Recently Mentioned Books

2. John D. Barrow, Mathletics: A Scientist Explains 100 Amazing Things About Sport .  I found half of this book to be fun, a pretty high hit rate given its style of many short chapters.  I learned how basketball players create the illusion of “hang time” (their bodies are falling parabolically, but their heads don’t have to be), that Mark Spitz would not qualify for U.S. Olympic trials today, and why the best discus throws are into the wind.

1. Roger Osborne, Iron, Steam, and Money: The Making of the Industrial Revolution .  A good popular overview of the British industrial revolution, focusing on inventors, coal, and engineering innovations.

You can buy the book here .  There is an excerpt from the book here .  Here is the book’s home page .  Here is a WSJ review .  Here is a Joseph Nocera review .  Here is our MRU video on Sachs’s Millennium Villages Project .

6. Director : George Roy Hill, how about A Little Romance ?

5. Coen Brothers movie : Raising Arizona or Fargo .   The more serious ones strike me as too grim.

5. Coen Brothers movie : Raising Arizona or Fargo .   The more serious ones strike me as too grim.

2. Rock music : The Replacements were pretty awesome for a short while.  The Artist Formerly Known as Prince has an impressive body of work, with Sign of the Times as my favorite or maybe Dirty Mind , though when viewed as a whole I find the corpus of work rather numbing and even somewhat off-putting.  Bob Mould I like but do not love, the peaks are too low.

2. Rock music : The Replacements were pretty awesome for a short while.  The Artist Formerly Known as Prince has an impressive body of work, with Sign of the Times as my favorite or maybe Dirty Mind , though when viewed as a whole I find the corpus of work rather numbing and even somewhat off-putting.  Bob Mould I like but do not love, the peaks are too low.

1. Folk singer : Is that what he is? Bringing it All Back Home remains my favorite Dylan album, of many candidates.

3. Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us .  He traces differences in political views back to three underlying factors, namely attitudes toward tribalism, tolerance of inequality, and perceptions of human nature (competitive vs. cooperative).  Think of this book as the next step after Jonathan Haidt.

2. Sumantra Bose, Transforming India: Challenges to the World’s Largest Democracy .  The first sentence of the last paragraph of the book is this: “In the post-1989 era, the people of India have progressively empowered regional(ist) parties and leaders.”

1. Isaac William Martin, Rich People’s Movements: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent .  He even covers Frank Chodorov.

The author is Paul Sabin and the subtitle is Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth’s Future .  I found this book informative, charming, and highly readable.  Here are a few excerpts:

You can pre-order my book on Amazon here .  On Barnes and Noble here .  On Indiebound.org here .  And from Penguin here .

You can order my book on Amazon here .  On Barnes and Noble here .  On Indiebound.org here .  And from Penguin here .

The author is Ara Norenzayan and the subtitle is How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict .  I found this book insightful, well-written and to the point.  The book itself lists some of its key propositions:

That is the new and excellent book by John McHugo , and it is perhaps the best short one-volume introduction to its topic (with Hourani being the best single longer book).  Here is one short bit, concerning 1925 in Syria:

That is the new and excellent book by John McHugo , and it is perhaps the best short one-volume introduction to its topic (with Hourani being the best single longer book).  Here is one short bit, concerning 1925 in Syria:

That is the new book by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir , and as you might expect it is one of the most significant economics books of the year.  Here is their bottom line:

The authors are Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, and the subtitle is Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies .

Definitely recommended, at this price or even the paperback for $20.00 .

The author is William A. Haseltine, the subtitle is The Singapore Health System, and the Kindle edition is itself an…affordable excellence at $0.00.

Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong-and What You Really Need to Know .

4. Pop Yeh Yeh: Psychedelic Rock from Singapore and Malaysia 1964-1970 , an excellent CD, especially if you approach it with the right sense of humor.

Xaviera Hollander deserves mention, although in what category should she be my favorite? Old Javanese Gold is excellent, plus there is puppetry.  The best textiles are from Sumatra, or from the smaller islands.