Recently Mentioned Books

The authors are Frances Widdowson and Albert Howard and the subtitle is The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation .  Here is one good two-sentence excerpt:

6. Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz, From Poverty to Prosperity .  I've only been reading the Amazon blurb for it — the book isn't out yet — and here is Arnold on the book .

4. Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us , by Alyssa Katz.  There is lots of good material about our social and policy infatuation with housing, but she commits a mistake that I have been "waiting for" — she blames part of the housing bubble on the decline of rent control

3. Les Miserables , by Victor Hugo.  This new translation by Julie Rose is more or less definitive.  But it is heavy.  If any book ought to be on Kindle…

2. Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care .  I felt I should try one by her to stay in touch.  It was better than I had expected though not really smarter than I had expected.  Here is an NYT article about her .

1. Addiction: A Disorder of Choice , by Gene Heyman.  This book overstates its claims, but if you wish to see a non-economist defending a (broadly) Beckerian model of addiction, here you go.  I couldn't put it down!

A sarod player, he was one of my favorite musicians.  Here is one obituary , noting his father made him practice for 18 hours a day.  Here is another obituary ; he once wrote: "If you practice for ten years, you may begin to please yourself, after 20 years you may become a performer and please the audience, after 30 years you may please even your guru, but you must practice for many more years before you finally become a true artist — then you may please even God."  Here is evidence that Khan un...

This is definitely a book you should buy .  And unlike Discover Your Inner Economist , no more than a page or two of its content has been presented on MarginalRevolution.

You can buy Bob's book, The Evolution of God , here .

4. The first chapter from Peter Leeson's The Invisible Hook ; buy the book here .

4. The Persian Night , by Amir Taheri, an excellent new book for background on current events.

4. Secret Ballot : an excellent satirical movie on whether Iranian democracy is savior or farce.

6. The value of face-to-face classroom time (discussed in Create Your Own Economy , by the way) will prove robust.  But the very best teachers of the future will take on an increasing role as editors, collage creators, and DJs.  A brilliant scientist who doesn't understand YouTube will be crippled as a teacher.  Adjuncts may lead the wave of innovation here.

Some parts of this talk were from my forthcoming book Create Your Own Economy , due out July 9.  Order it here . Eric's Twitter feed is here .

Elsewhere on the new book front, there is Keith Stanovich's What Intelligence Tests Miss (I hope to review it) and Robert Wright's The Evolution of God ; there is some chance I will be doing a BloggingHeads with Wright on this book.

Elsewhere on the new book front, there is Keith Stanovich's What Intelligence Tests Miss (I hope to review it) and Robert Wright's The Evolution of God ; there is some chance I will be doing a BloggingHeads with Wright on this book.

The subtitle is Washington DC Area Restaurant Guide and the author is Robin Goldstein .  I am a Contributing Editor and yes he did listen to my most valuable pieces of advice.  Described as "brutally honest," this is much, much better than Zagat's and the like.  It is the best book of its kind.

That's from Matthew B. Crawford , who has a Ph.d. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago yet now runs a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond .  I would cite shooting baskets, walking, and cooking as three of my analogous "intellectual" activities.

That is from Jonathan Curiel's often interesting Al' America: Travels Through America's Arab and Islamic Roots .  The book also has an intriguing discussion of Islamic influences on the architecture of the World Trade Center.

In fact I liked the book — How Cooking Made Us Human , by Richard Wrangham — very much.  Here is a good review of the book .  The one sentence version is:

That's the new and interesting Hugh Thomas book about the leading Spanish businessman of the 20th century, Eduardo Barreiros .  Barreiros entered into car manufacturing , but with the Cuban government as his business partner:

It's called Discovery — A Memoir and I enjoyed it very much.  If you, like me, wish that more books were just a bit wilder, weirder (I mean that in the good sense), and real, you will like this one.  Here's one brief bit:

I also think that IQ will be shown to be more multi-dimensional than we now think .  If you wish to understand the role of IQ in human affairs, you would do better to study autism and ADHD than race (by the way, I discuss the importance of neurodiversity in much greater detail in my forthcoming book Create Your Own Economy .)

That's the new Grant McCracken book and do check out the subtitle at this link.  It is very exciting, very worthwhile.  I need to send Tim Sullivan a blurb and I can't find his current email.  How about this?

5. Time Out Barcelona . The Time Out series is the most useful resource for urban travel, including for food.  No other guide book comes close.