Recently Mentioned Books

That is from Hampton Sides's quite interesting Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West .  From the specialized academic literature, here is an entire study of the mother-in-law taboo (JSTOR) ; I'm not sure any of the offered hypotheses or explanations are persuasive.  It seems the taboo lasted well through the twentieth century.  Here is another discussion , under the more general heading of Navajo taboos:

My favorite classical recording this year was Alexandre Tharaud playing Satie for piano .

A very good gift book is Eric Siblin's new The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece .  It signals the sophistication of both the giver and receiver and yet it is short and entertaining enough to actually read.  Package it with the recent Queyras recording of the Suites , if need be.

A very good gift book is Eric Siblin's new The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece .  It signals the sophistication of both the giver and receiver and yet it is short and entertaining enough to actually read.  Package it with the recent Queyras recording of the Suites , if need be.

3. Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence , read it slowly in small bits.

2. Via Arnold Kling (do read his new book ), Presidential cabinets: prior private sector experience .

3. Better Living Through Economics , edited by John J. Siegfried.  It covers emissions trading, the EITC, trade liberalization, welfare reform, the spectrum auction, airline deregulation, antitrust, the volunteer military, and Alvin Roth algorithms for deferred acceptance.  The contributions are uniformly excellent and written by top economists.

I won't have time to read through the novel ( the new Alice Munro is out , for one thing) but I thought the premise was an intriguing one.  The Amazon reader reviews are favorable.

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: