Recently Mentioned Books

That's the new Ayn Rand biography , written by Anne C. Heller .  It is a truly excellent, first-rate biography, at least up through my current p.111.  I know Ayn Rand is an emotional topic for many of you, pro, con, or somewhere in between.  But my praise of this book is analogous to how I might praise a biography of Jean Rhys or W.C. Handy.  It's simply a very good book by any objective [sic] standard and it should be of interest to any student of intellectual history, American popular fiction,...

That is from the new book NurtureShock , by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, which I found interesting at times.  "Interesting enough to read" is perhaps its category.  Here is a WSJ review .

The authors are Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff and the subtitle is Eight Centuries of Financial Folly .  Here is the book's home page .

Tim's new book is out this week and the subtitle is Priceless Advice on Money, Work, Sex, Kids, and Life's Other Challenges .  The book is basically Tim's "Dear Economist" advice columns from the FT .  It is priced at a very reasonable $10 and it reaffirms Tim's status as the #1 UK writer on popular economics.

It was only two days ago I vowed "no more health care blogging" but I never said "no more health care book blogging," so here goes.  Daniel Callahan's notable Taming the Beloved Beast: How Medical Technology Costs are Destroying Our Health Care System soon will be out.  Here is his position:

More pet rapture insurance !  I thank James Hinckley for the pointer.  Note that this service, unlike the other, vows not to have sex with your pets.  That's what economists call quality competition .  Lawrence Abbott once wrote a very good book on that idea.

On the American Mafia, Mike Dash's The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder, and the Birth of the American Mafia is both good and readable.  See for instance the Jonathan Yardley review at the Amazon link.

This new book by Salvatore Lupo is a translation from the Italian.  I read a bunch of Mafia books before leaving for Sicily and this one has, by a considerable margin, more economic history and more analytic reasoning than the others.  It asks how the Mafia interacted with more general changes to the Sicilian economy and also asks why the Mafia were stronger in some parts of Sicily than others.  The latter sort of question is a no-brainer for an economist but it doesn't pop up very often in the ...

That's the new book by Diego Gambetta and it is the best applied book on signaling theory to date.  Gambetta's task is well summarized by a single sentence:

What can I say?  I have to count this tome as one of the best history books I have read, ever.  The author is Chris Wickham and the subtitle is A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 .  The author states that this is a book written “without hindsight” so the focus is not on how early medieval times were a precursor of this, that, or the other.  In addition to its all-around stunningness, it has the following:

4. Brahms Complete Edition, 46 discs for $62 .

I am surprised that Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West has not sparked more blogospheric debate (with a few exceptions ).  This is an intelligent, well-reasoned argument against allowing so many Muslims into Europe.  That said, while the author does ask how many traditional Italian restaurants would have to close without immigrant labor, he doesn't pursue this chain of reasoning very far.  What would happen to the Swiss tourist sector?...

I pose a similar question in my book Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding . After the adjustment process, I believe that matters would settle in an orderly fashion, although whether we pick the art from 30 or 50 years ago would make a big difference in terms of the required rejiggling of our aesthetic sensibilities.  We would pick out bestsellers from 30 or 50 years ago and some of them would be in demand, if only because people wish to share common cultural experienc...

3. Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States , by Andrew Coe.  There is way too much well-known diplomatic history in this book, but the best fifty pages are good enough to make it worthwhile.  That said, I could have saved a lot of time, by flipping rapidly through the boring pages. had I not been reading it on my Kindle.

2. The Great Contraction , Friedman and Schwartz.  Classic economics books like this are almost always worth a reread.  I had forgotten just how bad was the year 1931.

1. Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town , by Nick Reding.  Maybe I should define a new category: "Good enough to finish."  This is one of the better recent books on the economics of culture.

Almost everyone thinks that the French health care system is better than the British health care system.  What is the chance that the British could be persuaded to switch?  (Although I cannot imagine the rhetoric: "under the French health care system, Jean-Dominique Bauby would have been put to death.")  What does this say about health care reform more generally?

Most of the answers seem too obvious to list.  I will say only that there is more to Swedish detective fiction than Stieg Larsson (start with Henning Mankell), lingonberries are usually a good idea in a meal, "Honey Honey" is the most underrated Abba song (it didn't make Greatest Hits I ), there are more excellent Bergman movies than most people think even if you don't like the stereotypical ones, Carl Milles's greatest work is in a Fairfax/Merrifield cemetary on Rt.29 in Virginia , Emanuel Swed...

That is from How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n; Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music , by Elijah Wald.

I was put on to this anecdote from Bill Streever's very good new book Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places .  Single-topic popular science books may feel like an exhausted genre, but we're still seeing good ones come along.

It's an excellent book , whether on Sicily or Italy more generally, and it is written by Peter Robb.  It is also an excellent book about Naples:

2. Movie, set in : This is a tough one.  But I'll opt for Visconti's The Leopard (big screen required, don't bother with Netflix) over Coppola's Godfather sequence, not to mention La Terra Trema and L'avventura .  Wow.  Is there a Sicily scene in Patton ?

1. Novel, set in : The Leopard , by Giuseppe di Lampedusa.

The parts of this book about Jacobs are splendid.  The parts about Moses are good, though they were more familiar to me.  I believe there has otherwise never been much biographical material on Jacobs's life.  Here is an excerpt from the book .  Here is one review .  Did you know about her book A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska ?

The subtitle is How Jane Jacobs Took On New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City and the author is Anthony Flint.  Here is an excerpt: