Recently Mentioned Books

That is from the new Margaret Drabble book , which indeed is about her obsession with jigsaw puzzles.  While I do not myself have an interest in jigsaw puzzles, or crosswords, I am nonetheless finding the book very interesting.  It will baffle many of her traditional fans but that's probably for the better.

That's from Hume's Of The Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences . I discuss related points in my What Price Fame? The proximate pointer is from Dan Klein.

I am told this will preserve true love forever.  Here is a related article .  Here is a related book , which I have yet to read.  Here is the main Google blast on the topic .

5. Das Museum der Unschuld , by Orhan Pamuk.  That's The Museum of Innocence in English, out in late October, but I found the German-language version in Stockholm.  It's in his "Istanbul nostalgic" mode rather than his "I'm trying to be like Italo Calvino" style and it promises to be one of his very best books.

5. Das Museum der Unschuld , by Orhan Pamuk.  That's The Museum of Innocence in English, out in late October, but I found the German-language version in Stockholm.  It's in his "Istanbul nostalgic" mode rather than his "I'm trying to be like Italo Calvino" style and it promises to be one of his very best books.

4. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster , by Rebecca Solnit.  For many people this may be a good book but I could not read far into it.  The main thesis is quite interesting, namely that people forms immediate islands of community and cooperation during very trying times.  The examples include the San Francisco and Mexico City earthquakes, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina.  But I found the ratio of information to page was too low for my admittedly extreme tas...

2. Await Your Reply , by Dan Chaon.  This tripartite mystery about reinventing yourself has received rave reviews and Amazon readers are strongly positive.  I read about one hundred pages and thought it was ably done but of no real substance.

1. The Idea of Justice , by Amartya Sen.  This book is 415 pages of intelligent Sen-isms.  Key themes are the importance of public reasoning, the plurality of reasons, and the possibility of an impartial approach to major ethical questions.  We also learn that in 1938 Wittgenstein was determined to go to Vienna and give Hitler a stern lecture; he had to be talked out of it.  At the end of it all I was more rather than less confused about what impartiality means.  I don't blame that on Sen, but t...

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?