Recently Mentioned Books

That is from the new and noteworthy book by Kristian Coates Unrichsen, The First World War in the Middle East .  I wouldn’t say it is a fun book, but it is clear, well-written, and very good background reading on a number of today’s crises.

7. The Amazon site for the book is here .  Here is the Wikipedia page , the book still sells about 250,000 copies a year.  Steven Spielberg once bid for the movie rights.

5. Carl Wilson, editor, Let’s Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste .  Most of this volume concerns Céline Dion, or is that Celine Dion ?  Fascinating in parts, the subtitle should have been the title.

4. Hans Ulrich Obrist, ?Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Curating*? , a successful Swiss attempt at being clever and punchy.

3. Elizabeth Pisani, Indonesia, Inc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation .  Lots of emphasis on the islands.  Pretty good, not great.

2. Francisco Goldman, The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle .  Further evidence that politics is often the enemy of really good books, nonetheless this is still a moderately interesting treatment.

1. Tom Doyle, Man on the Run: Paul McCartney in the 1970s .  This book actually has some fresh material, plus you realize that John and Paul were even more obsessed with each other than we used to think.

The author of this new and excellent book is David Skarbek and the subtitle is How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System .  It carries rave blurbs from Thomas Schelling and also Philip Keefer.  My favorite section was the discussion of how the rate of gang formation in prisons depends on how the prisons are governed (start at p.65).  For instance when prison officials cannot reliably protect prison inhabitants, gang membership is especially likely.  Gangs rarely operate in UK prisons and...

The full list is here , possibly gated.  They also recommend the Adam Tooze book on the post WWI era , which I now have finished and really like and also find to be quite Sumnerian.  Adam Minter’s Junkyard Planet is an excellent read as well.

The full list is here , possibly gated.  They also recommend the Adam Tooze book on the post WWI era , which I now have finished and really like and also find to be quite Sumnerian.  Adam Minter’s Junkyard Planet is an excellent read as well.

By the way, you can buy Nader’s new book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State .  I very much enjoyed my preparation for this interview, which involved reading or rereading a bunch of his books and also a few biographies of him.

Robert Howse, Leo Strauss: Man of Peace .

In 100 Years, Leading Economists Predict the Future , edited by Ignacio Palacios-Huerta.

Steven D. Gjerstad and Vernon L. Smith, Rethinking Housing Bubbles: The Role of Household and Bank Balance Sheets in Modeling Economic Cycles .  They present a bank balance sheet account of the Great Recession, with a good deal of background coming from the experimental economics direction.

Peter de Keyzer, Growth Makes You Happy: An Optimist’s View of Progress and the Free Market .

Morten Jerven, Poor Numbers: How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What To Do About It .

The longer article , by Georgina Adam, cites the Thompson estimate that there are about seventy-five “superstar” artists who regularly earn in seven figures.  And here is the new Georgina Adam book Big Bucks: The Explosion of the Art Market in the 21st Century .

1. The new Edward Hugh eBook .

His discussion of the importance of the legal system is also very good.  You can buy the book here .

I have written a review of this book, subtitled The Great Housing Disaster , for the Times Literary Supplement of 13 June 2014.  As I explain in the review, he tried to write a book about housing problems in the UK without accepting the Avent-Yglesias analysis that legal restrictions on supply are a big part of the problem.  Rather than looking to supply and demand, Dorling instead tries to blame “inequality, selfishness and hoarded extra bedrooms.”  It doesn’t succeed.  Here is an excerpt from ...

6. Jenny Davidson, Reading Style: A Life in Sentences .  Why do we fall in love with some sentences rather than others?  This book is consistently insightful into classic (and sometimes not so classic) fiction.  For whatever reason, I agree with her about various novels to a remarkable degree.  Here is Jenny’s daily read .  Here is her blog .  This book induced me to order Stephen King’s Needful Things , which I have never read.

5. David Bromwich, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke .  Clear, thorough, and to the point on its stated topic.

3. Sudhir Vadaketh, Floating on a Malayan Breeze: Travels in Malaysia and Singapore .  A Singaporean travels through Malaysia to discover what divides their two countries and what ultimately unites them too.  I read this one straight through.  File under “great books you’ve never heard about.”  Honest and frank throughout.

2. Louise Lawrence, Children of the Dust , excellent, short and highly readable post-apocalyptic story, think of it as a precursor (1985) of some of today’s YA popular fiction, it should be turned into a movie.  I’ve ordered two more of hers.

1. Alan Macfarlane, Thomas Malthus and the Making of the Modern World , Kindle edition.  It starts off slow, but overall an excellent short look at Malthus as an underrated thinker and a theorist of the cultural and demographic preconditions of capitalism.