Recently Mentioned Books

Anyone interested in the economic history of wine and drink should read this book; you may already know John Nye’s War, Wine, and Taxes .

That is the new book by James Simpson , home page here, with free chapter one .  Excerpt:

Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy , by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfeee.

I very much like the recent Liszt CD by Haiou Zhang ; amazing that we can have such a pianist and hardly anyone has heard of him.

1. Franz Liszt : The “late, serious” pieces are important but I don’t think they are much fun to listen to.  I recommend the Transcendental Etudes, performance preferences here .  “Funerailles,” played by the young Lazar Berman .   “Years of Pilgrimage, the Swiss years,” by Aldo Ciccolini.  The Hungarian Rhapsodies, played by Cziffa or Robert Szidon.  Many of the opera transcriptions are subtler than they are made out to be, as creative examples of early mash-ups.  The B Minor Sonata is a bit to...

The new Ha Jin sits in my pile, he is underrated.  Next week Murakami and Nadas join that pile, lots to do!

5. Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table , above average.

4. Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot .  I’ve read only thirty pages but so far I’m impressed, I doubt the so-so reviews of the book, and note I have never loved his work in the first place.  This one has potential.

3. Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending .  This one just won the Booker Prize.  At first I thought it was contrived, then I realized it was deliberately contrived, and then I thought it was contrived in its deliberate construction of the contrivance, and so on.  I’ll try it again, in the spirit of being fooled by prizes, in the meantime you may be better off reading “spoilers” about the book before you start it, so you can skip right to your final opinion.

2. Audur Ava Olafsdottir, The Greenhouse .  From Iceland, one of my favorite novels this year, it’s funny and sheer fun to read and short and easy yet deep and moving all at the same time.

1. A.S. Byatt, Ragnarok: The End of the Gods .  Beautifully written, mixing moods from fantasy and Icelandic sagas, but it did nothing for me.  Some of you will like it.

If you haven’t already, I recommend that you all read David Grossman’s splendid To The End of the Land .

That is the new Michel Houellebecq book, available from UK Amazon , out January in the US .  It is worth the shipping costs.  Yet, while waiting for it to arrive, I saw a copy on sale in Rome, above a PPP price.  In my desire to read it sooner rather than later I bought it, that was worth it too.  It’s worth both prices put together, and then some, at pretty much any dollar/euro exchange rate or any dollar/pound sterling exchange rate, you can imagine.

You can pre-order the book here ; it is due out October 25th.

Might we run an econometrics test on regime changes?  The 17th century was much more violent than the preceding times, as was the early 19th century, albeit to a lesser extent.  Perhaps the distribution is well-described by “long periods of increasing peace, punctuated by large upward leaps of violence”, as was suggested by Lewis Richardson in his 1960 book on the statistics of violent conflict?  Imagine a warfare correlate to the Minsky Moment.  In the meantime, there will be evidence of variou...

It is an important and thoughtful book , and I can recommend it to all readers of intelligent non-fiction, reviews are here But I’m not convinced by the main thesis.

On related themes, see the new Lane Kenworthy book Progress for the Poor .

That is a forthcoming Jonathan Amith documentary on Nahua culture in the Rio Balsas region of Mexico.  The trailer video is here ; it is set in San Agustin Oapan, where I did the field work for my book Markets and Cultural Voices .  Recently I saw the film at National Geographic and loved it, admittedly it is not for all tastes.  I’ll let you all know when a DVD becomes available.

That is from The Collapse of American Criminal Justice , by William J. Stuntz, hat tip to Chug Roberts.

That is from the new and interesting Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm , by Rene Alemling.

That is from the new and excellent book The Collapse of American Criminal Justice , by William J. Stuntz, recommended to me by the excellent Chug Roberts.

I will be speaking at the NYC Singularity Summit, Oct.15-16 ., and also debating TGS with Michael Vassar.  Other speakers include Ken Jennings on Watson ( his new book on maps is suitably intense), Ray Kurzweil, Peter Thiel (his not on-line and excellent National Review cover story is the best introduction to his seminal views on stagnation, also note the Allison Schraeger piece, on financial innovation, in the same issue), and Sonia Arrison (I like her new book too, on aging ).

I will be speaking at the NYC Singularity Summit, Oct.15-16 ., and also debating TGS with Michael Vassar.  Other speakers include Ken Jennings on Watson ( his new book on maps is suitably intense), Ray Kurzweil, Peter Thiel (his not on-line and excellent National Review cover story is the best introduction to his seminal views on stagnation, also note the Allison Schraeger piece, on financial innovation, in the same issue), and Sonia Arrison (I like her new book too, on aging ).

I consider Wells to be an underrated author, especially in some of the “minor” works.  There is all of Wells for $3.00 here .

Reading this H.G. Wells novel ( free on Kindle ), I kept on thinking of Robin Hanson in the lead role, which I suppose means I enjoyed it.  The basic premise is that a man wakes up after a two-hundred year coma, and because of compound interest he owns half the earth.  He is also feared and worshiped, and over the previous two hundred years more than a few people have tried to speak and rule on his behalf.