Recently Mentioned Books

That is from Therese Delpech’s fascinating Savage Century: Back to Barbarism .  This book made a splash in France but has been virtually ignored in the U.S.  There haven’t been many reviews but here are some endorsements .

The Conscience of a Liberal is um…not that polemic.  It’s not that shrill.  There is an argument , to be sure, but the book has much more economic history than I had expected, and much more political history.

Here is the link .  Over the last week I went back and listened to their major works again; I’m not that impressed.  Try Christopher O’Riley’s album of piano arrangements , and you will see just how thin and unmemorable their compositions are.  Admittedly not all great music would transfer well to the piano, but the Radiohead "sound" isn’t that original either, at least not compared to the frontiers of electronica or for that matter punk.  This morning I put on Boris’s Pink ; it is hardly my fav...

Here is the link .  Over the last week I went back and listened to their major works again; I’m not that impressed.  Try Christopher O’Riley’s album of piano arrangements , and you will see just how thin and unmemorable their compositions are.  Admittedly not all great music would transfer well to the piano, but the Radiohead "sound" isn’t that original either, at least not compared to the frontiers of electronica or for that matter punk.  This morning I put on Boris’s Pink ; it is hardly my fav...

Here is the link .  Over the last week I went back and listened to their major works again; I’m not that impressed.  Try Christopher O’Riley’s album of piano arrangements , and you will see just how thin and unmemorable their compositions are.  Admittedly not all great music would transfer well to the piano, but the Radiohead "sound" isn’t that original either, at least not compared to the frontiers of electronica or for that matter punk.  This morning I put on Boris’s Pink ; it is hardly my fav...

If you agree with the sentiments expressed in this post, you should read David Harsanyi’s new and forceful Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and Other Boneheaded Bureaucrats are Turning American into a Nation of Children .

Battle Royale : Why do so few people know this 2000 Japanese cult classic?  The underlying political theme is that totalitarianism can end only in a war of all against all.  This classic of resistance and liberation shows how tyrannous circumstances degrade mankind.

What we will see is lots of lesser bands (and authors) giving their work away for free, but that trend has been underway for some time .  And by the way, Radiohead’s best album is Kid A .

Including Stephen Dubner’s new The Boy With Two Belly Buttons , which I just ordered.

Admittedly copyright issues are being superimposed on this scenario at the same time, so the net assessment of current music trends is complex.  But when there is uncertainty about consumer tastes, falling output can be a strong Pareto improvement.  (It’s just like how having lots of dates is not necessarily the sign of a happy love life.)  Less music is being produced, but we’re getting more of the stuff we want .

When blogging I try to keep book rehash to a minimum.  But tonight I cannot resist making a point from Good and Plenty :

As long as we are on the topic of very good books, there is a new and very nice hardcover edition of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations .

How to Read The Bible , by James Kugel.

5. Favorite Henry Purcell recording : The Complete Odes and Welcome Songs , and no, eight discs of this music is not overkill.

2. Philosopher : Francis Bacon.  I’m not a Straussian but he really does have hidden and deep meanings.  Read Perez Zagorin on Bacon for a guide to the complexity of it all.

1. Mystery writer : Eric Ambler, most of all A Coffin for Dimitrios ; the villain is pathetic, not fearful, and this is most of all a study in collective mythmaking.

I was supposed to speak on Discover Your Inner Economist , but this was the morning after Google announced its backing of the lunar landing prize .  They asked me about that, and here is what they got for an answer .

5. Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life , by Mark Francis.  It’s the best intellectual history I’ve read since McCraw’s Schumpeter book, and did you know that he and George Eliot had a non-consummated fling?  It’s a highly specialized topic, so I can’t recommend this book to everyone but I loved it and no you don’t need to care about Spencer the libertarian.

4. Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke .  The NYT gave it a rave, lead review , as did The Washington Post and other sources.  So far it is being framed as the major American novel of the year.  It’s an almost anachronistically modernist in its structure and seriousness.  And is there really anything more to say about the Vietnam War?  First I was bored but then I reread the first 150 pages and now I love it.

4. Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke .  The NYT gave it a rave, lead review , as did The Washington Post and other sources.  So far it is being framed as the major American novel of the year.  It’s an almost anachronistically modernist in its structure and seriousness.  And is there really anything more to say about the Vietnam War?  First I was bored but then I reread the first 150 pages and now I love it.

3. Bill Clinton, Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World .  Should we resent that this book is essentially a campaign prop for Hillary?  Still, it was better than expected.  It’s not deep but it does stress the virtues of commercialization and the profit motive.  Less surprisingly, globalization and micro-finance are portrayed as positive forces as well.

2. Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism , by Ha-Joon Chang.  This is a less subtle version of the "free trade isn’t always best" arguments made by Dani Rodrik.  Reread my post The New Attack on Free Trade .

1. A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States , by Stephen Mihm.  This book offers interesting tales of 19th century counterfeiters — an understudied topic — but it is too quick to slush together counterfeiters, capitalists, and Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man .  I read about 80 pages, some of you will wish to read more.

That’s by Barry B. LePatner and the subtitle is How to Fix America’s Trillion-Dollar Construction Industry .

I wondered whether that can be said of Naomi Klein’s new The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism .  Still, at some fundamental level I liked this book.  Perhaps I still had the Greenspan memoir too fresh in my mind, but at least this text is alive.  Yes she refuses to admit that Chilean reforms, however horrible the accompanying atrocities, did represent a success for market economics .  Yes she misstates the role of Milton Friedman in just about everything.  Yes she suggests that bl...