Recently Mentioned Books

Ignore them.  I've seen an amazing run of movies lately, including I am Cuba , Waltz with Bashir , The Class (worth twenty papers on the economics of education or more), Coraline (in 3-D is a must), and Silent Light , the latter being about Mennonites in Mexico.  Not to mention Gran Torino .  Elsewhere, Jason Kottke appreciates 1999 for film .

The old rating system granted up to five stars but now the maximum number of stars is ten.  This signals that they wish to start exaggerating the quality of the product.  When there are only five stars you know that they are laying their reputation on the line when they grant five stars to a new CD.  (Michelin of course won't give a restaurant more than three stars.  They don't calculate out to the fourth decimal place along a scale of one thousand.)  If the music isn't good you can decide to st...

4. Joel Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and Times of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds .  Fills in many of the pieces about his life and work; it seems he lived part of his life as a practicing Muslim.

3. David Post, In Search of Jefferson's Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace .  This book is written in the style of Jefferson in at least one way.  I mean that as praise.

2. William Flesch, Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and other Biological Components of Fiction .  An excellent book on why we find fiction and narrative so satisfying; the notion of vindication is central to the hypothesis.  Recommended.

1. Laurence M. Ball, Money, Banking, and Financial Markets .  A truly modern money and banking text; could this be the best money and banking text ever?  I don't yet see an Amazon link for it but presumably it will be out soon.  (Addendum: Link is now here .)

In his view that also explains why it was a "jobless recovery" in the 1938-1940 period, namely that the demand for labor did not need to rise so much.  It also has been argued that the technological innovations of the Great Depression were labor-saving ones and that 1930s unemployment cannot be understood apart from this fact.

That's the subtitle, the title is Cruel Games: A Brilliant Professor, a Loving Mother, a Brutal Killing , and yes it is the "true crime" account of the well-known game theorist who murdered his wife.  Here is a review of the book .  Here is an excerpt:

1. Actress : Jennifer Lopez.  Seriously. Out of Sight is quite good and the badly misunderstood The Cell makes perfect sense once you realize it is a retelling of parts of Sikh theology.  Rita Moreno gets honorable mention.

Stanovich has a new book summarizing some of the results, namely What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought .  It is more idiosyncratic than the articles (he overcommits to one very particular model of the mind; cognitive laziness, without regard for margin) but recommended nonetheless.  For those who care about these issues, a must.

1. Tim Harford's The Logic of Life , out in paperback Tuesday.  Our MR book forum on it was here .

I don't know why this book , by Joseph C, Davis, isn't cited more often, as it's one of the best on this period.  Here is one small bit:

The author is Kristin Luker and the subtitle is Research in an Age of Info-Glut .  I enjoyed this book very much and I thought it was one of the best books on the philosophy of the social sciences I have read, ever.  In part it is good because it ignores philosophy of science (and Continental philosophy gobbledy-gook) and focuses on the anthropology of how research is actually done.  Here is the author's summary of her message

There's also another good book on Samuel Johnson , which is what I have been reading, in addition to the new translation of The Canterbury Tales .

There's also another good book on Samuel Johnson , which is what I have been reading, in addition to the new translation of The Canterbury Tales .

3. Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution .

2. Frank H. Buckley, Fair Governance: Paternalism and Perfectionism ; a critique of "Nudge" and soft paternalism.

1. Peter Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates .

The subtitle is Congo, The Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe and yes the book truly explains all of these things or at least gives it a noble try.  The author is Gérard Prunier .  I've been stunned by how much I've learned from this book, which is clear without denying the underlying complexities.  I rate it as one of the two excellent books of the year so far, the other being Ted Gioia's book on the history of the blues .

The subtitle is Congo, The Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe and yes the book truly explains all of these things or at least gives it a noble try.  The author is Gérard Prunier .  I've been stunned by how much I've learned from this book, which is clear without denying the underlying complexities.  I rate it as one of the two excellent books of the year so far, the other being Ted Gioia's book on the history of the blues .

I read this in Temple Grandin's new (and often quite interesting) Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals :

5. Ted Gioia, Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music .  So far this is the book of the year for me.  There are many fine books in this area but this one rises to the top of the heap.  It's both the best introduction to its topic and the best book if you've read all the others and feel that nothing more can be said; a major achievement.

4. Bioethics and the Brain , by Walter Glannon.  I wished for more of the author in this book but still I found it a useful compendium on what people are arguing about in the field these days.

3. Yesterday's Weather , by Anne Enright.  I'm not usually a consumer of short stories (Alice Munro is one exception) but the best ones in this (high variance) volume are very very good.

2. Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating , by Mark Bittman.  The best book on "food sanity" to date.