Recently Mentioned Books

For the pointer I thank Mary Ray.  (p.s.: the paperback edition of Average is Over is out today).

On this note, the paperback of Average is Over is coming out August 26th, you can order your copy here .

Due to hydrocarbons, the country is growing at over six percent a year.  My favorite movie set in Bolivia is Even the Rain , a Spanish production I believe.

You can order the book here .

That is the new book by Jean-Pierre Filiu , Oxford University Press.  It would not have come right now unless I were supposed to read it on the plane, so I will.

I loved the Michael Hofmann review of Stephen Parker’s Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life in the 15 August 2014 Times Literary Supplement .  Every paragraph of that review is a gem and Hofmann calls the book perhaps the greatest literary biography he has read.  I’ve ordered my copy .

There is more here , you can pre-order the book here .  My previous posts about this work are here .

Justin McGuirk, Radical Cities: Across Latin America In Search of a New Architecture is broader than the title implies and recommended to anyone who follows that part of the world.

Fear: A Novel of World War I , by Gabriel Chevalier, is being touted as the “latter day All Quiet on the Western Front.”  At first I thought that was just exaggerated promo, but it is quite good.

That is the new Haruki Murakami book , which Amazon sent me a day early.  It is (dark) fun, but not deep and not top drawer Murakami.  Most of his fans will like it enough to be glad they bought it.

7. Dick Hyman’s Century of Jazz Piano , five CDs, quite familiar music, some of it corny even, nonetheless these remain remarkable pieces and they are impeccably played.  A joy of rediscovery.

6. Deafheaven, Sunbather .  “Black metal for people who don’t like black metal.”  Alternatively, “Serving as an artistic lucid dream of warmth despite the stinging pain of life’s cruel idealism.”

5. Mala, Mala in Cuba .  Think Buena Vista Social Club for dubstep fans.

4. Complete Haydn string quartets , Mosaiques Quartet.  My favorite of all the complete recordings of these.

2. Calypso: Musical Poetry in the Caribbean 1955-1969 , best on vinyl.

1. Sd Laika, That’s Harakiri , a new sound world, best on vinyl.

The authors are Till Düppe and E. Roy Weintruab and the subtitle is Arrow, Debreu, McKenzie and the Problem of Scientific Credit .  I very much liked this book, which provides an inside look at the discovery of some key theorems in economics, with an emphasis on the problem of joint discovery.  McKenzie, by the way, is the one who received the least credit, an example of the Matthew Effect .

The paperback edition of Average is Over is out soon on August 26, you can order it here .

Which is to say that while Cowen’s point about the global picture is both interesting and correct, his political stance is backwards. It’s not fans of Capital in the 21st Century who are pushing nationalism as an alternative to plutocracy, but its detractors. And though the recent politics in the US Congress have been driven by the somewhat odd sequence of events around the arrival of unaccompanied minors from Central America , the underlying pattern runs much deeper than that.

8. Stephen L. Carter, Back Channel: A Novel .

7. Dan DiSalvo, Government Against Itself: Public Union Power and Its Consequences .

6. Paul Know, editor, Atlas of Cities .

6. Lawrence A. Cunningham, Berkshire Beyond Buffet: The Enduring Value of Values .  Maybe the title doesn’t sound promising, but this is a substantive take on what actually goes on out there.

5. Steven Conn, Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century .  Good background for understanding today’s blue-red divide and the origins of progressivism.

4. David Eimer, The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China .  A look at China’s outermost regions and their ethnic minorities, an excellent perspective on The Middle Kingdom.