Recently Mentioned Books

3. Why apes cannot pitch , and there will soon be a new Bruno Latour book , two of them in fact .

Peter Orszag considers that possibility in his recent column .  About one in four bartenders has some kind of degree.  Orszag draws heavily on this paper by Beaudry and Green and Sand, which  postulates falling returns to skill.  It’s one of the more interesting pieces written in the last year, but note their model relies heavily on a stock/flow distinction.  They consider a world where most of the IT infrastructure already has been built, and so skilled labor has not so much more to do at the m...

You can buy my book An Economist Gets Lunch here .

5. The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith .  The Amazon link is here .

This is from the latest book by Christopher M. Davidson, After the Sheikhs :

You can buy the book here .

“It’s better than it looked,” Mr. Cowen said. “Technological progress comes in batches and it’s just a little more rapid than it looked two years ago.” His next book, “ Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation ,” is due out in September.

Here is a useful New York Times review .  Here is the author’s blog , which is about being a sociopath, or about pretending to be a sociopath, or perhaps both.  Here is the book on Amazon and note how many readers hated it.  I say they just don’t like sociopaths.

5. The Fragrance of Guava , Conversations with Gabriel García Márquez.  This book gives a very good sense of how the author sees his life’s work as fitting together, and why the short fiction and Autumn of the Patriarch are important.

4. Thane Gustafson, Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia .  A very detailed, readable, highly useful, and economically sophisticated account of how they got from the mess they had back then to the mess they have right now.

3. Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man .  For such a long book about a topic I don’t wish to read any more about, this is compelling.  It has many excellent sentences, such as “Nixon is a Market ascetic, and politics is his business.  On it he lavishes an intensity of dedication that is literally consuming.”  Every President should have a book this good about him.

2. Mason B. Williams, City of Ambition: FDR, LaGuardia, and the Making of Modern New York .  A useful historical look at how fiscal stimulus gets translated into actual urban policies on the ground, well documented and also surprisingly readable.

1. James Salter, All That Is .  Excellent set pieces from a strong writer with a cult literary following, but for me the story as a whole didn’t add up to much interesting.  I did finish it, however.

The author is Joe Studwell and the subtitle is Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region .  That’s an excessively bland title and subtitle, but so far this is perhaps my favorite economics book of the year.  Quite simply, it is the best single treatment on what in Asian industrial policy worked or did not work, full of both analysis and specific detail, and covering southeast Asia in addition to the Asian tiger “winners.”

Two points : I think he understood the English language better than any other major composer, and how he sets and understands a text is without parallel, in English at least.  Furthermore as a conductor or pianist he is superb, try his Brandenburg Concerti or his piano on Schubert’s Winterreise , Peter Pears singing, among other works.  Those are two of my favorite recordings in all of classical music.

Two points : I think he understood the English language better than any other major composer, and how he sets and understands a text is without parallel, in English at least.  Furthermore as a conductor or pianist he is superb, try his Brandenburg Concerti or his piano on Schubert’s Winterreise , Peter Pears singing, among other works.  Those are two of my favorite recordings in all of classical music.

My most significant Britten heresy : I’ve never enjoyed listening to Peter Grimes and I find most of the experience oppressive.  More generally, for much of my life I never felt close to Britten’s music, as it made me crave Stravinsky and Mahler instead.  But I’ve listened to it quite a bit since January and have enjoyed it more than expected.

The ones I think are best : Cello Symphony , Winter Words (song cycle), and perhaps Billy Budd . War Requiem . Nocturne is a powerful spare late work.  I like Curlew River for its connection to Balinese music, although I would not put it among his best compositions from a strictly musical point of view.

The ones I think are best : Cello Symphony , Winter Words (song cycle), and perhaps Billy Budd . War Requiem . Nocturne is a powerful spare late work.  I like Curlew River for its connection to Balinese music, although I would not put it among his best compositions from a strictly musical point of view.

The ones I think are best : Cello Symphony , Winter Words (song cycle), and perhaps Billy Budd . War Requiem . Nocturne is a powerful spare late work.  I like Curlew River for its connection to Balinese music, although I would not put it among his best compositions from a strictly musical point of view.

The ones I think are best : Cello Symphony , Winter Words (song cycle), and perhaps Billy Budd . War Requiem . Nocturne is a powerful spare late work.  I like Curlew River for its connection to Balinese music, although I would not put it among his best compositions from a strictly musical point of view.

The ones I think are best : Cello Symphony , Winter Words (song cycle), and perhaps Billy Budd . War Requiem . Nocturne is a powerful spare late work.  I like Curlew River for its connection to Balinese music, although I would not put it among his best compositions from a strictly musical point of view.

The Britten pieces you are most likely to enjoy : Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings , that disc has Les Illuminations and Nocturne too and is the single best Britten disc to buy, and also A Ceremony of Carols .

The Britten pieces you are most likely to enjoy : Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings , that disc has Les Illuminations and Nocturne too and is the single best Britten disc to buy, and also A Ceremony of Carols .

I very much liked Neil Powell, Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music .  Also very good is Paul Kildea, Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century .  They are both also useful for understanding English intellectual life during the 20th century, most of all Auden but even Keynes and also the broader history of homosexuality in England.  Both are already out in the UK, where I picked them up earlier in the year, and both will make my best of the year list in late November.