Recently Mentioned Books

6. David Edwards, The Lab: Creativity and Culture .  He wants to revitalize labs with a blend of "Artscience" and encourage them to cultivate more ideas which appear impractical but may have long-term payoffs.

5. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Yo no vengo a decir un discurso .  Transcripts of some of his lectures, so far very eloquent although the level of substance remains to be seen.

4. They Live , by Jonathan Lethem.  Scene-by scene commentary on the John Carpenter movie of that name.  I'd like to see more books like this.  It's short.

3. Kaushik Basu, Beyond the Invisible Hand: Groundwork for a New Economics .  The author is a smart guy and he writes clearly, but I object to the subtitle and what it implies.  I want The New Economics, not the Groundwork for a New Economics.

2. Erika S. Olson, Zero-Sum Game: The Rise of the World's Largest Derivatives Exchange .  Good inside the scenes account of the CME-CBOT merger, also with material on the rise of ICE.  I read some of it and was glad I did.

1. Hélène Cixous, Stigmata .  I didn't find anything of value here.  Probably the poetic element is better in the French but I wonder what the big deal is about.

The full story is here and for the pointer I thank J.C. Bradbury, who has a new book out The Hot Stove: Understanding Baseball's Second Season .

3. What will happen , and here is the book to come .

The author is Siddhartha Mukherjee and the subtitle is A Biography of Cancer .  This is not a typical excerpt, but it works as an excerpt for this blog:

The link is here , the point is from Paul Hsieh and Jeffrey Williams should be happy.  The locale is in India .

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Cannot Explain the Modern World .

4. Manuel de Lope, The Wrong Blood .  For those who love poignant Spanish meditations on memory, at the expense of plot.  I finished it, eagerly, but take the caveat seriously.  One good bit: "…no one on his way to a wedding seems like a dangerous man, and experience taught that dangerous men can come from a wedding…and so the owner of Etxarri's Bar gave no thought to his loaded shotgun."

3. The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry , edited by Patrick Crotty.  This is spectacular, covering both the medieval material (beautifully translated) and the last fifty years, and everything in between.  The volume looks like it should sell for $40, yet it goes for $15 on Amazon.  Definitely recommended, a real contribution and also a wonderful Christmas present.

2. Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us .  This book is very well done, but it suffers from the "I already agree with it" problem; it shows for instance that religious people make better neighbors, even after making the relevant statistical adjustments.

1. Hector Abad, Oblivion: A Memoir .  A boy's, and then a man's, relationship with his father; it may put this bestselling Colombian author on the Anglo-American map.

5. Robert Schumann, Carneval, Kreisleriana, Arabeske, by Vassily Primakov .

4. Volkmar Andreae, conducting the Bruckner symphonies and Te Deum .  Remastered mono from the 1950s, supposed to be perfection.

3. Dennis Russell Davies, conducting Haydn's complete symphonies .  Elevated for the sake of completeness, no one is saying it is better than Dorati.

2. John Butt, conducting J.S. Bach, Mass in B Minor , Joshua Rifkin style.  This is the recording which is supposed to convert the unpersuaded to the minimalist vocal approach.

1. Stephen Hough and Osmo Vanska, playing the Tchaikovsky piano concerti .  This was the only item selected by three critics.

It is simply a first-rate book.  It is out only in the UK, but I was happy to pay the extra shipping charge from UK Amazon, which you too can pay here .  Or maybe try these used sellers .  Some reviews are here .

That is from Paul Greenberg's Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food .

I never loved this book before (sadly I cannot do serious reading in French), but now I do.  Order it here .  Reviews — mostly raves — are here .  Right now Natasha is enjoying Davis's short fiction and I've ordered some of her other work as well.

Most of the book is intelligent, well-sourced, easy to read, and non-dogmatic.  It is a "big book" on the scale of Jared Diamond or Paul Kennedy and the author is obviously highly intelligent.  There is a good use of archaeology and mostly the author supports geographical theories of the rise of the West and other civilizations.  It considers energy use, urbanization, and war-making explicitly, all pluses in my view.  Eventually you realize it is going nowhere and has only a weak theoretical fra...

That is from Jane Smiley's new and worthwhile The Man Who Invented the Computer, The Biography of John Atanasoff, Digital Pioneer .  My favorite part of the book was the discussion of Konrad Zuse , who deserves his own popular biography.