Recently Mentioned Books

1. James Willey, String Quartets, 3, 7, and 8 , Esterhazy Quartet.

That is the new Jeffrey Sachs book, with the subtitle Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity .  Here is one excerpt:

5. Arnold Kling has a very good blog post explaining the importance of the new book The Race Against the Machine .

This is an excellent conceptual book on the financial crisis, full of deep research and intellectual honesty.  The authors, Jeffrey Friedman and Wladimir Kraus, are not in the usual loops of the economist elite, so I hope it is not ignored.  They place central importance on the Basel capital regulations and mark-to-market accounting, complemented by a credit channel, in their narrative.  Arnold Kling has much more on the book .  You can buy the book here ; anyone interested in the financial cris...

A good introduction to the bright side of Italy’s economy is Michael Porter’s 1998 The Competitive Advantage of Nations ; Porter portrays Italy as having some vital clusters of family-owned businesses, largely in the North.  Do you want your kitchen redone with some nice marble tile?  Italy can supply just the right stuff. This neat graph shows just how much Italy has specialized in small business.

5. Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Self-Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life .  Brilliant, insightful, with occasional lapses of taste, quintessential Trivers, now the go-to book on its topic, recommended.

4. Michael Nielsen, Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science .  The best book on the potential for open, networked science, looking forward.  Joshua Gans on the book here and here , the latter having a link to Michael’s TEDx talk.

3. Ladies of Liberty: Women Who Made a Difference in American History , by John Blundell.  Biographical sketches of libertarian and libertarian-themed women in U.S. history.  Includes Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Patterson, Rose Friedman, Jane Jacobs, others.

2. By page 200 I got bored of the new Eugenides novel. The Barbarian Nurseries reaps high praise and is well-written but it feels too ordinary for me.

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.