Recently Mentioned Books

1. Music : Opt for Taarab , the Arabic style from Zanzibar, start here . Bongo Flava: Swahili Rap from Tanzania is above average for its genre.  By the way, the Rough Guide Tanzania music CD is a bit lame.

1. Music : Opt for Taarab , the Arabic style from Zanzibar, start here . Bongo Flava: Swahili Rap from Tanzania is above average for its genre.  By the way, the Rough Guide Tanzania music CD is a bit lame.

It is by Erik Reinert, How Rich Countries Got Rich, and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor ; here is a home page for the book .  The title is misleading and sounds too monocausal.  Reinert’s well-written book in fact revives the arguments of Friedrich List, Henry Carey, and the 19th century protectionists.  In his view many forms of manufacturing are increasing returns to scale activities and help support civil society in the longer run.  Agriculture and the sale of raw materials are "Malthusian" sect...

That is from Roger Scruton’s over the top but nonetheless fascinating England: An Elegy ; he portrays the English as a people who have substituted morale and teamwork for intimacy.  If you are looking to understand why so many parts of the world find it difficult to adopt either capitalism or free political institutions, this is one of the very best places to start.  The English recipe is by no means the only way to go, but from Scruton one gets a good sense of just how much cultural background ...

That is from Arnold Relman’s A Second Opinion: Rescuing America’s Health Care .  I read Relman as offering three major arguments:

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.

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.

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 .