Recently Mentioned Books
Showing 25 of 6684 mentions, ordered by most recent.
The author is Sarah Bakewell and the subtitle is Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer . This book truly brings Montaigne to life — a task I would have thought impossible in a popular publication. I view Montaigne as one of the most important writers and thinkers and perhaps the single most important for anyone in the blogosphere. I had not known, by the way, that Montaigne was mayor of Bordeaux for four years.
That is the new and excellent book by Philip Mansel and the subtitle is Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean , excerpt:
The author is Nicholas Shaxson and the subtitle is Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens , excerpt:
That is from Charles’s Clotfelter’s very good new book Big-Time Sports in American Universities . Clotfelter is relatively sympathetic to sports in universities and considers their fundraising and civic virtue advantages. Of course those numbers are gross and not net expenditures.
More Than Good Intentions: How a New Economics is Helping to Solve Global Poverty , by Dean Karlan.
Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty , by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo.
That is Meghan O’Rourke’s new book about dealing with the death of her mother. It is difficult to excerpt usefully, but I found it striking and memorable. It melds prose and poetic styles very effectively (O’Rourke is a well-known poet and a very good one ) and it covers some relatively unexplored emotional space. I don’t know a better book on grief.
That is Meghan O’Rourke’s new book about dealing with the death of her mother. It is difficult to excerpt usefully, but I found it striking and memorable. It melds prose and poetic styles very effectively (O’Rourke is a well-known poet and a very good one ) and it covers some relatively unexplored emotional space. I don’t know a better book on grief.
I was reading Solzhenitsyn’s novel during my time in Brazil and I believe he has become oddly underrated. He is too often viewed as a historical artifact rather than as one of his century’s best writers. Here was one of my favorite passages from what is perhaps his best novel ( Cancer Ward is another favorite):
I was reading Solzhenitsyn’s novel during my time in Brazil and I believe he has become oddly underrated. He is too often viewed as a historical artifact rather than as one of his century’s best writers. Here was one of my favorite passages from what is perhaps his best novel ( Cancer Ward is another favorite):
4. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives , by Steven Levy. I haven’t finished this yet, but so far it is excellent and full of substance. Unlike a lot of company histories, it has a lot of economics, whether it is Google rediscovering the second price auction technique or the company having to hide how much money it was making from ads. I had my doubts about a book on so popular a topic, but this one delivers.
3. Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life . This truly vivid biography brings its subject to life through the extensive use of correspondence and quotation. The reader gets an excellent feeling of how Bismarck’s government actually worked, his intensity and also his mediocrities, and also the importance of Bismarck in building up Germany as a European power. The story is as gripping as a good novel. Sadly, almost no attention is paid to the origins of the welfare state. Still, this has receiv...
2. What Makes a Masterpiece?: Artists, Writers, and Curators on the World’s Greatest Art , by Christopher Dell. The “pick a bunch of mostly classic but occasionally surprising artworks and devote a few pages to each one” can work surprisingly well for popular art books and this is a good example of the virtues of that genre.
1. Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food . There aren’t many new angles for WWII books, but this is one of them. The focus is on food markets during the war and Collingham covers both the Allied and Axis powers, interesting throughout.
2. Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Cultures , by me.
There is Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire , but Fassbinder films I do not enjoy. Try also the TV serial Heimat , which properly can be considered cinematic.
1. Herzog’s Nosferatu , Kaspar Hauser , und Little Dieter ( German-language version only , and a very underrated movie) are my favorites from this tradition, which past Herzog I do not much admire or enjoy. Not long ago I saw Herzog’s early documentary How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck ?, 44 minutes on Netflix streaming, highly recommended, mostly it is footage of auctioneers talking really really fast, and percussively, to a partly Amish audience.
The source paper is here . You can, and should, buy Bryan’s new book here .
My favorite book by him is Prime Movers of Globalization: The History and Impact of Diesel Engines and Gas Turbines , a better title and subtitle there never was.
His Energy Myths and Realities: Bringing Science to the Energy Policy Debate is depressing, excerpt:
The author is Daniel K. Richter and the subtitle is America’s Ancient Pasts . I admit I am a sucker for books on this topic, but so far it is one of my two or three favorite non-fiction titles of the year. Excerpt:
[TC: And yet we still did not quite achieve our war aims.] That is from the new and interesting book by Sarah E. Kreps, Coalitions of Convenience: United States Military Interventions After the Cold War .
That is the new, short, and readable survey book by Elhanan Helpman , self-recommending of course. Here is Helpman’s home page .
That is from the new and interesting book by Tim Büthe and Walter Mattli, The New Global Rulers: The Privatization of Regulation in the World Economy , the book’s home page, with free chapter one, is here . Speaking of which, Garth Saloner is another very good South African economist and he is now Dean of Stanford Business School.
Drawing a direct analogy with the effect of vouchers in the education system, Messrs. Seeman and Luciani suggest “healthy-living vouchers” [TC: book is here ] that could be redeemed from different (certified) places—gyms, diet classes, vegetable sellers and more. Education vouchers, they point out, are generally disliked by rich whites as being bad for poor blacks—and generally liked by poor blacks. A bottom-up solution empowers people better than top-down government fiat.