Recently Mentioned Books

You can order the book here .  I think about the Balkans a great deal (and enjoy visiting there), if only because they are one simple alternate scenario for what the rest of world history will look like.

You can buy the book here , it has many notable contributors and other essays of interest.

What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Own Business Culture .  It is the best book on business culture in recent memory, here is one bit:

The passage is from Arthur C. Clarke’s excellent How the World Was One: Beyond the Global Village .

The author is Robert Zubrin and the subtitle is How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility .  I found this book fun, ambitious, and informative, even if I was not entirely convinced.  Zubrin thinks big and bold in an exciting way, here is one bit:

That is the new book by Chris Arnade , insightful throughout and with excellent photos.  Excerpt:

Linda Yueh’s What Would the Great Economists Do? How Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today’s Biggest Problems , now out in paperback, is the closest we have come to producing a modern-day version of Robert Heilbroner’s book.  As with Heilbroner, it is from a somewhat “left” perspective.

I will not have time to read Anthony Atkinson’s Measuring Poverty Around the World , his final book, but as you might expect it appears to be a very serious contribution.

Gareth Williams, Unraveling the Double Helix: The Lost Heroes of DNA .  A good, detailed look at thought on DNA-related issues, before Crick and Watson published the solution.

Arthur M. Diamond, Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism is a good introduction to what the title and subtitle promise.

5. John Steinbeck, East of Eden .  At first I enjoyed this one, but after a while I grew bored.  If it came out today, by John Anonymous, how many people would think it was a great book?  (“Most of those who wrote the Amazon reviews” you might reply.  Maybe, but what other current books do they like?  Barbara Kingsolver?)  If Sally Rooney’s Normal People , or some time-synched version thereof, came out in the 1920s or 30s, how many today would claim it is an absolute masterpiece?  I am happy to ...

5. John Steinbeck, East of Eden .  At first I enjoyed this one, but after a while I grew bored.  If it came out today, by John Anonymous, how many people would think it was a great book?  (“Most of those who wrote the Amazon reviews” you might reply.  Maybe, but what other current books do they like?  Barbara Kingsolver?)  If Sally Rooney’s Normal People , or some time-synched version thereof, came out in the 1920s or 30s, how many today would claim it is an absolute masterpiece?  I am happy to ...

4. Chester Himes, If He Hollers, Let Him Go .  Pretty brutal actually, a kind of pre-integration African-American noir, dating from 1945.  People should still read this one.

3. James Walvin, Freedom: The Overthrow of the Slave Empires .  Perhaps not original, but a highly readable and very much conceptual overview of how the slave trade developed and was then overthrown.  Recommended.

2. Alev Scott, Ottoman Odyssey: Travels Through a Lost Empire .  Imagine setting off to write a book about Turkey, finding your access shut down, and then coming up with what is probably an even better travelogue about the former fringes of the Ottoman Empire.  I will buy the author’s next book.

1. Michael H. Kater, Culture in Nazi Germany .  The best general introduction to this still-important topic.

There is much more at the link, hearkening back to my earlier book Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Cultures .

That is from Kwame Anthony Appiah, Lines of Descent: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity .

Every page of this book is interesting, and so I am going to recommend it.  Here is a Kirkus Review , otherwise MSM doesn’t seem to be touching this one at all.  Here is the Amazon link , 79 reviews and an average of five stars.  The reviews themselves are not entirely reassuring.

That is the new and very interesting forthcoming book by Janek Wasserman , focusing on the history of the Austrian school of economics and due out in September.  A few comments:

That is the new book by David Epstein , the author of the excellent The Sports Gene.  I sometimes say that generalists are the most specialized people of them all, so specialized they can’t in fact do anything.  Except make observations of that nature.  Excerpt:

Obviously the law can deter potential illegal migrants from entering the U.S. But so can the high cost of living. Even though there are much higher wages in the U.S. than in its neighbors to the South, a lot of those higher wages are eaten up by much higher rents — especially if the immigrant moves to a major city, as is often the case. I once wrote a book based on fieldwork in rural Mexico, and I found that, for those who had migrated temporarily to the U.S., high rent was typically their bigge...

Those are all from Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie’s Rebellious Passage: The Creole Revolt and America’s Coastal Slave Trade .

I am doing a Conversation with him, no associated public event.  I am a big fan of his book WhiteShift (perhaps the best book of the year so far?), here is my review .  Here is Wikipedia on Eric :

John Quiggin, Economics in Two Lessons: Why Markets Work So Well, and Why They Can Fail So Badly .  The third lesson, however, is government failure, and you won’t find much about that here.  Still, I found this to be a well-done book rather than a polemic.  Here is the introduction on-line .