Recently Mentioned Books

The author is William Tsutsui and the subtitle is Fifty Years of the King of Monsters .  Excerpt:

It may be out of date, but the starting point for any study of Japan is still Karel von Wolferen’s The Enigma of Japanese Power .   Definitely recommended.

That is a 2010 book by Daniel Ben-Ami , published in the United Kingdom.  It is a very good updating of the basis thesis of Julian Simon that economic growth is a strong net positive for humanity.  Some MR readers will already know these arguments, but many people should read this book.

Here is more , and the data are taken from this new book by Simmons and Daniel Sutter , on the economics of tornadoes, the book’s home page is here .

The author is David Sims and the subtitle is The Logic of a City Out of Control .  It is interesting throughout for anyone studying urban density or informal land titles or urban sprawl or Third World mega-cities.  This passage is off the central topics of the book, but I found it an interesting corrective to the usual picture:

The author is Gordon C. Bjork and the subtitle is Structural Change and the Slowdown of U.S. Economic Growth .  I recommend this not-so-well known book, first published in 1999, very highly.  Among its other merits, it traces how much of the productivity slowdown results from the switch of the U.S. economy into lower-growing sectors.  Excerpt:

And David's new book is here .

The author is Laura J. Snyder and the subtitle is Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World .  This is an excellent book about the history and status of science in 19th century England and in particular the contributions of Charles Babbage, John Herschel, William Whewell, and Richard Jones, the latter an economist and of course Whewell debated induction and scientific method with Mill.  Babbage too had writings on economics .  Here is an excerpt from Snyder:

The author is Laura J. Snyder and the subtitle is Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World .  This is an excellent book about the history and status of science in 19th century England and in particular the contributions of Charles Babbage, John Herschel, William Whewell, and Richard Jones, the latter an economist and of course Whewell debated induction and scientific method with Mill.  Babbage too had writings on economics .  Here is an excerpt from Snyder:

Yes, that Derek Parfit here , and here .  Remember how they used to ask about how good a Beatles reunion would have been?  This is an event.

The author is David Brooks and the subtitle is The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement .  I pre-ordered my copy some time ago and it is due out this Tuesday…

Things to Come is on Amazon here and on Wikipedia here .  Some stills and commentary are here .  Here is an NYT review from 1936 : "probably as solid a prophecy as any."

You can find the essay in this unorthodox and stimulating book .

That's the new Haruki Murakami book , due out in the U.S. in late October.  It's over one thousand pages and it was published originally in three parts.  My view of Murakami is that his later works are good but not special, and that his masterpieces are the early novels and also his non-fiction chronicle of the Tokyo gas attacks, Underground .  My favorite is Hard Boiled Wonderland the End of the World , which also should appeal to science fiction fans.

That's the new Haruki Murakami book , due out in the U.S. in late October.  It's over one thousand pages and it was published originally in three parts.  My view of Murakami is that his later works are good but not special, and that his masterpieces are the early novels and also his non-fiction chronicle of the Tokyo gas attacks, Underground .  My favorite is Hard Boiled Wonderland the End of the World , which also should appeal to science fiction fans.

James Le Fanu, in his 2000 history of modern medicine , lists definitive moments of modern medicine.  In the 1940s there are six such moments, seven moments in the 1950s, six moments in the 1960s, a moment in 1970 and 1971 each, and from 1973-1998, a twenty-five year period, there are only seven moments in total.

5. Patrick Cockburn and Henry Cockburn, Henry's Demons: Living With Schizophrenia, A Father and Son's Story .  Interesting but never insightful (can I coin that as a new phrase?).  On the surface this book shows the difficulties of having a son with schizophrenia, from both the perspective of the parents and also in the son's own words.  In reality, it turned me (further) against the idea of forced institutionalization of an adult.  They lock the son up for years and they don't seem to regret it...

4. Javier Cercas, The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-Five Minutes in History and Imagination .  In the waning of Franco's time, how did Spain turn away from military rule and toward democracy?  Can a mediocre man make a difference in history simply by retreating at the right moment?  Can a political life boil down to a single response, under gunfire at that?  Half of this book is brilliant writing, the other half is brilliant writing combined with obscure, hard-to-follow 1970s Spanish politics (doe...

3. César Aira, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter .  Commonly portrayed as an Argentina eccentric, he writes a few short books each year and over time he has accumulated the reptutation as one of the most important contemporary Latin writers.  Broadly in the Borges tradition, scattered and philosophical, there is little downside to giving him a try.

2. Adrian Johns, Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age .  A very good book on the history of radio, but the real bonus is the history of economic thought section, covering what Coase, Hayek, Arnold Plant and others thought of the BBC in its early years and how that related to debates over The Road to Serfdom .  I hadn't know that some of the British pirate stations of the 1960s were inspired by Hayek.  Plus it's only $4.68 in hardcover.

1. Carsten Jensen, We, the Drowned .  A series of generational tales from a Danish fishing village, starting with the 1864 conflict against Germany.  The WSJ loved it , the Danes loved it, eight Amazon readers loved it, and I liked it quite a bit at first.  Eventually I was wandering in a "tweener" novel — serious enough not to be stupid, yet not enough giddy fun to be a page turner, not serious enough to be deep, and ultimately a European novel of ideas by the numbers.  Some of you are likely t...

The author is Adrian Tinniswood and the subtitle is Corsairs, Conquests, and Captivity in the 17th-Century Mediterranean .  Excerpt:

The author is Charles Kenny and the subtitle is Why Global Development is Succeeding — and How We Can Improve the World Even More .

The topic is The Great Stagnation , find the dialogue here .  My favorite part was when we both discussed why we find David Ricardo an interesting thinker.  One way of summing up TGS is to cite local diminishing returns and yet longer-run increasing returns, though right now we're on the diminishing segment of that curve.  Ricardo got the first part right, and it took the world some number of decades to prove him wrong about the longer run.  TGS is a book set in the traditions of classical econo...

That quotation is from Simon Fairlie's quite interesting Meat: A Benign Extravagance .