Recently Mentioned Books

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...

4. The Bad Girl , Mario Vargas Llosa.  That makes two wonderful novels in one week.  I don’t enjoy all of his recent work, but this one is very fun, hearkening back to the tradition of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter .  The Edith Grossman translation is first-rate as always.

4. The Bad Girl , Mario Vargas Llosa.  That makes two wonderful novels in one week.  I don’t enjoy all of his recent work, but this one is very fun, hearkening back to the tradition of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter .  The Edith Grossman translation is first-rate as always.

3. Free Trade Reimagined , by Roberto Unger.  This is the fourth book this year to challenge the doctrine of comparative advantage, a more important fact than any argument in the books themselves.  The book is weak on empirics but it does present the sophisticated version of the anti-free trade arguments.  I don’t believe in open borders , so I suppose I’m not a free trader either.  Unger is smart, smart, smart, but that doesn’t mean he should be Minister of Long-Term Planning in Brazil, which h...

2. Theory of Clouds , by Stephane Audeguy .  I loved this novel, which was the rage in France but sadly will die here stillborn.  Think Julian Barnes, Sten Nadolny, or Kazuo Ishiguro.  Short, fun, dreamy, and conceptual. Its quality illustrates one of my favorite book-buying algorithms, which is to snap up serious foreign fiction translated into English, if only because the selection pressures are so severe.

1. Days on the Family Farm , by Carrie Meyer.  An interesting economic study of life on an early twentieth American family farm, based on personal diaries, and an antidote to anyone who thinks that all GMU economics faculty are like the bloggers you know.

That is from Richard Rhodes’s interesting Arsenals of Folly: the Making of the Nuclear Arms Race .  I’ve never seen a good quantitative study of how leadership biography matters for policy outcomes, and I expect that solid results are as hard to find as in birth order studies.  Does anyone know of a good, concrete stylized fact here?

That is from the new and sometimes intriguing Chic Ironic Bitterness , by R. Jay Magill .  The focus is on how America didn’t much change after 9-11, how the supply and demand for irony stayed pretty much the same, and how Stephen Colbert refutes or at least counters Kierkegaard’s critique of Schlegel.  ( Not everyone liked the book .)  Every now and then there is an author’s cartoon (e.g., "Immanuel Kant Bobble-Head Doll"), and on p.5 he stops and writes a stand-alone paragraph:

That is from the new and fascinating The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War .  Most of all, this book shows just how recently our modern notions of France were formed, and how late particularism persisted in the French psyche and ways of life.

That is from Patricia Beard, from Blue Blood & Mutiny: The Fight for the Soul of Morgan Stanley .

That’s the new book by Cass Sunstein , and yes it works through how choice theory should approach disasters and irreversible events.  It is the most accessible presentation of this material to date and it is recommended to anyone who follows issues of global warming, pandemics, asteroid impacts, and the like.

And it’s simple: just cook the cheeseburger in milk, what’s so hard about that?  Do note the burnt milk will ruin any good pan you use.  If you’d like to read some Doris Lessing , The Golden Notebook is compelling even though it is one of those books which old school feminists feel no man can possibly like.  Just be wary of the date who tells you it is his all-time favorite book.  I’ve never been persuaded by Lessing’s science fiction but some of you will wish to try it.

And it’s simple: just cook the cheeseburger in milk, what’s so hard about that?  Do note the burnt milk will ruin any good pan you use.  If you’d like to read some Doris Lessing , The Golden Notebook is compelling even though it is one of those books which old school feminists feel no man can possibly like.  Just be wary of the date who tells you it is his all-time favorite book.  I’ve never been persuaded by Lessing’s science fiction but some of you will wish to try it.

7. Composer : Walter Piston is the only one I can think of, try this disc .

Most of all he has rotten diction (odd for a former actor), plus he had no idea what the market-oriented crowd wanted to hear.  Sell short.  I’m still predicting Giuliani ; Hillary will do worse once the attack dogs gear up.  The fascinating but overlong Into the Wild is about, among other things, the weaknesses of family ties in the United States, and how people seek artificial family in response.  In a free society people must, to some extent, put principles of justice and political order abov...

Most of all he has rotten diction (odd for a former actor), plus he had no idea what the market-oriented crowd wanted to hear.  Sell short.  I’m still predicting Giuliani ; Hillary will do worse once the attack dogs gear up.  The fascinating but overlong Into the Wild is about, among other things, the weaknesses of family ties in the United States, and how people seek artificial family in response.  In a free society people must, to some extent, put principles of justice and political order abov...

Speaking of John, here is a Reason dialogue with John , covering his new book and also his description of GMU lunches.