Recently Mentioned Books

Overall I was disappointed by my read of this book and I write that as someone who very much has liked Wade’s NYT pieces on similar topics.  I appreciated the honesty and courage of the work, but I felt Wade needed to have pushed deeper in book-length form.

3. Many of his intemperate statements about the history of art are wrong or doubtful or exaggerated and have been answered or at least contested, including in the five books I have written on the economics of the arts, including In Praise of Commercial Culture .

That is the new, forthcoming Peter Leeson book, available here .

A similar, but less stark, dynamic is playing out in rich countries. Anyone who has ever used their Kindle’s included 3G service has benefited from network non-neutrality; after all, you can’t use it to access non-Amazon services. Absent Amazon’s non-neutral arrangement with wireless carriers, you’d have to pay a nontrivial monthly fee to access books via the cellular network, which would mean that most people would forgo cellular and stick to Wi-Fi. Again, we observe a non-neutral arrangement e...

The editor is Joshua Hall and the subtitle is The Simpsons and Economics .  The Amazon summary starts with this:

That is the new Princeton University Press book by Michael Cook and the subtitle is The Islamic Case in Comparative Perspective .  It is a very good comparative look at why Islam has evolved to have a special influence on politics, relative to the other major religions:

5. John Keay, Midnight’s Descendants: A History of South Asia since Partition .  A very good treatment of how much work remains to be done in the “nation building” enterprise in South Asia.  Recommended.

4. Dominic Couzens and Mark Sisson, The Secret Lives of Puffins .  Unlike many sea birds, puffins are quiet, and their divorce rate is in the range of seven to nine percent.  Excellent photos in this one.

3. Elliot A. Rosen, Roosevelt, the Great Depression, and the Economics of Recovery .  Chapter twelve is a fascinating look at the debates over Alvin Hansen’s “secular stagnation” thesis.  It is uncanny how much the exact same debates are being replayed today.

2. Dan Fagin, Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation .  An excellent study of one episode in the history of environmental catastrophe.  Overall, the environment remains understudied in economic history or for that matter public choice.

1. Andrew Hussey, The French Intifada: The Long War Between France and its Arabs .  Probably you should read a book on this topic, and this book is it.

The title is The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century .

You can order the book here .  You can find Herbert’s poems here .  This book also shows how much overly restrictive copyright law damages other works of literary criticism, Herbert of course is fully in the public domain.

Do you know the Oxford University Press “very short paperback books” series?  This is the latest entry, by Avinash Dixit , self-recommending.

I enjoyed this book , which is authored by Jeffrey Towson and Jonathan Woetzel.  Here is one excerpt:

Jacob Soll, The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations .

William D. Ferguson, Collective Action & Exchange: A Game-Theoretic Approach to Contemporary Political Economy .

Robert E. Mutch, Buying the Vote: A History of Campaign Finance Reform .

David Zetland, Living with Water Scarcity .  Amazon here .

Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us .

That is the new and excellent book by Dan Jurafsky , due out this September, and I found it interesting throughout.  Here is just one bit:

Everyone reads One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera but actually my favorites are some of the early short fiction and also News of a Kidnapping [Noticio de un Secuestro], plus the unfinished autobiography .

Everyone reads One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera but actually my favorites are some of the early short fiction and also News of a Kidnapping [Noticio de un Secuestro], plus the unfinished autobiography .

4. Philippe Legrain, European Spring , a useful and well-written popular look at the European economic mess, $2.99 on Kindle.

You can buy the book here .