Recently Mentioned Books

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.

3. Pete Seeger, The Complete Bowdoin College Concert 1960 .  Some people think of Seeger as a “right place, right time” sort of guy, but that does him an injustice.  He was one of the most talented American musicians of his generation, and this live two-CD set shows him at his versatile peak, as a kind of walking human jukebox of American musical traditions, with lots of world music too.

2. Bwati Kono , by Lobi Traore, raw electric blues from Bamako, hypnotic, Jimi Hendrix of West Africa stuff.

1. Bahamas: Goombay 1951-1959 .  I listened to this CD last year more than any other.  It’s also some of the wittiest music I own, and it has plenty of economic themes.

Thomas O. McGarity, Freedom to Harm: The Lasting Legacy of the Laissez Faire Revival .

Coolidge , by Amity Shlaes, and

The subtitle is The Global Expansion of Britain .  The book received strong reviews in the UK and these are justified.  Here is the bottom line: I started it Wednesday, have read parts of it every day, and I am still reading it .  There is interesting and fresh material on almost every page.  Think of it as a selective history of the building of the British empire.

That is from Martin Wolf .  Wolf’s piece also raises the question of whether the Basil Moore /post Keynesian view of endogenous money is essentially correct in a world of IOR, but that is a topic for another day…

That is the new and much awaited book by Gavin Wright, with the subtitle The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South .  Here is one small bit, reflecting some of the book’s main themes:

That is from the new and excellent book London: A Social and Cultural History, 1550-1750 , by Robert O. Buchholz and Joseph P. Ward.  This book was much fresher and original than I was expecting it to be and I can give it a strong recommendation.  I, too, was thinking I didn’t want to read another tired book about the history of London.

By the way, Fritz Machlup considered related arguments in his 1940 book .

The author is Paul Kennedy and the subtitle is The Problem Solvers who Turned the Tide in the Second World War .  This is an excellent look at the managerial and logistics side of the war.  My main regret — not really a criticism — is that the central role of economists was not given more attention.  Haven’t you wondered how it was possible that say the American role in the War was started and finished in less than five years’ time?  These days it can take that long to design, approve, and build...

That is the new book by Jonathan Last , which I liked very much.  Last recently wrote “In the end, demography always wins” and you will find that view writ large in the book.  He also wrote “Global demographics, not domestic policy, will control who comes and who goes.”

8. I consider her Hunan book to be her most significant and original achievement, but Every Grain of Rice is the most useful single all-purpose Chinese cookbook she has written.  It is especially good on the vegetarian side.