Recently Mentioned Books

That's a new book by Russ Banham and the subtitle is A Struggle for a Great American County .  It is published by George Mason University Press.  Excerpt:

The subtitle of the book is Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance and you can pre-order it here .  The authors are…come on guys…need I tell you?

Robert Pozen's Too Big to Save: How to Fix the U.S. Financial System is the single best source for figuring out what happened.  It is the go-to book if you are a non-specialist and want to understand: how credit default swaps work, the significance of Basel II, mark-to-market, how the various Fed bailouts operated, the meaning of the toxic asset plans, and many other matters.

That passage is from Robert Pozen's new and notable Too Big to Save? How to Fix the U.S. Financial System .

From Amazon :

In the pile is Robert Service's Trotsky , which is self-recommending.  On DVD, I very much enjoyed watching Tyson , which is chockful of social science in narrative form.

In the pile is Robert Service's Trotsky , which is self-recommending.  On DVD, I very much enjoyed watching Tyson , which is chockful of social science in narrative form.

5. Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist .  Sometimes Baker hits the spot, but this one didn't hold my interest.  Poets might like it.

3. To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise , by Bethany Moreton.  It sounds like one of those whiny books on Wal-Mart.  But I found it insightful throughout and also well-written; the main point is that Wal-Mart can be understood as driven by a Christian service ethos.  Parts of it serve as a good economic history of the South and of chain stores and big box stores.

2. Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression , by Morris Dickstein.  I put it down.  I care about the topic but so much of the content is going through the motions rather than framing the argument around the author's original insights.

1. Arvind Panagariya, India: The Emerging Giant .  Why didn't this book get more attention?  It's by far the best treatment of the economics of contemporary India.

That is from Richard Polsky's new and fun i sold Andy Warhol (too soon) .  The book is a sequel of sorts to Polsky's earlier I Bought Andy Warhol .  I am also a fan of Polsky's earlier Art Market Guides .

That is from Richard Polsky's new and fun i sold Andy Warhol (too soon) .  The book is a sequel of sorts to Polsky's earlier I Bought Andy Warhol .  I am also a fan of Polsky's earlier Art Market Guides .

That is from the new book Heart of Dryness: How the Last Bushmen Can Help Us Endure the Coming Age of Permanent Drought , by James G. Workman.

I was reading Paul Blustein's The Chastening , his book on the Asian financial crisis published in 2001, and came across the following passage:

Here is more and that is all from the interesting new book Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything , by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell.  You may recall that I mention Bell in Create Your Own Economy .  I don't personally have the ability to operate all that technology.  So if I could measure only five things from my daily life, what should they be?  What would yours be and why?

It is much deserved and here is one press account .  Here are previous MR posts on her work .  Here is an overall list of winners .  I also would draw your attention to winner Elyn Saks , who is a law professor at USC; I recommend her book on fighting schizophrenia .

Many of the criticisms of Liszt stick, but you can't judge these pieces by the standards of a Bach fugue.  If there's anything in classical music that comes close to the ecstasy of The Clash, or the beauty of Brian Eno, it is these works.  The Etudes are also nearly impossible to play and as monomaniacal works they try to contain everything pianistic.  A new version of the Etudes has appeared, by Miroslav Kultyshev .  It starts slow but by Mazeppa (YouTube here ) the listener takes notice.  Ther...

Many of the criticisms of Liszt stick, but you can't judge these pieces by the standards of a Bach fugue.  If there's anything in classical music that comes close to the ecstasy of The Clash, or the beauty of Brian Eno, it is these works.  The Etudes are also nearly impossible to play and as monomaniacal works they try to contain everything pianistic.  A new version of the Etudes has appeared, by Miroslav Kultyshev .  It starts slow but by Mazeppa (YouTube here ) the listener takes notice.  Ther...

Many of the criticisms of Liszt stick, but you can't judge these pieces by the standards of a Bach fugue.  If there's anything in classical music that comes close to the ecstasy of The Clash, or the beauty of Brian Eno, it is these works.  The Etudes are also nearly impossible to play and as monomaniacal works they try to contain everything pianistic.  A new version of the Etudes has appeared, by Miroslav Kultyshev .  It starts slow but by Mazeppa (YouTube here ) the listener takes notice.  Ther...

Many of the criticisms of Liszt stick, but you can't judge these pieces by the standards of a Bach fugue.  If there's anything in classical music that comes close to the ecstasy of The Clash, or the beauty of Brian Eno, it is these works.  The Etudes are also nearly impossible to play and as monomaniacal works they try to contain everything pianistic.  A new version of the Etudes has appeared, by Miroslav Kultyshev .  It starts slow but by Mazeppa (YouTube here ) the listener takes notice.  Ther...

Many of the criticisms of Liszt stick, but you can't judge these pieces by the standards of a Bach fugue.  If there's anything in classical music that comes close to the ecstasy of The Clash, or the beauty of Brian Eno, it is these works.  The Etudes are also nearly impossible to play and as monomaniacal works they try to contain everything pianistic.  A new version of the Etudes has appeared, by Miroslav Kultyshev .  It starts slow but by Mazeppa (YouTube here ) the listener takes notice.  Ther...

The subtitle is The Search for Alpha When Risk and Return Break Down .  I definitely liked this book.  It's the best readable summary I know of why CAPM fails (see my comments here ).  Market data do not, upon examination, show a close connection between risk and return, at least not once you start moving out on the risk spectrum beyond T-Bills and the like.  It's not just the famous Fama and French papers, it is worse than you think.  I also like the author's "relative status" theory for why ma...

That is all from T.R. Reid's The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care .  I thought this book was very readable, very interesting, and has very good information about different health care systems around the world.  The author is extremely critical of the U.S. system; the premise of his book is that he takes his shoulder injury to doctors in many different countries.  Since not much can be done for the shoulder, the expensive and complicated U.S. system d...

The link is here and I thank Michelle Dawson for the pointer, which is in turn via this link on weird books .  There you will also find a discussion of Dale Power's controversial Do-it-Yourself Coffins for Pets and People (check out the Amazon reader reviews) and other notable titles.