Recently Mentioned Books

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.

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.