Recently Mentioned Books

4. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, Bewilderments: Reflections on the Book of Numbers .  Imagine taking an underdiscussed (by most people) book of the Bible and showing its connections to politics and the legitimation of authority, to spiritual yearning, to overcoming trauma, and to Freudian and other psychoanalytic theories of the ambiguity of desire.  This is all done from a theologically Jewish point of view, incorporating the midrash as well.  That may sound like a bit much, but I found this book f...

3. Bill Gifford, Spring Chicken: Stay Young Forever (Or Die Trying) .  An informative, entertaining, and yet non-sensationalistic account of recent (and some not so recent) attempts to conquer aging.  It avoids the temptation of exaggerating the science and also turning all of the profiled individuals into “colorful characters.”  A genuinely good book.

2. Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East .  An engaging look at a time and place of increasing relevance for today’s global problems.

1. Michael Meyer, In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China .  Adam Minter has a very good and useful review of a very good book.  The main lesson, beyond the specific and often fascinating vignettes, is that history is everywhere, and everywhere is interesting if only you know how to read the open book.

That is the new Michael Walzer book, with the subtitle Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions .  The stated paradox is fairly simple, yet worthy of sustained attention:

By the way, those numbers are read off a graph and thus are approximate.  They are from p.67 of Mara Prentiss, Energy Revolution: The Physics and the Promise of Efficient Technology , new and noteworthy from The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, recommended.

That is the new book by Mark Greif, and the subtitle is Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973 .  I very much enjoyed grappling with this one.  One of my more recent views is that the thinkers of the mid-twentieth century are in fact, as a whole, extremely underrated.  They are not old enough to be classic and not new enough to be trendy or on the frontier.  Their world faced problems which seemed totally strange to us in the 1990s, but which are starting to sound scarily relevant and contemp...

That is the new Robert D. Putnam book and it focuses on the widening opportunity gap among America’s young.  Much of the work is narrative and case studies, starting with Port Clinton, Ohio but not stopping there.  Any Putnam book is an event, and this one is the natural sequel to Charles Murray’s Coming Apart .  The writing and the underlying intelligence are of an extremely high quality.

Robert Alter, a translation with commentary, Strong as Death is Love , including The Song of Songs, Ruth, Esther, Jonah, Daniel.  I haven’t read this one yet, but Alter’s biblical works are among the greatest scholarly creations of our time.

Oxford Companion to the Economics of China , edited by Shenggen Fan, Ravi Kanbur, Shang-Jin Wei, and Xiaobo Zhang.

Melanie Swan, Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy .  This appears to be a very clear and useful treatment of the idea of a blockchain, including Ethereum and even futarchy.

Melissa Lane, The Birth of Politics: Eight Greek and Roman Political Ideas and Why They Matter .

That is the newly published volume 16 of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek , edited by Sandra J. Peart.  Of course this is splendid from beginning to end, including Peart’s introduction, the letters, Hayek’s commentary, and assorted documents, and the book even contains three very nice poems written by Harriet Taylor.

That is the new and forthcoming book from Richard H. Thaler , due out in May.  It is excellent and fascinating, and yes even if you have read all of the other popular books on behavioral economics you should read this one too.

Gernot Wagner and Martin L. Weitzman, Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet .

Michael T. Heaney and Fabio Rojas, Party in the Street: The Antiwar Movement and the Democratic Party after 9/11 .

The 1943 Bengal famine has been cited by Amartya Sen and others as a classic example of market failure.  But in his new (and excellent) book Eating Dead People is Wrong, and Other Essays on Famine, Its Past, and Its Future, Cormac Ó Gráda devotes an entire chapter to that episode and comes away with a different impression.  Here is a summary sentence:

I found very interesting the new book by Joseph Coleman, Unfinished Work: The Struggle to Build an Aging American Workforce , which deals with some related issues though not primarily in the academic context.

This is a theory of teaching that is based on the inter-subjective relationship between teacher and learner. This theory posits that teaching does not, as is commonly assumed, take place via instruction from teacher to students, but rather through a process of selection in the learner’s brain, stimulated by materials and activities utilized by the teacher. In this theory, the mechanism that drives the selection process in learners’ brains is co-regulated emotional signaling between teacher and l...

I had never heard of this novella , and yet it is a splendid and and indeed frank exhibit of Hardy’s rather brutal and tragic view of human psychology.  It is explicitly a version of the Romeo and Juliet story, except the pair end up marrying rather than dying.  What happens then?  The story is full of behavioral economics and rational choice dilemmas.

It is also notable how few of you picked entertainers or sports figures, as such individuals have figured prominently on such lists in the past (see my What Price Fame? ).  In 1971 a lot of people would have said “John Lennon,” and in his day Ted Williams placed high in such surveys.  These days, for better or worse, the tech world and politics seem to exercise a stronger hold on our imaginations, all the more among MR readers I suspect.

That is from William Giraldi , who is reviewing Scott Timberg’s Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class , an interesting book which I hope to cover more soon.

That is the new and notable book by Jacob T. Levy.  Here is one overview bit:

By the way, Werner Troesken at the University of Pittsburgh will be publishing a new book on how American freedoms have allowed infectious diseases to spread , or so sounds the description.  It is from University of Chicago press, due out in May.

That is the new eBook from my colleague Philip Auerswald and Anthony JoonKyoo Yun, you can buy it here .