Recently Mentioned Books

That quotation is from the new eBook by Steven Poole, You Aren’t What You Eat: Fed Up with Gastroculture .  The book is cranky, often self-contradictory, and also reasonably entertaining.

Definitely recommended, you can buy the book here .

You can buy it here .  It is better, by the way, to read volume one first, but if you picked this up blind, without having read the first part, you would do just fine with it.

I loved this novel .  It is immediately gripping, subtle, fun to read, runs counter to cliche, and is also fairly short.  You will find some (strongly positive) reviews here .  I quite liked her last book , but if you didn’t, this is a whole level better, and different in nature, so you should try it anyway.

Alan Lightman relates some ideas from the new Lee Smolin book :

I also would reject any hard notion of “capacity” and view the matter as a sliding scale, depending on expectations and how much risk and fragility investors and suppliers of labor are willing to accept; see my Risk and Business Cycles for more on this point.

The subtitle is Eat Vegan Before 6:00 to Lose Weight and Restore Your Health . . . for Good .  This is an excellent book (recipes too) which comes to grips with the notion that virtuous eating also has to be fun and privately beneficial and involve a minimum of self-constraint or for that matter calculation costs.  As I’ve argued in my own An Economist Gets Lunch , eating less meat is the most socially beneficial change in your dietary habits you can make.  Here’s one very good way to do it.

The subtitle is Eat Vegan Before 6:00 to Lose Weight and Restore Your Health . . . for Good .  This is an excellent book (recipes too) which comes to grips with the notion that virtuous eating also has to be fun and privately beneficial and involve a minimum of self-constraint or for that matter calculation costs.  As I’ve argued in my own An Economist Gets Lunch , eating less meat is the most socially beneficial change in your dietary habits you can make.  Here’s one very good way to do it.

It comes out October 1 , and here is from the back cover:

This is a highly thoughtful book, and I enjoyed the lengthy discussion of fermentation and fermented foods.  My favorite puzzle posed is the question of why fermented foods are so frequently matters of acquired taste across cultures.  Yet overall the book is missing a sharpness of argumentation or novelty of perspective which I look for in works of this kind.  You can order the book here .  Here is a useful Laura Miller review of the book .  Here is a NYT review .  Here is Mark Bittman coverage ...

That is the new book by my colleague Christopher Coyne , due out May 1st from Stanford University Press.

That is from Avi Steinberg’s Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian , which is often annoying, intermittently very interesting.

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.