Recently Mentioned Books

Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam , recently a Pulitzer Prize winner for non-fiction.

Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief .

In the last week, the quality of my reading has been above average.  I’ve also been enjoying the Feenstra and Taylor international trade text .  This book is very well-written, as are the contributions of Krugman, but overall that field has some of the worst writing in all of economics and also many of the most pointless (yet still well-cited) theory pieces.

5. Rebecca Miller, Jacob’s Folly .  Finally a fiction book this year I am truly excited about, lots of fun but deep too.  Here is a Bookslut interview with the author .

4. Willy Hendriks, Move First, Think Later: Sense and Nonsense in Improving Your Chess .  To me, more interesting as behavioral economics and as epistemology than as a chess book.  The author claims that most chess advice is bad, and that we figure out positional strategies only by trying concrete moves, not by applying general principles.  You do need chess knowledge to profit from the book, but if you can manage it, it is one of the best books on how to think that I know.

3. Toni Strubell, editor, What Catalans Want: Could Catalonia be Europe’s Next State? I loved this book.  First, it is full of information about what Catalans want.  Second, no one person is allowed to go on for too long.  The book offers fascinating data — in the Hansonian manner — about “the logic of complaint,” namely what many people consider to be legitimate grievances and also about how people frame some of the emotional deficits in their public lives.  The photos of the contributors refle...

2. Michael Suk-Young Chwe, Jane Austen, Game Theorist .  I remain a Chwe fan, even though I appreciate Jane Austen less than do most other readers of intelligent fiction.

1. Gianni Toniolo (editor), The Oxford Handbook of The Italian Economy Since Unification .  If you want a 742-page, $142.50 volume on the Italian economy, written by highly intelligent and well-informed experts, but with some repetition, this is indeed the place to go.  And that was exactly what I wanted.

It is thus hard to assess the book as a whole, but I will continue with volume two.  Ryan himself is a fairly deep thinker.  Allan Bloom was a less deep thinker, and yet perhaps for that reason Bloom much better captured the depth of Plato .

I picked up these two volumes on the basis of a very favorable review reproduced on The Browser, by Noel Malcolm .  Yet the books sat around the house for months.  I figured this was another overwrought survey by a famous person, valuable mainly as an introduction for those who don’t know much about the topic.  The subtitle of volume one, by the way, is A History of Political Thought Herodotus to Machiavelli . Volume two picks up from there.

3. Jayson Lusk’s *The Food Police*, new book .

The authors are Robert Fogel, Enid M. Fogel, Mark Guglielmo, and Nathaniel Grotte, and the subtitle is Simon Kuznets and the Empirical Tradition in Economics , on target as one might expect.

5. Christopher A. Whatley, Scottish Society, 1707-1830, Beyond Jacobitism, Toward Industrialisation .  I am often asked what is a good introduction to the time and writings of Adam Smith.  Such a book is oddly hard to come by but this is one of the best candidates.

4. David E. Nye, America’s Assembly Line .  A very good history, economic and otherwise, of precisely what the title purports to offer and kudos on the absence of a subtitle.

3. Diane J Bleyer, A Mother’s Right .  A science fiction story based on premises of population decline, highly volatile weather, illegal abortion, and a stolen unborn child.

2. Diane Wood Middlebrook, Anne Sexton: A Biography .  I hadn’t known that Sexton once threw her toddler daughter against the wall in a fit of anger.  A lot of people still found her fun to hang around with.

1. Jonathan Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life .  The title is apt.  This is an excellent and very readable account of Marx’s life , although it strikes me as superficial on the ideas side.

This is from the new William G. Bowen book, Higher Education in the Digital Age :

2. The new Jeff Sachs book is due out in June and appears to cover JFK and foreign policy .

That is from Jonathan D. Ostry, “Managing Capital Inflows: Old and New Debates,” in The Great Recession: Lessons for Central Bankers , edited by Jacob Braude, Zvi Eckstein, Stanley Fischer, and Karnit Flug.

That is from Cass Sunstein (always worth reading), due out April 9 .  Here is a short video , previewing parts of the book, and here is a short review by Sunstein , also relevant.

The author is Jeremy Adelman and the subtitle is The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman .  This is the book I have looked forward to most all year and so far (p.153) it does not disappoint.  Here is one excerpt:

My view by the way is different, and can be found in my book Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Cultures .

The author is Neil Davidson, a Scot, and the Amazon link is here .

3. Chester E. Finn Jr., Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut .