Recently Mentioned Books

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.

2. Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son . I ended up enjoying this more than I do his trendy fiction.  This supposed paean to family life collapses quickly into narcissism, but that's in fact what makes it work.  I was surprised but not shocked by the part where he deliberately tortures his infant son.

1. John Derbyshire, We are Doomed .  He complains because most Western culture today does not live up to the standards of Carol Burnett and Saturday Night Fever . Really.  If there's one thing that can be said, it is that yesterday's cultural pessimists were more interesting than the pessimists of today.

I should note that I liked the book more than that excerpt, taken alone, indicates.  As is often the case, the parts where I praise the work are simply less interesting.  You can order the book here .  In case you don't remember, he's the guy who did the first work on the "deadweight loss of Christmas."  The book has come out just in time for…the Christmas season.

The author is Sean Carroll and the subtitle is The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time .  This book-to-appear offers a very good summary of the paradoxes of time.  The new contribution (new to me, at least) is to offer an integrated discussion of the multiverse, the law of entropy, de Sitter space, and the foundations of the so-called "arrow of time."

3. Hayek opposed deflation ; he said the same in MTaTTC too.

That's the new book by Andrew Ross Sorkin and the subtitle is The Inside Story of how Wall Street and Washington fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves .  Last night I read through to p.132.  So far it seems to be the single best narrative of the crash and its aftermath.  I haven't seen anything theoretical or on root causes, etc.  I chuckled at reading this sentence, which starts with Dick Fuld of Lehman Brothers picking up the phone:

Even since I wrote Create Your Own Economy , which was not so long ago, I've come around closer to Alex's position on on-line instruction.  Today I read :

That is from Graham Farmelow's excellent new book The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Physicist .  This isbook  one of my two must-read biographies of this year, the other being the book on Garcia Marquez .

That is from James Belich's Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo World, 1783-1939 .

I'm also enjoying A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book , which has beautiful language and creates its own world; still, I can't find the thread of the plot at p.100.  And the new Pamuk (which I'm still reading, very slowly) remains sublime and it is becoming one of my favorites.

5. Danube , by Claudio Magris.  Now this is a splendid travel book.

4. The Thirty Years' War , by Peter H. Wilson.  I read about one-third of this lengthy and clearly written Belknap Press book.  After a while I realized I was learning what the War wasn't (not the beginning of religious toleration, not the beginning of the modern nation-state, etc.), but not what the War was .  I guess I'll never know.

3. Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel .  I found this a difficult book to get a grip on.  To my eye, most of the pages were a kind of empty.  Can you explain to me what made this book good?  The first page has a sentence like: "Any sadness I might have felt, any suspicion that happiness or understanding was unattainable, seemed to find ready encouragement in the sodden dark-red brick buildings and low skies tinged orange by the city's streetlights."  That's not, to my ear, an ugly sentence, but ...

2. David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries .  The former member of Talking Heads, and compiler of Brazil Classics 1 , bicycles through ten cities and reports on them.  Most of the pages have something interesting.

2. David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries .  The former member of Talking Heads, and compiler of Brazil Classics 1 , bicycles through ten cities and reports on them.  Most of the pages have something interesting.

1. Ulysses and Us: The Art and Everyday Life in Joyce's Masterpiece , by Declan Kiberd.  He argues that Ulysses is a fun book, a popular fiction, and easy to read.  I won't give away my copy to anyone, which you can take as an endorsement.

That is from James Belich's Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo World, 1783-1939 .