neapolitan quadrology, these novels are getting better and better and stand as one of the major literary achievements of the last decade.

2. Han Kang, The Vegetarian: A Novel .  A novelistic equivalent of those weird “Asia extreme” Korean movies, compelling and easy to read, recommended.

1. Owen Hatherley, Landscapes of Communism: A History through Buildings .  A consistently interesting take on communist architecture, not entirely unsympathetic as indeed corresponds to my own attitude.  Sheila Fitzpatrick wrote a nice LRB review of the book , suggesting that the author must have visited those developments in summer rather than wintertime.

The author is Michael Booth and the subtitle is Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia ; please note the book is (at times) as much tribute as critique.  I found it interesting and informative throughout, here a few passages:

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.