Recently Mentioned Books

2. Charles Wheelan, Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data .

1. Frank H. Buckley, editor, The American Illness: Essays on the Rule of Law .

That is from Douglas Rushkoff’s Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now .

At least since the 19th century, the interest of economists in personal liberty can be easily documented. In 1829, all 15 economists who held seats in the British Parliament voted to allow Roman Catholics as members. In 1858, the 13 economists in Parliament voted unanimously to extend full civil rights to Jews. (While both measures were approved, they were controversial among many non-economist members.) For many years leading up to the various abolitions of slavery, economists were generally cr...

2. The Dinner , by Herman Koch.  It sold millions in Europe, but I don’t find snark about rich Dutch people that interesting.

The authors are Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman and the Amazon link is here .  If you’re like me, by this point you have “popular behavioral economics book” fatigue.  Still, I bought and read this one through.  It doesn’t fall into the “designed to erase all doubts” category, but still it has some interesting ideas which you won’t find in the other popular behavioral economics books.  I am glad I bought and read it.  Here is one bit:

I am a fan of this book.  The author is Ken Stern and the subtitle is Why Charities are Failing and a Better Way to Give , with emphasis on the former I would say.  Here is one excerpt:

That is from Here and Now Letters 2008-2011 , by Auster and Coetzee.  That excerpt is from the first letter, and I will keep reading.

That is the new book by Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya.  I reviewed the slightly earlier UK/India version briefly and very favorably here , and next month it will be out under this new title in the U.S.  The subtitle is How Economic Growth in India Reduced Poverty and Lessons for Other Developing Countries .  It is no surprise that they did not keep the India title — India’s Tryst with Destiny — for the US market.  Who wants to read about India per se?  Who knows what a tryst is?

That is from Michael St.John Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill .

The long book on my Kindle is John Calvin’s The Institutes of the Christian Religion .  It’s impressive.  I don’t agree with Calvin, either theologically or temperamentally, but he is an extremely sharp thinker and writer, too often neglected for his extreme “Calvinism.”

The author is Neil Irwin and the subtitle is Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire .  This is very likely a very good book.  If my quick perusal is accurate, I like how Irwin refers to Trichet as “the president of Europe.”  There is also a very interesting chapter on the Swedish central bank of the 17th century.

That is a sentence from Brook’s new A History of Future Cities , a frequently interesting conceptual history of Dubai, Mumbai, St. Petersburg/Leningrad and Shanghai.  The first Amazon review is quite on the mark.

Thomas Jefferson’s Creme Brulee: How a Founding Father and His Slave James Hemings Introduced French Cuisine to America .

You can order the paperback version — out tomorrow — here .  Barnes and Noble link is here .

My two-volume Liberty Fund edition of John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy arrived, and I will be rereading those for a future MRU course.

Then, upon my return from the Oklahoma trip , I saw Robert M. Edsel’s Saving Italy , and was surprised when the subtitle read The Race to Rescue a Nation’s Treasures from the Nazis .  (Perhaps Berlusconi would nonetheless give his autobiography that title.)  So far all I can learn about saving the current Italy is that electoral turnout seems to have been quite low, which lowers the reliability of previous estimates I suspect.  Does anyone out there know more?

Peter Blair Henry, Turnaround: Third World Lessons for First World Growth .

That is from Cuisine, Colonialism and Cold War: Food in Twentieth Century Korea , by Katarzyna J. Cwiertka.  This is an excellent book on Korean-Japanese relations, the early history of Korean industrialization, and the rise of industrial food, as well as the evolution of Korean food in recent times, all rolled into a scant 237 pp.  A good author can do wonders…

I started reading Napoleon Chagnon’s Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes — the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists .  The first fifty pages are excellent fun and well-constructed, though I cannot speak to the details of his claims about the frequency of conflict or the motivation of conflict by sexual competition for women.  At some point, however, I realized I don’t want to read an entire book on either tribe, at least not at this moment.  I am not suggesting that the book gets worse...

The author is Zoltan J. Acs and the subtitle is Why Philanthropy Matters: How the Wealthy Give, and What It Means for Our Economic Well-Being .  It is the best pro-philanthropy book I know.

That is the subtitle, the title is The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis , consisting of the lectures BB delivered at George Washington University.

If you enjoyed Liaquat Ahamed’s Lords of Finance , and his take on the 1920’s, and you are looking for something comparable on postwar economic reconstruction, this is the place to go.

This is an excellent book.  The author is Benn Steil and the subtitle is John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order .

For an honorable mention I would suggest Y’anbessaw Tezeta , by Getachew Mekuria and The Ex & Friends, Ethiopian saxophone.