Recently Mentioned Books

5. Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality .  A very good study of the developments of early 20th century physics, the parts about Rutherford and Planck being most novel to me.

4. Mary Robinette Kowal, The Calculating Stars: A Lady Astronaut Novel .  Readable, with a clear and propulsive plot, but somehow it stopped being of interest to me about halfway through.  It is the recent Hugo and also Nebula Award winner for best novel.

3. Jonathan Eig, Ali: A Life .  Definitely recommended, this is an excellent boxing book, race relations book, 1960s and 70s book, and much more.

2. Evan Thompson, Why I am Not a Buddhist .  For every view, there should be a book “Why I am not X.”  This gets us part of the way there.  That said, I have simpler reasons for not being a Buddhist, namely I do not think it is true.

1. Richard J. Williams, Why Cities Look the Way They Do .  Mostly interesting, think of this as a humanities-laden approach to cities, but without too much mumbo-jumbo.  Excerpt: “As long ago as 1968, a British art critic, Lawrence Alloway, grasped something of this.  Writing about the Biennial, he argued that Venice wasn’t a city, but should be better understood as a cultural medium, like an exhibition or a newspaper, ‘compounded of famous architecture, recurrent festivals, and tourist industri...

You can order the book here .

You can pre-order the book here .

COWEN: What is the Straussian reading of Babar the Elephant ?

3. Shame is perhaps Rushdie’s best novel, though it is super-rude, here is one overview .

Due out November 12, you can pre-order here .

More books should be like this, it actually tries to teach the reader something!  And succeeds.  Definitely recommended.  Due out in January, you can pre-order here .

That is the new and forthcoming book by New York Times writer Binyamin Appelbaum.  I did not agree with all of the perspectives in the book, but enjoyed reading it, and found no errors of fact in it (rare for a book on free market economics!).  I was happy to give it this blurb:

That is from Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet .

4. David Cahan, Helmholtz: A Life in Science .  At 768 pp., I only read about half of this one.  Nonetheless I read the better half, and it is one of the more useful treatments of 19th century German science.  I hadn’t realized the strong connections with Siemens and Roentgen, for instance, and one clear lesson is that German science of that time had some pretty healthy institutions outside of the formal university system.

3. Lene Rachel Andersen and Tomas Björkman, The Nordic Secret: A European story of beauty and freedom .  There should be many more books about why the Nordics are special, and this is one of them.  The central notion here is “secular Bildung” as a means of elevating society and cooperative relations.  Uneven in its structure of exposition, but definitely interesting in parts and the importance of the question makes this better than most of the other books you might be likely to read.  Just don’t...

2. Ben Lewis, The Last Leonardo: The Secret Lives of the World’s Most Expensive Painting .  I felt I knew this story already, but nonetheless found interesting information and conceptual analysis on virtually every page.  And while the author is agnostic and balanced, the text upped my opinion of the “likely Leonardo weighted expected value” component from about 0.1 to maybe 0.25?  Yet so much fuss about a painting that resurfaced in 1907 — model that…  And don’t forget: “None of the great art h...

1. Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell, Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World .  A good, short “give it to your high school kid” book on why socialism is not an entirely ideal way to arrange society.

…his 2011 book on southern hip-hop, Dirty South: OutKast, Lil Wayne, Soulja Boy, and the Southern Rappers Who Reinvented Hip-Hop was a Library Journal best seller.

His previous book Original Gangstas: Tupac Shakur, Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, and the Birth of West Coast Rap has received raves from Rolling Stone and People , a starred review in Kirkus , a five-star Amazon rating, and made numerous year-end best lists . More info can be found here .

That is from Thomas F. Madden, Venice: A New History .

I am pleased to have made the longlist (FT link) with my Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero *.

That is from Peter Ackroyd’s Venice: Pure City .

The author is Andrew McAfee and the subtitle is The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources — And What Happens Next .

Now, those are just sample questions, obviously you could come up with your own and add to or alter that list.  But here is the thing: simply pursue the list of questions.  It may well induce you to buy books, such as this work on Venetian architecture and the East .  Or it may lead you down Googled rabbit holes.  Or it may lead you to…

Spoke/wrote/co-authored a bestselling book — Zero to One — which also was a huge hit in China.  And the samizdat lecture notes, from Peter’s Stanford talks, were a big hit in advance of the book.