Recently Mentioned Books

Arrived in my pile there is William D. Nordhaus, The Spirit of Green: The Economics of Collisions and Contagions in a Crowded World , and in September Adam Tooze is publishing Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy , and also for September there is Gregg Easterbrook’s Blue Age: How the US Navy Created Global Prosperity — And Why We’re in Danger of Losing It .

Arrived in my pile there is William D. Nordhaus, The Spirit of Green: The Economics of Collisions and Contagions in a Crowded World , and in September Adam Tooze is publishing Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy , and also for September there is Gregg Easterbrook’s Blue Age: How the US Navy Created Global Prosperity — And Why We’re in Danger of Losing It .

Don’t forget Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Bettering Humanomics: A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science .

Julian Baggini’s The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well is not written for me, but it is a lively and useful introduction to one of humanity’s greatest minds.

Mathilde Fasting has edited After the End of History: Conversations with Frank Fukuyama .

Joanne Meyerowitz, A War on Global Poverty: The Lost Promise of Redistribution and the Rise of Microcredit . A history of antipoverty efforts, with an emphasis on the shift toward “enterprise” in the 1980s, with the microcredit treatment being mostly pre-Yunus.

Dorothy Sue Cobble, For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality is a serious and thorough yet readable account of what the title promises, with a minimum of mood affiliation.

I very much enjoyed Richard Thompson (with Scott Timberg), Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice, 1967-1975 , still smarter than the competition and you don’t even have to know much about Thompson.

3. William Deresiewicz, The Death of the Artist: How Creators are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech .  Ignore the subtitle (which itself illustrates a theme of the book), this is the best book on the economics of the arts — circa 2021 — in a long time.  “The good news is, you can do it yourself.  The bad news is, you have to.”  Every aspiring internet creator, whether “artist” or not, should read this book.  If you don’t think of your career itself as a creative produ...

2. Wenfei Tong, Bird Love: The Family Life of Birds .  Now this is a great book, wonderful photos, superb analytics and bottom-line approach throughout.  By the way, “Superb fairywrens are particularly adept at avoiding incest.”

1. David Thomson, A Light in the Dark: A History of Movie Directors .  One of the best attempts to make the auteur notion intelligible to the modern viewer, he surveys major directors such as Welles, Kubrick, Hitchcock, Godard and others. Stephen Frears is the dark horse pick, and he recommends the Netflix show Ozark .  I always find Thomson worth reading.

We saw this happen between the 1970s and the 1990s. American hippies built a genuinely bohemian counterculture. But as they got older they wanted to succeed. They brought their bohemian values into the market, but year by year those values got thinner and thinner and finally were nonexistent.

(By the way, I’ve been going around to many San Francisco book stores, and none of them carry the new Sarah Ruden translation of The Gospels , which is likely a significant work.  I could feel people looking down on me as I asked for it.  Part of me wanted to say “ But this is Sarah Ruden ,” but that would be making the problem only worse.  Since I did not feel tempted to say “ But this is God , ” perhaps I am part of the problem.)

The author is Roderick Matthews, and the subtitle is A New History of British India .  This book has been highly controversial for its supposed “whitewashing” of British rule in India, but so far I find it insightful and indeed revelatory.  It is to date my favorite book this year, most of all conceptual but also remarkably well-informed historically.  Here is one excerpt:

It is very good, in the problem-solving mode of The Martian, you can buy it here .  I can’t say more without giving away spoilers, though that means the book is full of suspense from the first moment on.  Here is my earlier 2017 Conversation with Andy Weir .

I will be covering this book more soon, you can pre-order it here .  And here Tim Harford does FT lunch with Kahneman , self-recommending.

Daniel Carpenter is one of the world’s leading experts on regulation and the foremost expert on the US Food and Drug Administration. A professor of Government at Harvard University, he’s conducted extensive research on regulation and government organizations, as well as on the development of political institutions in the United States. His latest book Democracy by Petition: Popular Politics in Transformation , details the crucial role petitions played in expanding the franchise and shaping moder...

There is Niall Ferguson, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe , lots of bad news yes, but is he short the market?

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth , is indeed…a defense of truth.

Tom Standage, A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next is a very good history of what it promises.

5. Tim Birkhead, The Wisdom of Birds: An Illustrated History of Ornithology .  As I tweeted : “I am coming to the conclusion that the quality of books about birds is higher than about almost any other subject.”  Simple question: have you read a better book about the history of ornithology than this one?

4. Paul Betts, Ruin and Renewal: Civilizing Europe After World War II .  The immediate aftermath of WWII was the last time the Western world was truly chaotic, and this book captures that time well, including its intellectual milieu.  Are you interested in how West and East German books of manners differed in the late 1940s and 1950s?  If so, this is your go-to book.

3. Jennifer Ackerman, The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think .  A good and entertaining overview of some of the most interesting questions about birds, including bird intelligence.  “Extreme behavior in birds is more likely in Australia than anywhere else.”

2. Michele Alacevich, Albert O. Hirschman: An Intellectual Biography .  There can never be enough books on Albert Hirschman, noting this one focuses on his ideas rather than his life.

1. Marcel Proust, The Mysterious Correspondent: New Stories .  Yes they read like fragments, but Proust’s fragments are still better than almost anything else.