Recently Mentioned Books

Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing , reviewed by Virginia Postrel here .  Stephen M. Davidson, Still Broken: Understanding the U.S. Health Care System (intelligent book, bad timing since it pushes a non-Obama reform).  Peter Heather, Empires and Barbarians The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe ; good book but I've read too much on this topic lately. What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs , has the pluses and minuses of an edited collection.  Boris Groysberg, Chasing Stars: Th...

Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing , reviewed by Virginia Postrel here .  Stephen M. Davidson, Still Broken: Understanding the U.S. Health Care System (intelligent book, bad timing since it pushes a non-Obama reform).  Peter Heather, Empires and Barbarians The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe ; good book but I've read too much on this topic lately. What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs , has the pluses and minuses of an edited collection.  Boris Groysberg, Chasing Stars: Th...

The author is Dan Ariely and the subtitle is The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home .  It is in my hands.  It will not be left at Newark Airport .  It is written with his characteristic clarity and good humor.

By the way, it was this book , enclosed in the package, sent to my work address.  It was, or rather had been, my book.

That is the new book by the very smart Sebastian Mallaby and it is a history of hedge funds, told from a relatively sympathetic point of view.

5. Frank Trentmann, Free Trade Nation .  The rise and decline of free trade ideology in Britain, told in scholarly yet exciting fashion.  I am just starting this one.

4. Kai Bird, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978 .  This is a fascinating portrait of the mid-century Arab world, a story of a itinerant childhood, plus it's an account of festering Mideast conflicts, a political Bildungsroman, and, every now and then, a story of what it's like to be an Israel skeptic and also be married to a woman whose parents are Holocaust survivors.  Intelligent on every page.

3. William Vollmann, Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, Kabuki Goddesses, Porn Queens, Poets, Hou .  What can one say about Vollmann at this point?  The title is descriptive, for sure, and the author loves his topic.  He's massively flawed to read but still more alive than most writers.  Here are earlier MR posts on Vollmann , who issues large and deeply informed tomes at the ...

2. Neurodiversity: Discovering the Extraordinary Gifts of Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, and Other Brain Differences , by Thomas Armstrong.  I don't agree with all the details in this book, but so far it is the major popular statement of the position outlined by its title.

1. Ukraine & Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry , by Anatol Lieven.  I didn't think I needed to read a dated book on Russian-Ukrainian relations, but in fact I did.  This has excellent detail and conceptual analysis on every page.  Recommended.

That is from Steven S. Gubser's The Little Book of String Theory .  There is much in this book I did not understand, but I've seen plenty of popular physics books over the last few years.  This is the first one in a long time that I both wanted to read and finished; it's full of fresh material, fresh at least to me.

4. Book with a price premium for a Kindle edition .

5. Insectopedia , by Hugh Raffles.  There's one-quarter of a great book in here, provided you don't mind non-linear literary organization and welcome the notion of "hodgepodge."

4. Social Security: A Fresh Look at Policy Alternatives , by Jagadeesh Gokhale.  I've thumbed this one more than I have read it.  The author argues that the U.S. social security system is much less solvent than is commonly thought.  I could put ten more hours into this book and still it would be hard for me to judge that conclusion.  Still, for the time being this appears to be the most fully realized treatment of its issues.

3. Numbers Rule: The Vexing Mathematics of Democracy, from Plato to the Present , by George G. Szpiro.  A history of social choice theory, with much more detail (yet still readable) than one is used to receiving on this topic.  I liked this book very much, plus it has extensive coverage of Ramon Llull , who remains a very underrated thinker.  Among his numerous achievements, he understood a significant chunk of Borda and even Arrow in the thirteenth century.  The first chapter of the book is her...

2. El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City , by John Ross.  This book evokes vivid memories of Mexico City.  At first it feels like "gonzo journalism," but it ends up supplying more factual information than the initial tone suggests.  There are few cities I love more.

1. Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things , by Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee.  If you drop the normative tone, and read the case studies for "how to" tips, this is a pretty good book.

Emil Kauder wrote a very good book arguing, among other things, that the Catholic thinkers were more likely to be early founders of the marginal utility tradition (Marginal Revolution is in large part a Catholic concept!).  I am pretty sure that the members of the early "School of Salamanca" were Catholic, at least nominally.  Also see the R.S. Howey book on the history of marginal utility theory.

5 Men in the Sun , by the Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani, was translated by Hilary Kilpatrick and published by Lynne Rienner Publishers in 1998.

4 War in the Egyptian Homeland , by the Egyptian Yousef Al-Qaeed has not been translated. (Oops! Hilary notes that War in the Land of Egypt by Yusuf al-Qa’id –see where a non-standard transliteration will get me–was published by Interlink in 1997, translated by Olive and Lorne Kenny and Christopher Tingley. Yes, and my title translation was lame. Worse, I’ve read that translation….)

2 In Search of Walid Masoud by the Palestinian author Jabra Ibrahim Jabra. This is available in English, translated by by Adnan Haydar & Roger Allen. Syracuse University Press, 2000. Also, Ghassan Nasr’s translation of Ibrahim Jabra’s The Journals of Sarab Affan , published by Syracuse University Press, was a runner-up for the Banipal translation prize in 2008.

1 The Cairo Trilogy by Egyptian (Nobel-prize winning) author Naguib Mahfouz. Yes, of course it’s available in English: Trans. William Maynard Hutchins, Everyman’s Library, 2001.

It was published by Basic Books, which also is putting out Jeff Miron's Libertarianism: From A to Z .

That's the title of the new book by Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff and the subtitle is A New, Safe, and Audacious Way to Improve the Performance of Your Retirement Portfolio .  Their point is simple: if diversification across asset classes is so good, why not also seek greater diversification across time periods ?  In other words, you should want to hold stocks for longer periods of time and to do this when you are young you should incur additional debt to play the market.

The author is David E. Hoffman and the subtitle of this recent Pulitzer winner is The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy .  I recommend it highly, especially if you are too young to have remembered the middle years of the Cold War.  I hadn't thought of this before: