Recently Mentioned Books

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.

4. Venus in Furs , by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.  If you are drawing inferences, keep in mind this means I had not read this book to date.  It is a source for Roissy and also has some early anticipations of behavioral economics.  Sporadically interesting, I would say.

3. Lanark , by Alasdair Gray,  This book is as good as I remember it; I was surprised to see it has only four reviews on U.S. Amazon .  Many critics consider it the best and most creative Scottish novel of the twentieth century and of course it has tinges of science fiction and fantasy.

3. Lanark , by Alasdair Gray,  This book is as good as I remember it; I was surprised to see it has only four reviews on U.S. Amazon .  Many critics consider it the best and most creative Scottish novel of the twentieth century and of course it has tinges of science fiction and fantasy.

2. The Yacoubian Building , by Alaa Al Aswany.  Fun, philosophical, erotic, and a bestseller in the Arab world.  Many Americans don't know this book but it is worth picking up.

1. From London to Elista: The Inside Story of the Three Matches that Vladimir Kramnik Played for the World Chess Title , by Eugeny Bareev and Ilya Levitov.  Via John Nye, the quality and drama of this book stunned me.  Chess aside, the use of the dialogic form works remarkably well.

8. Medieval theologian and memory expert : Ramon Llull .  I am a big fan of Llull, a cosmopolitan polymath and early advocate of animal welfare.  I wrote a part of my next book about him, although I ended up cutting it out of the final draft because it didn't quite fit.

3. Novelist : Albert Sanchez Piñol's Cold Skin is a favorite of min e.  Quim Monzó is a fun writer , as is Carlos Ruis Zafón.

1. The new Bruce Bartlett book .

I was very taken by this movie , which is much more insightful than the recent The End of Poverty? .  The film is an attempt to pay homage to Evo Morales and his supporters but it actually shows a far bleaker and more Caplanian picture of life on the ground.  It's one of the best movies on poverty, albeit unintentionally in whole or in part.  The two most unforgettable scenes are when the Morales supporters cannot get the calculator to give them an arithmetical answer ("we need a better calculat...

Check out the accompanying sketch, from a short essay by Robert C. Allen , drawn from his new book The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective .  The bottom line seems to be this:

That is from David Kessler's The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite .  This is a good book even if you've already read seven prior books on exactly the same topic.  It's the best applied study in behavioral economics to date.  I do object, however, to how the author aggregates fat, salt, and sugar, as if they were equally bad for you.

5. Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music , by David N. Meyer.  A serious and excellent book, noting that every now and then the reader is hit by a strange sentence like: "Of course the temptation to get all bourgeois on Gram's a** is irresistible."  Meyer underrates the album Burrito Deluxe , however.

5. Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music , by David N. Meyer.  A serious and excellent book, noting that every now and then the reader is hit by a strange sentence like: "Of course the temptation to get all bourgeois on Gram's a** is irresistible."  Meyer underrates the album Burrito Deluxe , however.

4. Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day , by Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford, and Orlanda Ruthven.  A good overview of how the world's poor intersect with financial institutions at the micro level.

3. John Reader, The Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent .  Not as good as his excellent book on  Africa , but I liked the sections on potatoes in the Incan empire.  This book could have been great, it isn't, but it is still above average.

3. John Reader, The Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent .  Not as good as his excellent book on  Africa , but I liked the sections on potatoes in the Incan empire.  This book could have been great, it isn't, but it is still above average.

2. Richard Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence .  Dull for some, definitive for others.  If the thesis about commerce sounds a little late to the party, it is only because of Goldthwaite's own previous work.