Recently Mentioned Books

3. I am very happy to see my former Ph.D student, Shawn DuBravac, who recently finished his degree, at #10 on the NYT non-fiction bestseller list .  His book Digital Destiny is here .

Rafael Yglesias, The Wisdom of Perversity, a novel .

Andrew Levy, Huck Finn’s America: Mark Twain and the Era that Shape His Masterpiece , looks quite good on first glance.

Jeffrey A. Frieden, Currency Politics: The Political Economy of Exchange Rate Policy , somehow this is oddly relevant these days.

Arnold Thackray, David Brock, and Rachel Jones, Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley’s Quiet Revolutionary .

The author is Ian Bostridge and the subtitle is Anatomy of an Obsession , and of course it focuses on Die Winterreise .  This is the first book published this year to make it into my 2015 “best of the year list.”  Here is one good review of the book .

That is all from Sam Van Schaik, Tibet: A History .

4. Naipaul and Theroux bury the hatchet . Sir Vidia’s Shadow is another of my all-time favorite books.

One obituary is here , more are here .  The book is here .

That is from Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century , an excellent book from 2007.  I am sorry it took me so long to discover this work.  It has wonderful sentences such as:

The article offers other points of interest, mostly about how special interests have undermined entrepreneurship.  I have recently pre-ordered Bessen’s forthcoming book on this theme .

That is from Water: Asia’s New Battleground , which is actually one of the most interesting political economy books published in the last few years.

5. Philip Klein’s Overcoming Obamacare is a very useful and well-written guide to alternatives to ACA, although I am not sure the reader comes away especially heartened or optimistic.  Aaron Carroll reviews the book , mostly positively (though he disagrees), Veronique de Rugy has coverage also .

2. Eric Topol, The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in Your Hands .  I don’t have the time to read a book on medicine just now, but it looks quite interesting, a rebuttal to the claim that consumers are helpless in the world of medicine.

1. Lives of the Laureates: Twenty-three Nobel Economists , edited by Roger W. Spencer and David A. Macpherson.  I know an earlier edition of this book, my favorite piece is the essay by Thomas Schelling but it is a good book throughout.

You can order the book here .  It came out in December 2014 but will make my best books of 2015 list for sure.  For the initial pointer to this book I wish to thank Jim Olds.

That is a new (early 2014) and excellent book by Elaine Scarry, the subtitle is Choosing Between Democracy and Doom .  Here is one good sentence:

That is one of the essays in the book Violence, Terrorism, and Justice , edited by R.G. Frey and Christopher W. Morris.  By the way, Schelling cites the campaign of Palestinian radicals against Palestinian moderates as one of the examples of a successful terrorist plan.

I ordered this book through the UK , as it does yet have a U.S. publication date on Amazon.  It has a fascinating 891 pp. of text (and an excellent annotated bibliography ), virtually all of which are worth reading.  In just about any year it is one of the top five non-fiction books of that year.  I found it especially strong on English-French relations, and early modern times, and perhaps a bit weak on post-1970 developments, which are in any case harder to cover.

Of all the moderns who have written on automation and rising joblessness, Martin Ford is the original.  His Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future is due out this May, you can pre-order here .  Self-recommending.

If I apply the Amazon order test, the best book for me this last year was Michael Hoffman’s Where Have You Been?: Selected Essays .

Andrew Roberts’s biography of Napoleon made me want to read an additional biography of Napoleon, because it made his life to me more interesting.  It made Napoleon’s period more interesting too.  I might read a book on cavalry tactics as well, a topic I have never read on before.

That is from Natasha Singer, interesting throughout .  And I just received a review copy of the relevant Bruce Schneier book Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Capture Your Data and Control Your World .

6. Andrew I. Gavil and Harry First, The Microsoft Antitrust Cases , which upon a brief perusal appears to be a very thorough and useful look at what the title promises.

5. E.M. Forster, A Passage to India .  A very good reread, the Straussian in me remains convinced that the final “Hindu section” of the book somehow has to make sense.