Recently Mentioned Books

Timothy Taylor, The Instant Economist: Everything You Need to Know About How the Economy Works is too elementary for most MR readers but it is well executed and would make a good gift for anyone needing an introduction to economic reasoning.

If you are seeking to “normalize” this review, I consider Judt’s Past Imperfect to be one of the best books of the last few decades, his Postwar to be one of my favorite books ever, and his late essays to be some of the best writing, in any genre, in a long time.  (Though I didn’t like Ill Fares the Land .)  I can recommend this too, as something worth consuming and pondering and spending money on, but I still have a slightly queasy feeling in my stomach.

If you are seeking to “normalize” this review, I consider Judt’s Past Imperfect to be one of the best books of the last few decades, his Postwar to be one of my favorite books ever, and his late essays to be some of the best writing, in any genre, in a long time.  (Though I didn’t like Ill Fares the Land .)  I can recommend this too, as something worth consuming and pondering and spending money on, but I still have a slightly queasy feeling in my stomach.

If you are seeking to “normalize” this review, I consider Judt’s Past Imperfect to be one of the best books of the last few decades, his Postwar to be one of my favorite books ever, and his late essays to be some of the best writing, in any genre, in a long time.  (Though I didn’t like Ill Fares the Land .)  I can recommend this too, as something worth consuming and pondering and spending money on, but I still have a slightly queasy feeling in my stomach.

It is a wide-ranging dialogue with Timothy Snyder, you can buy it here .  I will gladly recommend this book, but I have mixed feelings about it.  It is Judt’s “deathbed conversations” with Snyder, when he was paralyzed.

The longer story is here , and of course Manhattan has done fine over this same period of time.  Ryan’s eBook is here , I believe Matt’s is due out soon, I look forward to reading it.  Here is my earlier column on minimum parking requirements .  Here is Matt on Donald Shoup .

Remember when “rage” used to mean “Radical Alternatives to Government Enterprise”? Murray’s book will bring rage of a different kind, because it strikes rather directly at how political views are based on emotional feelings about the deserved status of various social groups (RH: “Politics isn’t about policy.”)  Here is more .  If you are wondering, my copy of the book arrives today.  Perhaps my review will consider whether economic forces are driving the social ones, or vice versa.

In my forthcoming An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies you will find a more extensive discussion of the economics and ethics of boycotts.

The author is Daniel Klein and you can buy it here .  My blurb reads:

I still think Michael Nielsen’s Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science is an important book on an important topic.

Johan van Overtveldt’s The End of the Euro is a very good book on the background leading up to the current euro crisis; also useful is David Marsh’s The Euro: The Battle for the New Global Currency .

Johan van Overtveldt’s The End of the Euro is a very good book on the background leading up to the current euro crisis; also useful is David Marsh’s The Euro: The Battle for the New Global Currency .

Daniel Hausman’s Preference, Value, Choice and Welfare reflects his characteristic intelligence and judgment and it should be read by anyone with an interest in economic methodology.

I cannot say I am personally so interested in the topic of Ed Leamer’s The Craft of Economics: Lessons from the Heckscher-Ohlin Framework , but he is a master of exposition for complex economic results and this book is no exception.

I am learning a good deal from Stephen Bainbridge’s Corporate Governance After the Financial Crisis :

This neglected gem of a book was written by Harriet Martineau, best known for her 19th century tracts on political economy.  Now I learn she was a forerunner of behavioral economics, occupying a space somewhere between Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and the pain meditations of Dan Ariely, excerpt:

He writes for The Economist and the subtitle is Debt, Money, and The New World Order .  It is a very good and sensible introduction to the history of the recent economic crisis, with an emphasis on debt and also historical perspective.  It is due out February 7, recommended.

That is from D. Graham Burnett’s very impressive The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century .  Here is a NYT review , and here is a WSJ review .  It could be the most detailed study of a commons problem ever written, with plenty on the corruption of science along the way.

That is the new book by Justin Yifu Lin , who is also Chief Economist of the World Bank.  It is derived from lectures delivered in China.  Much of the book is an OK survey, though I did not find it added much insight to extant accounts.

There is also the self-explanatory Emrys Westacott, The Virtues of Our Vices: A Modest Defense of Gossip, Rudeness, and Other Bad Habits .

5. John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent .  Unlike George Steiner’s claim, this is not comparable to Tolstoy.  Still, it is an excellent if uneven 1920s novel that ought to be read more widely.  The best passages are frequent and striking.  The bottom line is that I can imagine someday reading it again.  If you are tempted, give it a try.

4. Michael Erard, Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners .  A fun and useful book, you can take the subtitle literally.  You need to ignore the very weak material on neurodevelopmental issues.

3. David Roodman, Due Diligence: An Impertinent Inquiry into Microfinance .  Puts microfinance into a broader historical perspective, balanced and insightful throughout, informationally dense, recommended.  A good model for many other non-fiction books.

2. Katerina Clark, Moscow, The Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931-1941 .  A detailed and insightful revisionist look at Soviet culture during that period, asking whether it really can all be boiled down to communism or if there was more behind it and it turns out there was.

I have been reading and enjoying Laurent Dubois’s new Haiti: The Aftershocks of History , one of the very best books on the history of the country.  In 1914-15, about eighty percent of the government’s revenue went to debt service.  It is one of those rare books where you can know a lot about the topic, and yet still learn something interesting on virtually every page.