Recently Mentioned Books

You can buy Field’s excellent book here and here is my previous post on the work .  Here is Kling on Field , very useful.

That is the new and excellent book by Anatol Lieven , and there is now more reason than ever to read it.  Here are a few things I learned from the book:

The bottom line: I was never reading this because it will be popular and I wanted to review it, I was always reading it to ponder the ideas.  You can buy the book here .

Tim is probably the single best economist to follow on Twitter , arguably today’s best active popular economics writer , and now I have in my hands his new book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure .  Self-recommending!  (If page one is good, should I worry about the rest of the book?)

Overall, it is neglected knowledge just how much the “Green Revolution” has slowed down since the 1990s.  In Africa, measured heights have stagnated or declined in recent times .  Robert Paarlberg’s Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa is an excellent book on its title topic and more generally on falling TFP in global agriculture.

That is the new book by F. Bailey Norwood and Jayson L. Lusk, and the subtitle is The Economics of Farm Animal Welfare .  A few facts:

Here is an interview with Field .  You can buy the book here .

3. Earl B. Hunt, Human Intelligence , a good introduction to current debates.

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.