Recently Mentioned Books

2. Popular Music : The View, Hats off to the Buskers , from Scotland, this is musically superior pop and they still have room to get even better.

1. Fiction : Stephane Audeguy, Theory of Clouds .  The conceptual foreign novel which got lost in the shuffle of the American fiction market.

That is from Albert Sanchez Piñol’s Cold Skin , a Catalan novel which is well known in Europe (I discovered it browsing a Swiss bookstore) but obscure in the United States.  It captivated me right away.  I cannot quite call it science fiction, but I would recommend it to science fiction and horror fans who are looking for something serious and conceptual and literary, and who feel that only scraps remain on the table…

5. The Feast of the Goat , by Mario Vargas Llosa.  One of the best studies of the psychology of political power and the connection between tyranny and the erotic.  A fun albeit sometimes harrowing read.  Another superb translation by Edith Grossman, might she be the best translator ever?

4. Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb , by Richard Rhodes.  This favorite book of Jason Kottke is first-rate non-fiction, it is also one of the best books on the Cold War.

3. How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves, from the Board to the Boardroom , by Garry Kasparov.  This is a fun book, except that life mostly doesn’t imitate chess.  Chess is characteristic for its lack of self-deception; it is hard to avoid knowing where you stand in the hierarchy and excuses are few and far between.  That’s why most chess players are depressed.  Kasparov seems to save his self-deception for politics; let’s hope he is still alive a year from now.

2. The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West , by Mark Lilla.  Why Schleiermacher really matters, how Kant painted himself into a corner trying to solve the problems laid out by Rousseau, and why it all springs from Hobbes.  I found this well above average for its genre, though you must have a taste for Straussian-like books where big ideas clash at the macro level and there is little attempt at any kind of empirical resolution.

1. Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination from the Great German Poet , by John Armstrong.  The author does not demonstrate overwhelming expertise but this is nonetheless not a bad place to start on the most neglected of all the great writers.

Here is the link and story .  Along related lines, I found Sarah Maxwell’s The Price is Wrong:  Understanding What Makes a Price Seem Fair and the True Cost of Unfair Pricing to be a stimulating collection of anecdotes on this issue.  Here is my previous post on the iPhone and price resentment .

Here is the full post , which also covers Tim Harford’s forthcoming The Logic of Life , which you’ll hear more about in due time (it carries a blurb and recommendation from yours truly).

That is from Randall Collins, Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory .  Here is my previous post on the book .  By the way, if you find questions like this interesting, it is yet another reason to watch the TV show Friday Night Lights .

That is from Randall Collins, Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory .  Here is my previous post on the book .  By the way, if you find questions like this interesting, it is yet another reason to watch the TV show Friday Night Lights .

That’s from Robert Reich’s Supercapitalism .  I’m coming late to this party, but mostly I liked the book.  It’s full of fresh thinking and most of all it is excellent on just how much invisible hand mechanisms shape an economy.  It has the best explanation (and partial defense) of high CEO pay I’ve seen, namely supply and demand.  If you think it is exploitation of shareholders, take a look at how much private equity pays its CEOs.  And as the above quotation indicates, Reich is willing to rethi...

That’s the new book from Randall Collins . The main argument is that people are not as predisposed to violence as we might think. Collins cites a wide array of evidence, from military behavior in the field to, most intriguingly, video studies of the micro-expressions of violent perpetrators.  People are more naturally tense and fearful, sometimes full of bluster but usually looking to avoid confrontation unless they have vastly superior numbers on their side.  The prospect of violence makes peop...

11. Favorite Leo Kottke album : Six and Twelve String Guitar ; this one changed my life.

You can buy Chris’s book here .  I view the key analytical point as focusing on the power of on-the-ground expectations to make the reconstruction "game" either a cooperative or combative one.  This is a difficult variable to control, but Chris offers a very good look at the best and worst attempts that the United States has made to manipulate these variables and thus export democracy.  If you want to know why the Solow model doesn’t seem to hold for Bosnia, or a deeper more analytic sense of wh...

Nada, her book , is even better , a true case of a rediscovered classic, now out in a first-rate English translation.

This new Cato book is a good introduction to the empirical literature on vouchers and charter schools.  For my taste it places too much weight on standardized tests, but admittedly that is the main way to compare educational results over time or across countries.  I believe the lax nature of government schooling in the U.S. often leaves the upper tail of the distribution free to dream and create, but I would not wish to push that as an argument against vouchers.  If you’re interested in bad argu...

What a wonderful title. This new sensation , by French intellectual superstar Pierre Bayard, tells how to liberate our reading habits from the oppression of our most formidable peers (we carry around books to look cool) and more importantly from our own ever-more-demanding selves, which pursue the perfect reading experience but for largely misconceived and self-destructive Freudian reasons; rather than improving our reading, we should instead perfect a new kind of "anti-reading," and as part of ...

4. Michael Dirda, Classics for Pleasure .  As with popular science books, I am long since jaded with the genre of "let’s read my short essays about the classics so you don’t have to go bother reading those long, nasty books yourself."  But this one delivers a true odyssey of discovery; I dog-eared a dozen or so pages to follow up on the recommendations.  Will tracking down John Aubrey’s Brief Lives pay off?  Who knows, but don’t we live on hope as it is?

3. Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America , by Jonathan Gould.  I loved this book, and yes I was already sick of books about the Beatles.  Not only is the musical analysis first-rate (it pinpoints what is wrong with the arrangement of "Got to Get You Into My Life"), but it is close to an economic history of the Beatles.  Of course they started Apple, their record label, to shift labor income into capital gains, yet they were not up to running a music company.  Who needs the Laffer ...

2. God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World , by Walter Russell Mead.  Yes there is a uniquely Anglo-American way of looking at the world, here’s how it came about, and also why the rest of the world resents it.  And why Tony Blair fought the Iraq War.  Consistently interesting and readable, recommended.  In passing it is also one of the best books for understanding the rise of the West.

1. David Linden, The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God .  My standards for popular science books have tightened in the last ten years but this still exceeds them.  A good rule of thumb is to read anything that comes from Belknap Press at Harvard, unless of course it is Michael Sandel’s question-begging critique of transhumanism and genetic engineering .

1. David Linden, The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God .  My standards for popular science books have tightened in the last ten years but this still exceeds them.  A good rule of thumb is to read anything that comes from Belknap Press at Harvard, unless of course it is Michael Sandel’s question-begging critique of transhumanism and genetic engineering .

5. The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century , by Alex Ross.  Ross won’t quite say it, but he tries to convince the reader that the twentieth century is the best century for music, ever. That’s without pushing serialism too hard or resorting much to popular music.  Sibelius, Janacek, Messiaen, and John Adams are among the heroes in this story.  If you are only going to buy (and read) ten books on music, ever, this should be one of them.  Here is one good review .  Here is a Jason Kot...