Recently Mentioned Books

6. Speaking of Bookslut, Jessica Crispin’s favorite fiction book of the year was the Hungarian Metropole , by Ferenc Karinthy.  I read it some time ago and inexplicably forgot to mention it.  The feel is Kafkaesque and the premise is that a man wakes up in a world where suddenly he cannot understand any of the languages being spoken and has no way of communicating with anybody.

5. Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter .  Translated from the Italian, this short novel is one of my favorite fictional works of the year; it is a favorite of Bookslut (and others ) as well.

4. Heraldo Muñoz, The Dictator’s Shadow: Life Under Augusto Pinochet .  This book fills in a lot of back detail about the Pinochet years.  It is not perfect, but it is far more objective and useful than I had been expecting, especially given that the author was persecuted by Pinochet.

3. Michael Bérubé, Life as We Know It: A Father, A Family, and an Exceptional Child .  About the author’s Down syndrome child; this is a very good book and it is also conceptual, not your usual concrete-bound memoir.

2. Alexander Dolgin, The Economics of Symbolic Exchange .  A long, sprawling, and often creative and interesting overview of cultural economics, especially as it relates to issues of symbolic goods.

1. Stephen Schwartz, The Other Islam: Sufism and the Road to Global Harmony .  Islamic theology is a reading interest of mine and I don’t mean the stuff that the terrorists promote.  This book is not a comprehensive introduction to Sufism but it is interesting throughout and most of all excellent on the sadly neglected topic of Albanian Bektashi theology .

I will go through the book, chapter by chapter, with an eye toward a deeper understanding of what Keynes wrote and why it is, as Greg says, so important.  I’m not yet sure what kind of pace I can maintain but order your copy here, now . The Kindle version is only $3.96.  We’ll do chapters 1 and 2 by next Monday, eight days from now.

I will go through the book, chapter by chapter, with an eye toward a deeper understanding of what Keynes wrote and why it is, as Greg says, so important.  I’m not yet sure what kind of pace I can maintain but order your copy here, now . The Kindle version is only $3.96.  We’ll do chapters 1 and 2 by next Monday, eight days from now.

I plead fully guilty to not having been a Cassandra.  Oddly, I published an entire book in the late 1990s — Risk and Business Cycles (cheaper on Kindle )  — on how excess risk and correlated errors could cause an economy to explode; I’ll tell you more about that soon.   But if anything when it came to running commentary (on this blog, most of all) I was an anti-Cassandra.  First, I was too influenced by the relatively mild housing bubble collapse of the late 1980s.  Second, I did not understand ...

I plead fully guilty to not having been a Cassandra.  Oddly, I published an entire book in the late 1990s — Risk and Business Cycles (cheaper on Kindle )  — on how excess risk and correlated errors could cause an economy to explode; I’ll tell you more about that soon.   But if anything when it came to running commentary (on this blog, most of all) I was an anti-Cassandra.  First, I was too influenced by the relatively mild housing bubble collapse of the late 1980s.  Second, I did not understand ...

You can buy it here .  And if you agree with Dani Rodrik more than you agree with me, you may like the book more yet.

The subtitle is The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies and that is the new book by Bert H ö lldobler and Edmund O. Wilson.

3. Condy Raguet in print ; order it here .

It’s still a good book and a fun book.  You can order it here .

Nowhere in the book does the name Dean Keith Simonton (check out the headings to these links ) appear nor does the phrase " multiplicative model of human success ."  A lot of the content here has already been done with more rigor and empirical support and also in readable form I might add.  Everyone should read Simonton , noting that his hypotheses fare better in the arts than in politics .

Nowhere in the book does the name Dean Keith Simonton (check out the headings to these links ) appear nor does the phrase " multiplicative model of human success ."  A lot of the content here has already been done with more rigor and empirical support and also in readable form I might add.  Everyone should read Simonton , noting that his hypotheses fare better in the arts than in politics .

Nowhere in the book does the name Dean Keith Simonton (check out the headings to these links ) appear nor does the phrase " multiplicative model of human success ."  A lot of the content here has already been done with more rigor and empirical support and also in readable form I might add.  Everyone should read Simonton , noting that his hypotheses fare better in the arts than in politics .

The book is getting snarky reviews but if it were by an unknown, rather than by the famous Malcolm Gladwell, many people would be saying how interesting it is.  The main point, in economic language, is that human talent is heterogeneous and that the talent of a particular person must mesh with the capital structure of his or her time if major success is to result.  The book is best read as a supplement to Ludwig Lachmann’s Capital and its Structure .  The main enduring insight of both Lachmann a...

During the year I saw many favorable reviews for Alexsandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project (I liked it) and Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (I haven’t read it yet), though neither seems to be popping up on so many "best of" lists.  Perhaps Robin Hanson would view such lists as signaling rather than a honest statement of preferences.

During the year I saw many favorable reviews for Alexsandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project (I liked it) and Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (I haven’t read it yet), though neither seems to be popping up on so many "best of" lists.  Perhaps Robin Hanson would view such lists as signaling rather than a honest statement of preferences.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle: A Novel , By David Wroblewski.  I liked the 150 or so pages I read but just didn’t have the time or the love to finish it.  It reminds me of Stephen King’s better work.

Julian Barnes, Nothing to be Frightened Of .  I like some of Barnes’s work, most of all Flaubert’s Parrot , but I am embarrassed that such a shallow book would receive any favorable notice at all.

Roberto Bola ñ o, 2666 .  Duh.  After four hundred pages of reading, I see it as less perfect than The Savage Detectives but it has greater world-historic reach and even some sprawl.  A clear first choice in almost any year.

Burton Folsom, New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR’s Legacy has Damaged America ; this book has a good compendium of free market critiques of Roosevelt, although I would not look here for a balanced review of the evidence. Senselessness , by Horacio Castellanos Moya; this is now my favorite novel from either Honduras or El Salvador, depending how you classify the nationality of the author.  Alex Beam, A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books .  A fun inside h...

Burton Folsom, New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR’s Legacy has Damaged America ; this book has a good compendium of free market critiques of Roosevelt, although I would not look here for a balanced review of the evidence. Senselessness , by Horacio Castellanos Moya; this is now my favorite novel from either Honduras or El Salvador, depending how you classify the nationality of the author.  Alex Beam, A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books .  A fun inside h...