Recently Mentioned Books

This book is academic substance, beginning to end, and for that reason it won’t be a fun read to everybody.  But with that caveat, and noting the $60.00 purchase price, it joins my list ( Sacred Games , The Savage Detectives , Prophet of Innovation ) of must-reads for the year.

Kevin Lang’s Poverty and Discrimination is marketed as a text but it is far more.  Imagine a first-rate labor economist sitting down to tell us what he knows about the topics at hand.  This includes who is poor, does economic growth still eliminate poverty, how much does family structure matter, does changing neighborhoods help a family, what have been the effects of welfare reform, how strong is labor market race discrimination, and many others.  Lang’s discussions are consistently smart and in...

5. Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union: A Novel .  This comic detective story is based on an alternative reality in which Israel loses the 1948 war and the surviving Jews settle in Alaska.  It’s the first book of his I’ve liked, though I don’t think it has much substance.

4. Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate .  This Soviet-era masterpiece, which covers the Battle of Stalingrad, bored me.  I have no complaint about its quality, I simply felt the time in my life is past to further digest those themes in an emotionally meaningful way.

3. The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction , by Patrick Anderson.  A good guide and overview, the author argues that Raymond Chandler is overrated relative to say Macdonald or Kehane.

2. The Grid: A Journey Through the Heart of Our Electrified World , by Phillip F. Schewe.  Better than no book at all, but this important topic still awaits its definitive treatment.

1. House of Leaves , by Mark Danielewski.  This experimental novel, written with varying typefaces, page layouts, and interjected footnotes, is a fun mock of the academization of literature.  It has a large cult following but can be enjoyed by the general reader.  Don’t be intimidated by the heft, a third of the pages are essentially blank.  It felt great making so much progress so quickly.

Tim Harford , The Undercover Economist , reports:

Here is my review of Thomas McCraw’s new Schumpeter biography .  Excerpt:

That is from the new book of poetry by Meghan O’Rourke, columnist and culture editor at Slate.com.  Here are five more poems from the book .  Here is a page on the book .  Here is an interview .  Here is a rave New York Times review .