Recently Mentioned Books

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.

1. Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count , by Richard E. Nisbett.  A good compendium of the arguments for environmentalism in the IQ debates.  But this book has all the same flaws as The 10,000 Year Explosion — albeit from the other side of the issue — and egads are those people in the comments section touchy.  This book, by the way, offers the state of the art rebuttals to genetic explanations of Ashkenazi achievement, if you are looking to advance your understanding of...

I'm not sure if the book is interesting, have any of you read it?  But I remembered these sentences from a review:

The subtitle is How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution and the authors are Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending.  I do think that such topics should receive open debate but, as with Greg Clark's book, I'm not convinced.  There is plenty on dog breeding, lactose intolerance, Genghis Khan and his children, the difficulties of settling the Andean Highlands, and just-so stories about medieval Ashkenazi Jews.  What's missing is a sense of what the hypothesis does not explain, what its limitatio...

Here is much more .  I thank Bob, a loyal MR reader, for the pointer.  And don't forget about the new Sally Satel book on organ sales and why they are a good idea.

3. Feuchtgebiete , coming soon to a British country near you ; U.S. Amazon link here , note that the text of the first link is not for a "family blog" like MR .

My problem with movies is simple.  I can read faster than some people, but I can't watch a movie faster than anyone.  So the relative price of movie-watching for me is high (the marginal utility of books does not for me decline rapidly) and often I need the big screen to hold my interest.  Nonetheless I read Essential Cinema and the new David Thomson book — both superb — and decided I wanted to see a chunk of movies.  I've already blogged Satantango and Ruiz's Time Regained was a surprisingly go...

My problem with movies is simple.  I can read faster than some people, but I can't watch a movie faster than anyone.  So the relative price of movie-watching for me is high (the marginal utility of books does not for me decline rapidly) and often I need the big screen to hold my interest.  Nonetheless I read Essential Cinema and the new David Thomson book — both superb — and decided I wanted to see a chunk of movies.  I've already blogged Satantango and Ruiz's Time Regained was a surprisingly go...

The subtitle is Tales from the Dark Side of Japan and the author is Alex Kerr.  It is recommended reading for those who would have Obama expand his stimulus plan to include more construction.  Here are some strung-together excerpts:

Here is the book's home page with some sample free material.  Here is a list of contents .  Here is one summary of the book's contents .  The editors, Kenneth A. Reinert and Ramkishen S. Rahan, are from GMU School of Public Policy although note that is not the same as the economics department.  You can buy it here .

That is from the often quite interesting Our Southern Highlanders: A Narrative of Adventure in the Southern Appalachians and a Study of Life Among the Mountaineers , by Horace Kephart, recommended to me by a loyal MR reader.

A recent MR request asked me which book I wished I had written and now I have a recent answer: Laura Miller's The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia .  And I'm not even a big Narnia fan ( this review aside ).  Most of all this is a book about what it means to love another book and how deep such a love can run.  It also covers the gap between children and adults, how storytelling works, what theology means in art, not to mention it gives an excellent portrait of Tolkien.  Every par...

4. Somewhere Towards the End , by Diana Athill.  A scary and effective memoir about how Athill, a famous editor, dealt with aging and the end of her sex life.

3. The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory , by Torkel Klingberg.  When push comes to shove, the author fails to establish his major thesis.  Still, this book is way above average for how seriously it treats the actual science behind its argument.  I learned a great deal from it.

2. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective . This achieved (justified) rave reviews in the UK but it has hardly made a dent in the U.S. market.  It is non-fiction but written in a hybrid form and often feels more like a novel.

1. The Aztec World , by Elizabeth Brumfiel and Gary Feinman.  Long-time MR readers will know Aztec history is a special interest of mine.  This book, a companion volume to the Aztec exhibit from Chicago’s Field Museum, is perhaps the best introduction to the Aztecs to date.

By the way, on DRM and related issues, I recommend the new James Boyle book Public Domain .  The book is free and on-line here .  You can buy it from Amazon here .

Also known as Stairway to Heaven , directed by Michael Powell.  It’s one of the best movies, period, and it is finally on DVD , appearing today.  I’ve been waiting for years and I just ordered mine; I’ll also be teaching it in Law and Literature this spring .  It’s a law trial, a primer on Anglo-American relations, a love story, and a meditation on hope and death.  Here is a review .