Recently Mentioned Books

That is the new and excellent book by Mark Kleiman and the subtitle is How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment .

Nicole Gelinas, After the Fall: From Wall Street — and Washington .

Johan Norberg, Financial Fiasco: How America's Infatuation and Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis .

Charles K. Rowley and Nathanael Smith, Economic Contractions in the United States: A Failure of Government .

The Voluntary City: Choice, Community and Civil Society , edited by David Beito, Peter Gordon, and Alex Tabarrok.  It's very much anti-zoning.  Here you can look inside the book .  I am genuinely puzzled by this progressive meme that GMU economists don't speak out adequately against zoning and in favor of more diverse, more vital, and more practical urban environments.

The new Pamuk book , due out in October, is phenomenal and is getting better each day.

8. Strength in What Remains , by Tracy Kidder.  It bored me and I stopped.  It's OK but I view it as an inefficient blend of narrative and mild information about East African ethnic cleansing.  Most critics praised it.

7. Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism .  My mouth watered at the thought of a popular (Norton) Joyce Appleby book on the origins of capitalism.  It is intelligent throughout but it wasn't teaching me anything so I put it down.  Skimming did not alter this impression.  It is more a disappointment than a bad book but it is a disappointment nonetheless.  All of a sudden she's afraid to take chances.

6. Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs .  Has any novel this year received better or more unanimous critical reviews ?  The writing is smart, beautiful, and quirky and Moore is not afraid to let her main character be weird.  Still, I lost interest within one hundred pages and stopped reading.  I am willing to admit the fault may be mine and over Christmas I'll try it again.  Somehow I need more analytic structure in my fiction.  If you look at the Amazon reader reviews, they make related points. ...

5. The Informers , by Juan Gabriel Vasquez.  I loved the first part, about the guy's relationship with his dying father, but found the wartime blacklist story only "good."  Still, this is one of the better Colombian novels and I could imagine the author writing a truly great novel someday.  Here is one good review .

4. The Perfect Fruit: Good Breeding, Bad Seeds, and the Hunt for the Elusive Pluot by Chip Brantley.  There is now a "go-to" book on the pluot and this is it.  It explains why plums vary so much in quality, why plums are usually bad these days, how the pluot was intended as a replacement, and why some stores call them plumcots.  I paid attention the whole way through.

3. Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything , by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell.  This is an exciting and prophetic book about taking the ideas of self-experimentation and self-recording to an extreme.  Record your entire life and then do…?…with the data.  Something, they'll figure it out.  Just record the recorders and run regressions on what ends up working.

2. The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How American and Europe are Alike , by Peter Baldwin.  This book offers an onslaught of facts and statistics, toward the aim of showing that the United States and Europe aren't so different after all.  You also can read it as a critique of purely statistical reasoning.  At the very least, it's a good reference work even though I wasn't convinced by the central thesis.

1. Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before , by Michael Fried.  The text is weak (and mostly skippable), but still this had high value for me.  It's a look at how photography has become the centerpiece of contemporary art, starting with Jeff Wall and offering well-chosen color images from the leading creators.  I had been needing a book like this.

Overall this is an underrated tourist destination (it is an easy direct flight from Dulles) and I recommend Lesley Choyce's Nova Scotia: Shaped by the Sea .

There are MP3s at the link (enjoy!) and I discuss related themes — how it matters if we make philosophic aesthetics more empirical — in one chapter in Create Your Own Economy .  Hat tip goes to Christian Bok .

6. Education as placebo effect ; from Create Your Own Economy .

That is from the new Margaret Drabble book , which indeed is about her obsession with jigsaw puzzles.  While I do not myself have an interest in jigsaw puzzles, or crosswords, I am nonetheless finding the book very interesting.  It will baffle many of her traditional fans but that's probably for the better.

That's from Hume's Of The Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences . I discuss related points in my What Price Fame? The proximate pointer is from Dan Klein.

I am told this will preserve true love forever.  Here is a related article .  Here is a related book , which I have yet to read.  Here is the main Google blast on the topic .

5. Das Museum der Unschuld , by Orhan Pamuk.  That's The Museum of Innocence in English, out in late October, but I found the German-language version in Stockholm.  It's in his "Istanbul nostalgic" mode rather than his "I'm trying to be like Italo Calvino" style and it promises to be one of his very best books.

5. Das Museum der Unschuld , by Orhan Pamuk.  That's The Museum of Innocence in English, out in late October, but I found the German-language version in Stockholm.  It's in his "Istanbul nostalgic" mode rather than his "I'm trying to be like Italo Calvino" style and it promises to be one of his very best books.

4. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster , by Rebecca Solnit.  For many people this may be a good book but I could not read far into it.  The main thesis is quite interesting, namely that people forms immediate islands of community and cooperation during very trying times.  The examples include the San Francisco and Mexico City earthquakes, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina.  But I found the ratio of information to page was too low for my admittedly extreme tas...

2. Await Your Reply , by Dan Chaon.  This tripartite mystery about reinventing yourself has received rave reviews and Amazon readers are strongly positive.  I read about one hundred pages and thought it was ably done but of no real substance.

1. The Idea of Justice , by Amartya Sen.  This book is 415 pages of intelligent Sen-isms.  Key themes are the importance of public reasoning, the plurality of reasons, and the possibility of an impartial approach to major ethical questions.  We also learn that in 1938 Wittgenstein was determined to go to Vienna and give Hitler a stern lecture; he had to be talked out of it.  At the end of it all I was more rather than less confused about what impartiality means.  I don't blame that on Sen, but t...