Recently Mentioned Books
Showing 25 of 6684 mentions, ordered by most recent.
That's from yesterday's Financial Times , no…whoops, sorry! That's from Mark Mazower's Inside Hitler's Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44 . It's a good book.
Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, Modern Principles of Economics ( UK ) – well-written, interesting, and some material not normally covered in econ. textbooks. I’ll try to find time to write more about this textbook, but guess students and professors will be the judges.
That is from the new and consistently interesting The Poisoners' Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York , by Deborah Blum. Although she has won a Pulitzer Prize, she remains an underrated author.
The author is Ruth Towse and you can buy it here . This excellent book now sets the standard for the field. Here is the home page of Ruth Towse .
I gave my DVD of The 25th Hour to Peter Boettke; we both loved it. Natasha and I have started following Tell Me You Love Me , the brutal and anti-erotic new HBO show.
Book season this fall is amazing; there is an impressive pile on the sofa, but sadly (for the sake of science) I cannot find many books that I have only one reason for reading. I liked the title of An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England (though nothing else about it) and so I have a library copy. Tree of Smoke is shaping up as the best American novel in years. The new Pamuk is getting me interested in rereading Dostoyevsky; it is sad to see Pamuk having written that he cannot imag...
Book season this fall is amazing; there is an impressive pile on the sofa, but sadly (for the sake of science) I cannot find many books that I have only one reason for reading. I liked the title of An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England (though nothing else about it) and so I have a library copy. Tree of Smoke is shaping up as the best American novel in years. The new Pamuk is getting me interested in rereading Dostoyevsky; it is sad to see Pamuk having written that he cannot imag...
Book season this fall is amazing; there is an impressive pile on the sofa, but sadly (for the sake of science) I cannot find many books that I have only one reason for reading. I liked the title of An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England (though nothing else about it) and so I have a library copy. Tree of Smoke is shaping up as the best American novel in years. The new Pamuk is getting me interested in rereading Dostoyevsky; it is sad to see Pamuk having written that he cannot imag...
The subtitle is How Prosperity Evolves and you can buy it here . The book is due out in May. Excerpt:
That is from Mokyr's new and notable The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 . The obvious question of course is why so many people moved into cities. Did " new goods " make the urban living standard higher than some measures might suggest? Was it to avoid boredom? To avoid "rural idiocy" and invest in future IQ externalities for children ?
You will find more images here . I have been reading the very good book South African Art Now .
That is from Christopher R. Browning's new book Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp .
Here is the full article . Call me crazy, but I've long been a (partial) fan of John Bailey's Sailing to Paradise: The Discovery of the Americas by 7000 B.C.
4. David S. Landes, Joel Mokyr, and William J. Baumol, editors, The Invention of Enterprise: Entrepreneurship from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times .
3. Daniel R. Headrick, Power over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present .
2. Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, The Road from Ruin: How to Revive Capitalism and Put America Back on Top .
1. Sebastian Edwards, Left Behind: Latin America and the False Promise of Populism .
It's now out and my review copy has arrived; the authors are Yoram Bauman and illustrator Grady Klein. It is the next step in economics education. You can buy it here .
The author is John North and the subtitle is An Illustrated History of Astronomy and Cosmology . Excerpt:
There is a recent eBook (selling for only $4.00), consisting of a dialogue between myself and Grandin, mostly on autism and talented autistics but not just. For instance we also talk about our favorite TV shows, including a discussion of Lost , and there is a segment on science fiction and the future of humanity. I try to draw her out on autism, cognitive anthromorphizing, and attitudes toward religion, but she is reluctant to offer her opinions on that important topic. I would describe the e...
3. Grandin tends to brusquely classify autistic children into different groups. She will speak of "the nerds who will do just fine" (see the eBook linked to below) as opposed to the "severely autistic," who require that someone take control of their lives and pound a bit of the autism out of them. There's a great deal of diversity among autistics, and autistic outcomes, but I don't see that as the most useful way of expressing those differences. Autism diagnoses are often unstable at young a...
6. Kent Annan, Following Jesus Through the Eye of the Needle: Living Fully, Loving Dangerously . What is it like to be a Christian missionary in Haiti? This is a surprisingly insightful and moving book, one of the best Haiti books but of general interest as well. Most of all, it's about the author's struggle with himself. Chris Blattman likes it too, here is his review .
5. Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey: A Novel . The premise — an alternative literary version of Homer's story — sounds contrived but I was surprised at how good and how moving this was. Here is one good review of the book .
4. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains .
3. Steven C.A. Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution . A clearly written, well-argued book, which on top of everything else is better than most books on the Industrial Revolution, hardly its main area of focus. The main point is that the Glorious Revolution was more radical than is commonly portrayed and it represented the culmination of a struggle between two very different kinds of modernizing forces in England. Chapter 12 — "Revolution in Political Economy" — is a gem. This is a very ...