Recently Mentioned Books
Showing 25 of 6684 mentions, ordered by most recent.
Mara Hvistendahl, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men .
Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life . This vivid biography brings its subject to life through the extensive use of correspondence and quotation. The reader gets an excellent feeling of how Bismarck’s government actually worked, his intensity and also his mediocrities, and also the importance of Bismarck in building up Germany as a European power. The story is as gripping as a good novel. Sadly, almost no attention is paid to the origins of the welfare state. Still, this has received rave r...
Javier Cercas, The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-Five Minutes in History and Imagination . In the waning of Franco’s time, how did Spain turn away from military rule and toward democracy? Can a mediocre man make a difference in history simply by retreating at the right moment? Can a political life boil down to a single response, under gunfire at that? Half of this book is brilliant writing, the other half is brilliant writing combined with obscure, hard-to-follow 1970s Spanish politics (does A...
Frank Brady, Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall — from America’s Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness .
The author is James Rickards and the subtitle is The Making of the Next Global Crisis . This book is rapidly proving influential, though you will not see it reviewed in all of the major mainstream outlets. The so-called “Right” is walking away from “1990s WSJ Op-Ed CPI bias what’s so bad about poverty anyway?” narrative and looking for alternatives. This is one of them, excerpt:
5. Melancholia ; I liked this one, even though I agree with all the negative things that have been said about it . See it on the big screen.
4. Even the Rain , Spanish movie filmed in Bolivia.
3. Of Gods and Men .
2. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives , from Thailand.
1. Incendies ; a French-Canadian movie set mostly in Lebanon, with Greek themes.
The author is Ian W. Toll and the subtitle is War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 . I loved this book and it should join my list of the very best books of the year . Every page was gripping and instructive. Here is an excerpt on “how to leave the dollar zone”:
The author is Tanni Haas and the subtitle is The World’s Political Bloggers Share the Secrets to Success . There are interviews with Arianna Huffington, Jane Hamsher, Nick Gillespie, Lew Rockwell, Juan Cole, Matt Yglesias, Kevin Drum, yours truly, and others. Here is a comment from Kevin Drum:
The author is Vaclav Smil and the subtitle is Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production , excerpt:
Race Against the Machine is compared to TGS in this forthcoming Economist article , and see this earlier piece . Short bit:
5. Best Austrian or Austrian-influenced book of the year: Daniel B. Klein, Knowledge and Coordination: A Liberal Interpretation . It’s not out yet, I’ll cover it more when it appears, more information here .
3. Second best eBook of the year, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy. By the way, here is my recent debate with Erik ; we both agreed in advance to mix things up and generate controversy, so interpret the exchange accordingly. In reality, Erik and I agree about many many things and Matt Yglesias notes as much . (We do, however, seem t...
6. Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003 , by Roberto Bolano. Will make you want to read a lot more Latin American fiction.
5. The Anatomy of Influence , Harold Bloom. In part this is a lifetime achievement award, but his best passages are still stunning.
4. Habibi , by Craig Thompson. I don’t enjoy many graphic novels, but this is my favorite of all those I have read.
3. Audur Ava Olafsdottir, The Greenhouse . From Iceland, it’s funny and sheer fun to read and short and easy yet deep and moving.
2. Steve Sem-Samberg, The Emperor of Lies, A Novel . “I don’t want to read any more about the Holocaust” is not good enough reason to neglect this stunning Swedish novel. A fictionalized account of the Lodz Ghetto, it looks at the lives of the ghetto rulers and whether they were heroes or collaborators. I found it tough to read more than one hundred pages of this at a time; by focusing on the suicides rather than the murder victims, it is especially brutal. Get up the gumption.
1. Murakami I now have finished it, don’t think it adds up to anything but it is consistently fun for 900+ pages. How many other books can claim that?
5. Douglas A. Irwin, Trade Policy Disaster: Lessons from the 1930s , self-recommending. Another new and self-recommending book is Mark Miller’s Salsas of the World , he is one of my cooking and restaurant heroes.
5. Douglas A. Irwin, Trade Policy Disaster: Lessons from the 1930s , self-recommending. Another new and self-recommending book is Mark Miller’s Salsas of the World , he is one of my cooking and restaurant heroes.
4. Robert L. Bradley, Jr. Edison to Enron: Energy Markets and Political Strategies , home page here . The second part of a three-volume series on the history of American energy, told through the distinction between productive and predatory capitalism. Bradley is a very much underrated economic historian, largely because of his “amateur” status, but there is a remarkable amount of learning in his books..