Recently Mentioned Books

5. Movie : Raid: The Redemption .  Martial arts reign, after the police storm an apartment fortress.  If you like the genre at all, this one is special.  Note that The Act of Killing is set mainly in Sumatra and thus does not count.

3. Popular music : The Smithsonian has a very good 17-CD set of Indonesian popular music .

2. Gamelan music CD : Java: Court Gamelan .  Dreamy and beautiful, this is one of my favorite world music CDs.

1. Novel : Pramoedya Toer, The Buru Quartet .  I like this better than say Mahfouz or Rushdie.  It focuses on the key question of what a life may be said to consist of, and each of the four volumes makes the others richer.  Another famous Indonesian novel is Andrea Hirata, The Rainbow Troops , it is good not great.

That is the central message of the new and excellent Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam , by Nick Turse.

10. My Bloody Valentine, Mbv .  Get the LP version for the proper sound.  It’s amazing how good this comeback is, after a twenty year hiatus.

9. Earl Hines in New Orleans .  I’ve spent a lot of time looking for the best Hines CD and this seems to be it.

8. Continuous Beat , Rez Abbasi Trio.  Guitarist born in Karachi, this is probably my favorite jazz album over the last few years.

7. Alela Diane, Wild Divine .

6. P.J. Harvey, Let England Shake .

4. Laura Marling, I Speak Because I Can .

2. St. Vincent, Strange Mercy .  I don’t like the more recent CD with David Byrne nearly as much.

1. The Roots of Drone .  Usually I hate collections, and listen to them only once, but on this virtually every track is good and the order is very well arranged.

The author is Rose George and the subtitle is Inside Shipping, The Invisible Industry that Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate .  Here is one excerpt:

The author is Edmund Phelps and the subtitle is How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change .

The new (November 2012) book is War From the Ground Up: Twenty-First Century Combat as Politics , and yes it is an important work.  It is also difficult to excerpt.  Nonetheless I especially liked these two sentences about Afghanistan:

The author is Maury Klein and the subtitle is Mobilizing America for World War II , and it weighs in at almost 900 pp.  So far it is quite good, and well-written, though fairly slow in getting off the ground.  Here is one bit:

I’ve browsed the “above 10k” category and virtually all of it seems a) aesthetically absymal and b) drastically overpriced.  It looks like dealers trying to unload unwanted, hard to sell inventory at sucker prices.  I’m guessing that many of these are being sold at multiples of three or four over auction price histories.  Is this unexceptional John Frost worth even a third of the 150k asking price? Maybe not .

Their Warhols are weak and overpriced , even if you like Warhol.  Are they so sure that this rather grisly Monet is actually the real thing?  I say the reviews of that item get it right.  At least the shipping is free and you can leave feedback.

Should you buy this mediocre Mary Cassatt lithograph for “Price: $185,000.00 + $4.49 shipping”?  (Jeff, is WaPo charging you $250 million plus $4.49 shipping ?  I don’t think so. )

The first sentence of this MIT Press book — entitled Wu Jinglian — reads “Wu Jinglian is widely acknowledged to be China’s most influential and celebrated economist.”

7. Jacob N. Shapiro, The Terrorist’s Dilemma: Managing Violent Covert Organizations .

6. Rachel Laudan, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History .

5. Tomoko Shiroyama, China During the Great Depression: Market, State, and the World Economy, 1929-1937 .  A good introduction to an understudied but increasingly relevant topic.

4. Javier Marías, The Infatuations .  I’m not sold on the ending, but most of the time this feels like one of his two or three best books.  I don’t think it will be his breakthrough book to “truly famous like Rushdie or Coetzee global author” status, but that moment likely will come.