Recently Mentioned Books

The author is William D. Cohan and the subtitle is A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street .  It's the story of the recent history of Bear Stearns.  Here is an NYT review .  Here is a Business Week review .  Here is an L.A. Times review ; note that all reviews are very positive.

5. Bonsai , Alejandro Zambra, 83 pp., the next literary rage to come from Chile since Roberto Bolaño.

3. Richard A. Posner, A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression .

2. Imagining India, The Idea of a Renewed Nation , by Nandan Nilekani.  An excellent study of the microeconomics of entrepreneurship in India; I thank Carl Schramm for the pointer.

1. The Enormity of the Tragedy , by Quim Monzó.  Originally written in Catalan, this short novel is popular throughout Europe for its priapic good humor.

That is from Harold G. Vatter's The U.S. Economy in World War II , one of the better treatments of that era.

The original tip is from 1001 Foods You Must Taste Before You Die , an excellent book for reading or browsing.

That is from Donald Markwell's generally quite interesting John Maynard Keynes and International Relations: Economic Paths to War and Peace .  And you will find the essay here .  Keynes, of course, did snap out of that phase.  One thing I learned from this book is that international relations is the key topic for tracing the evolution of Keynes's thought over his entire career.

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.