Recently Mentioned Books

That is from Dana Thomas’s really quite interesting Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster .  Thomas believes that the Japanese are so infatuated with luxury goods because they wish to brand themselves in what otherwise pretends to be a "classless" society.

You can get Bach’s Well-Tempered Klavier played this way , but to my ears it is not a revelation.  Of course unequal temperament (not my preferred terminology) has struck back through popular music, whether it be bent blues notes, pedal steel guitar, and the drone tunings of My Bloody Valentine or Sonic Youth.  Oddly the author doesn’t mention this.  Listeners want variety, and simply "pegging the scale" does not control the real sound which results, just as in um…macroeconomics.

How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care) , by Ross W. Duffin, is a cranky but fascinating look at how music went astray:

I’ll be doing the first post on Greg Clark’s A Farewell to Alms this Tuesday, try to read the first 112 pages.  In the meantime, here is a review from The Economist .

Playboy reviews Discover Your Inner Economist .  Excerpt:

The subtitle is The Costs and Benefits of Alcohol Control , and the book (here is its home page ) has more on the latter than the former.  The author, economist Philip J. Cook, produces a wide range of reasonable arguments that alcohol is too cheap on the supply side, given its social costs.

This new book by Alan Krueger , full of first-rate empirical work, punctures many myths about terrorism.  For instance poverty does not breed terrorism, once you look at the data.  Here is the book’s home page .

I’d like to soon start the MR BookForum on Greg Clark’s A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World .  I hear you’re all getting your copies now.  Ideally I’d put up the first post within 5-10 days, noting that the first session will be setting and overview.  You won’t need to have started the book by then.  Are you in fact all getting your copies from Amazon or elsewhere?

I believe that Mailer has become a quite underrated writer, especially his Harlot’s Ghost .  But wife-stabbing is not the main reason why he has failed to win the prize.

My new book Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist offers a chapter on how to help other people.  In the book I suggest several principles:

That is from Chris Goodall’s How to Live a Low-Carbon Life: The Individual’s Guide to Stopping Climate Change .  Just imagine, when it comes to the number of players in this game, the guy doesn’t mention whether the appropriate model should use a countable or a non-countable infinity.  Often it makes a big difference for the result.

That is from India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy , a truly excellent book by Ramachandra Guha, well over 800 pages and yes it will be finished.

That is from the quite interesting Why is That So Funny?: A Practical Exploration of Physical Comedy , by John Wright.  The book discusses how improv comedy "models" human behavior, and where else will you find a discussion of how the "Principles of Simple Clown" differ from the "Principles of Pathetic Clown"?

That’s the title of Laurie Viera Rigler’s new and fun book .  The basic premise is that a pouty L.A. girl "wakes up" in the body of a character in a Jane Austen novel; here is the book’s website .  She also finds herself courted by an ardent suitor, Edgeworth, who wants an answer to his marriage proposal and soon.  My wonderings were skewed as usual:

That is from Charles Karelis’s truly intriguing The Persistence of Poverty: Why the Economics of the Well-Off Can’t Help the Poor .

That is from Twinkie, Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods Are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated Into What America Eats , by Steve Ettlinger.  So far this is my pick for the best food book of the year.

It is also claimed that: "Paper bags cause more global warming than plastic."  Here is the book , I’ve ordered it and will report in due time.  In the meantime, here is Ezra’s coverage .

You may recall that we are having the first MarginalRevolution BookForum on Greg Clark’s A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World .  Here is my previous post on the book and how the forum will work.  It’s a great book and I recommend it highly.

Yes my book is out today (B&N here ) but you don’t need to buy it.  You can get it here for free.

I read Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide , by Gerard Prunier, and was quite impressed.  I thought "what a smart and unbiased introduction to such a difficult topic."  But why was I impressed?  I don’t know nearly enough about the topic to judge the material.

That is from the new Ocean of Air: Why the Wind Blows and other Mysteries of the Atmosphere , by Gabrielle Walker.

That is from the excellent Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind , by Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth.

Here is one obituary , here is Wikipedia .  His six-hour Scenes from a Marriage is probably my favorite movie, ever (in the more common abridged version only the first installment makes sense, but it is still a knockout). The Seventh Seal is his most overrated movie; Wild Strawberries and Fanny and Alexander are also famous but not his best stuff.  The dreamy Persona is the next one to try, or at 83 minutes probably the best introduction to his work. Winter Light is splendid on a big screen. Smi...

Here is one obituary , here is Wikipedia .  His six-hour Scenes from a Marriage is probably my favorite movie, ever (in the more common abridged version only the first installment makes sense, but it is still a knockout). The Seventh Seal is his most overrated movie; Wild Strawberries and Fanny and Alexander are also famous but not his best stuff.  The dreamy Persona is the next one to try, or at 83 minutes probably the best introduction to his work. Winter Light is splendid on a big screen. Smi...

Here is one obituary , here is Wikipedia .  His six-hour Scenes from a Marriage is probably my favorite movie, ever (in the more common abridged version only the first installment makes sense, but it is still a knockout). The Seventh Seal is his most overrated movie; Wild Strawberries and Fanny and Alexander are also famous but not his best stuff.  The dreamy Persona is the next one to try, or at 83 minutes probably the best introduction to his work. Winter Light is splendid on a big screen. Smi...