Recently Mentioned Books

Many of the criticisms of Liszt stick, but you can't judge these pieces by the standards of a Bach fugue.  If there's anything in classical music that comes close to the ecstasy of The Clash, or the beauty of Brian Eno, it is these works.  The Etudes are also nearly impossible to play and as monomaniacal works they try to contain everything pianistic.  A new version of the Etudes has appeared, by Miroslav Kultyshev .  It starts slow but by Mazeppa (YouTube here ) the listener takes notice.  Ther...

Many of the criticisms of Liszt stick, but you can't judge these pieces by the standards of a Bach fugue.  If there's anything in classical music that comes close to the ecstasy of The Clash, or the beauty of Brian Eno, it is these works.  The Etudes are also nearly impossible to play and as monomaniacal works they try to contain everything pianistic.  A new version of the Etudes has appeared, by Miroslav Kultyshev .  It starts slow but by Mazeppa (YouTube here ) the listener takes notice.  Ther...

Many of the criticisms of Liszt stick, but you can't judge these pieces by the standards of a Bach fugue.  If there's anything in classical music that comes close to the ecstasy of The Clash, or the beauty of Brian Eno, it is these works.  The Etudes are also nearly impossible to play and as monomaniacal works they try to contain everything pianistic.  A new version of the Etudes has appeared, by Miroslav Kultyshev .  It starts slow but by Mazeppa (YouTube here ) the listener takes notice.  Ther...

Many of the criticisms of Liszt stick, but you can't judge these pieces by the standards of a Bach fugue.  If there's anything in classical music that comes close to the ecstasy of The Clash, or the beauty of Brian Eno, it is these works.  The Etudes are also nearly impossible to play and as monomaniacal works they try to contain everything pianistic.  A new version of the Etudes has appeared, by Miroslav Kultyshev .  It starts slow but by Mazeppa (YouTube here ) the listener takes notice.  Ther...

Many of the criticisms of Liszt stick, but you can't judge these pieces by the standards of a Bach fugue.  If there's anything in classical music that comes close to the ecstasy of The Clash, or the beauty of Brian Eno, it is these works.  The Etudes are also nearly impossible to play and as monomaniacal works they try to contain everything pianistic.  A new version of the Etudes has appeared, by Miroslav Kultyshev .  It starts slow but by Mazeppa (YouTube here ) the listener takes notice.  Ther...

The subtitle is The Search for Alpha When Risk and Return Break Down .  I definitely liked this book.  It's the best readable summary I know of why CAPM fails (see my comments here ).  Market data do not, upon examination, show a close connection between risk and return, at least not once you start moving out on the risk spectrum beyond T-Bills and the like.  It's not just the famous Fama and French papers, it is worse than you think.  I also like the author's "relative status" theory for why ma...

That is all from T.R. Reid's The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care .  I thought this book was very readable, very interesting, and has very good information about different health care systems around the world.  The author is extremely critical of the U.S. system; the premise of his book is that he takes his shoulder injury to doctors in many different countries.  Since not much can be done for the shoulder, the expensive and complicated U.S. system d...

The link is here and I thank Michelle Dawson for the pointer, which is in turn via this link on weird books .  There you will also find a discussion of Dale Power's controversial Do-it-Yourself Coffins for Pets and People (check out the Amazon reader reviews) and other notable titles.

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 .