Recently Mentioned Books

4. Virginia Woolf, Flush: A Biography .  This one doesn’t get huge amounts of play, but it’s actually an awesome book about…a dawg .  Recommended, beautifully written and easy to read, Straussian too though you can read it straight up for fun as well.

3. Todd Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener, The Upside of Your Dark Side .  Only some people should read this book.

2. Sebastian Edwards, Toxic Aid: Economic Collapse and Recovery in Tanzania .  He gives foreign aid to Tanzania an “F” for the 1961-1981 period, a “B minus” for 1981-1994, and a B+ for the latter part of that period.  Edwards is a top international economist and this is one of the best thought out books on foreign aid.

1. David Sterling, Yucatán: Recipes from a Culinary Expedition .  This cookbook is “too good” to actually cook from, but as account of food from Yucatán, along with history, photos, and recipes, it has to count as one of the year’s most notable publications.

That is the new James K. Galbraith book, subtitled The Great Crisis and the Future of Growth .  It covers a lot of ground and everyone will find something to object to in here.  Still, I found it a good example of some fresh thinking, though it is not a tract which sees through its arguments with a lot of detail.  I am glad to have read it.

That is from Morris L. Bian, The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China: The Dynamics of Institutional Change , p.205.  This book is useful for showing early Chinese moves in the direction of state planning and state-owned enterprises.

That is from the new and excellent When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940-1944 , by Ronald C. Rosbottom.

5. Author : Hmm…I don’t really like either Robert Penn Warren or Hunter S. Thompson.  So Thomas Merton wins a second category, try The Seven Storey Mountain .

Eric Kaplan, Does Santa Exist?: A Philosophical Investigation , by one of the producers of The Big Bang Theory.

Isabel Sawhill, Generation Unbound: Drifting into Sex and Parenthood without Marriage .

Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control .

That is from the new and excellent Nicholas Lardy book Markets Over Mao: The Rise of Private Business in China .  In my view the truth lies somewhere between the arguments of Lardy and the thesis of Joe Zhang , see the first Amazon review for Zhang’s critique of Lardy, plus Zhang’s comments here .  Here is Scott Sumner criticizing Zhang .

That is the new book by Robert E. Litan and it is the single best attempt to answer the question of what good economists have done the world (I am also a big fan of Alex’s earlier edited volume, Entrepreneurial Economics on this topic, the Litan is more current).  The subtitle is How Economists and their Ideas have Transformed Business .

That is the new book by Robert E. Litan and it is the single best attempt to answer the question of what good economists have done the world (I am also a big fan of Alex’s earlier edited volume, Entrepreneurial Economics on this topic, the Litan is more current).  The subtitle is How Economists and their Ideas have Transformed Business .

The full piece is here .  By the way, there is a new Cass Sunstein book out, which I have not yet read, Valuing Life: Humanizing the Regulatory State .

Andrea Louise Campbell, Trapped in America’s Safety Net: One Family’s Struggle .  A good anecdotal but also analytical study of how means-tested welfare programs can make life very difficult for the poor.  Recommended.

Edward D. Kleinbard’s We are Better Than This: How Government Should Spend Our Money is a well-done progressive take on the expenditure side of fiscal  policy.

Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North .  A moving and vibrant novel about an Australian in a prisoner of war camp in WWII and his escapades surrounding that time in his life.

I very much enjoyed Ian Leslie’s Curious , a polyglot look at being…curious.

Ruth Towse, Advanced Introduction to Cultural Economics .  She remains the definitive presenter of this material.

This is the new and fantastic book by Arthur M. Melzer and the subtitle is The Lost History of Esoteric Writing .  It is the best book I know on esoteric writing and its history and furthermore it is clear and to the point!  (I think)

Jennifer Schuessler at The New York Times reports on the work and new book of Dan Jurafsky:

Alastair Bonnett, in his new and excellent Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and other Inscrutable Geographies , notes that these enclaves are usually not supplied with public goods.  Furthermore:

The author is Joe Zhang and the subtitle is Is China’s State Capitalism Doomed ?  Here is the summary of his conclusions:

That is by Martin Wolf and the subtitle is What We’ve Learned — And Still Have to Learn — From the Financial Crisis .  You can buy it here .