Recently Mentioned Books

As long as we are on the topic of slavery , why not consider fiction? This science fiction novel has an intriguing economic premise: you're born a slave and you're not free until you can buy yourself back from your owner (which may be a corporation).

You can buy the book here .  The subtitle is Intangible Assets, Hidden Liabilities and the Lasting Triumph over Scarcity .

That is from my (favorable) review of E. Roy Weintraub and Evelyn L. Forget, Economists' Lives: Biography and Autobiography in the History of Economics .  The review will be published in a journal called Biography .

That is from Jim Krane's fascinating City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism .  This is pretty clearly the best book on Dubai.  It has an insider's perspective but is also analytical.  Recommended

That's from Taylor's interesting new book Not a Chimp: The Hunt to Find the Genes that Make Us Human .  Taylor does stress that this hypothesis is speculation rather than established fact.

5. The Lives of the Brain: Human Evolution and the Organ of Mind , by John S. Allen.  A very good Belknap Press introduction to recent research on cognition, especially cognition and language.  An antidote to many things you have read in Pinker.  It's a bit of a "tweener" book: it doesn't take you "by the hand" through the results but it also doesn't assume that you are a research scientist.  It was written at a good level for me, but some readers may wish for more explanation of the results.

4. Timothy Egan, Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America .  Impeccably written and well-researched, but it bored me.  Spellbinding portraits of characters, etc. Not enough of a point and of course the fire was not what saved America.  Many people like it, though, so don't let me put you off.

3. Googled: The End of the World as We Know It , by Ken Auletta.  In the abstract this is quite a good book and if someone woke up from a time capsule from 1969 you would start him with this.  Too much of it was familiar to me, though.

2. Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York , by William Grimes.  A book like this has to have something interesting and indeed this one does.  There is an excellent chapter on how oysters once were "New York City food," akin to lobster in Maine or crab in Maryland.  No more.  The rest of the book remains oddly distant from the eating experiences of real people and overall I was disappointed.

1. Momofuku , by David Chang and Peter Meehan.  This Nelson/Winter treatise on industrial organization teaches you the evolution of recipes and restaurants and (most of all) the mistakes made along the way.  Smokiness is an important concept in Japanese food, pickling and fermentation are underrated cooking techniques, a cook can learn from a heart surgeon, people will pay $80 for a ribeye steak without fancy decor, and you can cook semi-safe sous vide at home (suck the air out with a straw).  R...

6. Oppens Plays Carter , by Ursula Oppens.

5. John Adams, Transmigration of Souls , and other works conducted by Robert Spano.

4. Kurtag's Ghosts , by Kurtag and Formenti.

3. Mahler: The Complete Symphonies , conducted by Leonard Bernstein, remastered edition.

2. John Adams, Doctor Atomic Symphony .

1. Mahler's 4th, conducted by Ivan Fischer .

The subtitle is An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia and the author is James C. Scott of Yale University.  Here is a summary from the Preface:

Scott DeMarchi and James T. Hamilton have a new book out and the subtitle is The Habits of Mind That Really Determine How We Make Decisions .  I take this to be the key paragraph:

4. Derrida, an Egyptian , by Peter Sloterdijk.  I'm spending some of next summer in Berlin so I've been trying to catch up on what they're reading over there.  (Any recommendations?)  On every page it feels as if Sloterdijk is intelligent, yet I came away empty-handed and feeling like a frustrated Robin Hanson ("why doesn't he just come right out and say what he means?).  No way should you buy the hardcover for $45.00, in return for 73 pp. of actual text.  Ultimately he's writing about the boxes...

3. Delirious New Orleans: Manifesto for an Extraordinary American City , by Steven Verderber.  An excellent photo-essay on all the marvelous signs and small architectural wonders trashed by Hurricane Katrina.  This book goes micro, not macro, and it catalogs a now-disappearing America from the age which I find most precious in our history.

2. Paul Auster, Invisible .  Auster is back in top form.  The French, of course, think of him as a deeper writer than do most of his American critics and readers.  Is he more like Hitchcock (also appreciated early on by the French) or more like Starsky and Hutch?  Read this book and decide.  As usual, the truth lies somewhere in between.

1. The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy , by Bill Simmons.  Could this be the best 736 pp. book on the diversity of human talent ever written?  It starts slow but eventually picks up steam.  It's also devastatingly funny.  That said, if you don't know a lot about the NBA, it is incomprehensible.  (I could not, for instance, understand the section of Dolph Schayes because that was not the NBA I know.)  In the historical pantheon, he picks David Thompson, Bernard King, and A...

5. J.M. Coetzee, Summertime . I bought my copy up in Edmonton, where it is available for $32.99 or so.  I thought it was excellent, but also that few people will appreciate the extent to which the story centers around an autistic protagonist.

4. John Keay, China: A History . The clearest and more intelligible treatment I've seen — ever — of all those dynasties and murky sides of Chinese history.  Yet if I understand this book on early Chinese history — and no other — should I in fact be suspicious?

3. Socrates in the Boardroom: Why Research Universities Should be Led by Top Scholars , by Amanda H. Goodall.  I actually laughed when I read the subtitle. She discusses fundraising in the second to last paragraph of the book. More generally, you can take this book as a radical attack on economic reasoning: she believes that having a Ph.d. will cause a person to ignore the incentives that face non-Ph.d.-holding individuals in the same position.