Recently Mentioned Books

2. Charles C.W. Cooke’s The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right’s Future is all the rage right now.  Books which attempt to redefine or carve up the political spectrum aren’t exactly my thing, but this one is well-written and vital.  Here is a Reason interview with Cooke .  Here is a NYT interview with Cooke .

1. I enjoyed my page browse through Becoming Steve Jobs , which seems fun, readable, and informative, but it’s not what I feel like reading right now.  But if you think you might want to read it, you probably should.

That is from Joseph Bottum, An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America .

That is the new Ian Bremmer book, with the subtitle Three Choices for America’s Role in the World .  It can be Indispensable America (our postwar role), Moneyball America (pick priorities and accomplish them), or Independent America (limited foreign policy aspirations but lots of nation-building at home and trade abroad), and Ian prefers the latter — “I believe it’s time for Americans to redefine our value to the world.”  Most of all he thinks we have to choose, and articulate the reasons for ou...

This is from his Polemics book :

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant: A Novel .  It has a beautiful air of mystery and profundity, but by p.120 I still didn’t care.  Some of you will like this a lot, but I put it down to pick up some other book which I will not finish.

Richard Roberts and David Kynaston, The Lion Wakes: A Modern History of HSBC .  This is an important book for the historian, but it is not written for the eye of the economist.

Edward Mendelson, Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth Century Writers .  Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, Kazin, William Maxwell, Bellow, Mailer, Auden, and O’Hara.

James McPherson, The War That Forged a Nation: Why the Civil War Still Matters .

There is a new version of the Mahabharata , in blank verse rather than prose, translated/created by Carole Satyamurti .  I’ve only read an initial sliver of it, but dramatically and linguistically it is very effective.  This is a beautiful edition, and deserves serious consideration as a purchase for just about every library.  I have yet to see any significant reviews of the work.

That is from the new and noteworthy The Korean Economy: From a Miraculous Past to a Sustainable Future , by Barry Eichengreen, Wonhyuk Lim, Yung Chul Park, and Dwight H. Perkins.

5. The strongest version of Shambaugh’s argument is that there is no “core” to the internal coups, a’ la Gordon Tullock’s book Autocracy .  You get too many internal coups, or too many incipient internal coups, and the public square is required to impose structural equilibrium on the problem.  Maybe so, but that requires lots of claims about the internal dynamics of Chinese politics, and the lack of internal coup stability mechanisms.  The cited evidence by Shambaugh does not seem to bear direct...

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.