Recently Mentioned Books

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 .

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.