Recently Mentioned Books

There is also in my pile Richard Pomfret’s The Age of Equality: The Twentieth Century in Economic Perspective , Belknap Press, a popular economic history of the 20th century, listed as due out October 15 but my paid-for copy just arrived.

The subtitle is Travels in the New Third World , and it is a convenient collection of Lewis’s recent and sometimes controversial writings on the financial crisis.  I liked the Iceland piece best, the German one least.  It is out next week, but a review copy is in my hands.

6. Jo Nesbo, Nemesis: A Novel .  Highly entertaining, indeed gripping, but by the end I was wondering whether I had wasted my time.  It turns out not to be conceptual after all.  A good plane read, which is for me what it was.

5. 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.  Definitely recommended, I urge you...

4. Roger Ebert, Life Itself: A Memoir .  One-fifth or so of this book is interesting, so some small number of you should wade through it.  I liked the discussion of black and white cinema best, but most of it is rambling and insufferable.

3. Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn . Never bad, it becomes excellent by the end.

2. Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World .  No surprises, good, perhaps best on the evolution of the natural gas market.

1. David Stevenson, With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918 .  Thorough, readable, never thrilling but consistently satisfying.  It is a good follow-up to Niall Ferguson’s splendid The Pity of War .

1. David Stevenson, With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918 .  Thorough, readable, never thrilling but consistently satisfying.  It is a good follow-up to Niall Ferguson’s splendid The Pity of War .

That is from David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years .

Reamde , by Neal Stephenson, out this Tuesday, no typo in the title, one positive review here .

3. There is Jim Manzi’s point that Europe has stiff carbon taxes, and is a large market, but they have not seen a major burst of innovation, just a lot of conservation and some substitution, no game changers.  Denmark remains far more dependent on fossil fuels than most people realize and for all their efforts they’ve done no better than stop the growth of carbon emissions; see Robert Bryce’s Power Hungry , which is in any case a useful contrarian book for considering this topic.

4. New book: Timothy Besley and Torsten Persson, Pillars of Prosperity: The Political Economics of Development Clusters , web page for the book is here .

That is from Kitty Burns Florey, Script & Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting .

1. Music : James Brown was born in the state; my favorite James Brown song is Bewildered .  Reverend Gary Davis is associated with North Carolina but he too was born in the state; try Sally Where’d You Get Your Liquor From ?  My favorite Dizzy Gillespie album is Dizzy’s Big 4 .

6. Aurel Schubert, The Credit-Anstalt Crisis of 1931 , no further comment required.

5. Charles Seife, Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking .  An excellent and compulsively readable history of the attempts to make fusion power work; I thank Gordon for the original pointer.

4. Wells Tower, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned .  This Jonathan Miles quotation is better than anything I will come up with: “Tower’s stories [have] the kind of torque that’s so damnably rare these days in American short fiction, where the payoff tends to be the faint, jewel-box click of epiphany, the small tilting of a life.  Tower’s ambition is greater and brawnier than that.”

3. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years .  Do you seek an overly verbose, sometimes fascinating synthesis of economic anthropology, early 20th century credit theories of money, and the history of debt?  The book overinterprets early historical evidence and falls apart as it approaches contemporary times, still it has a vitality which many other tracts lack.  Here is a chat with the author .

2. Sergio Chejfec, My Two Worlds . Are you deeply interested in how an Argentinean observer might phenomenologically regard a southern Brazilian city, combined with his philosophy of walking, in fictional form?  I am.  This may or may not be of general interest.

1. Andes , by Michael Jacobs.  Most travel books disappoint me, but I found this one interesting throughout, most of all the section on Venezuela.  It is conceptually strong and overall enthralling.

The editor is Paulo Mauro and the subtitle is Sources of Failure and Keys to Success in Fiscal Adjustment .  It provides useful background on the debt crises, or lack thereof, in today’s major economies, including Italy, Japan, Canada, the UK, and the United States.

That’s a question from Zoe Pollock , who links to lots of discussion.  My nomination is John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls .  Here is one YouTube performance , here is another , though admittedly it sounds more impressive on a good stereo or better yet live.

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow .  It is due out October 25th.

That is from David A. Hounshell’s excellent From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932 .  Here is a related article , possibly gated, here is another .