Recently Mentioned Books

That is all from the new and interesting Of Counsel: The Challenges of the Modi-Jaitley Economy , by the excellent Arvind Subramanian.

Have you ever wanted to read about how ethnic groups in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Djibouti fit into this same broad picture?  Just exactly how Somalian and Ethiopian history intersect, from the 1970s onwards?  This here is your book.  I’m running to Amazon right now to buy more from this wonderful author.  You can buy it here .

Self-recommending is Desmond Dekker: Action!/Intensified

Autechre, NTS Sessions , an 8-CD set.

Aphex Twin, Collapse EP (too many other CDs piled on top of the record player!)

Mitski, Be the Cowboy

Low, Double Negative

Lush, Snail Mail (at least three excellent songs)

Paul’s new album Egypt Station does not have much ear candy, but it does reveal his longstanding status as a very horny dude; listen to his much earlier Temporary Secretary for something unacceptably obscene (and creative).  Then go back and re-listen to his early Beatle lyrics through this lens.  The best argument for LSD I’ve heard is simply that it got Paul to stop singing about girls for a few years, so it must be pretty powerful.

The Beatles’s White Album tapes were a revelation, but it is enough to hear them once or twice.  I learned that the album was remarkably well-produced, no less than Sgt. Pepper, to get that under-produced sound.  “I Will” came directly from “Blue Moon” (!), and “Blackbird” came from Bach’s Bourree (less surprising).  Classic Beatle songs such as “Let It Be” and “Hey Jude” and many others were basically written by 1968, making 1966-68 a truly remarkable period in their songwriting output.  “While...

van Morrison, Astral Weeks , fifty year anniversary for that one, and I hadn’t realized how closely the lyrics were tied to details of Belfast.  Next up will be the quieter cuts on Electric Ladyland .

Brian Eno, Another Green World , and

That is from Kenneth Tynan, Profiles , which is in fact a remarkable and remarkably good book.

Jeffrey Lane, The Digital Street , is an interesting and original urban ethnography of how digitalized media, and the recording of street interactions, affect gang norms and patterns of violence.

Kimberly Clausing, Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital delivers exactly what its subtitle promises.

M. Todd Henderson, Mental State , “When conservative law professor Alex Johnson is found dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound at his house in Chicago, everyone thinks it is suicide.  Everyone except his brother, Royce, an FBI agent.”

Louise I. Shelley, Dark Commerce: How a New Illicit Economy is Threatening Our Future , is a useful survey of varying kinds of black and dark markets.

4. Sally Rooney, Normal People .  A novel, they’re not, Irish, recommended.

3. Charles Allen, Coromandel: A Personal History of South India .  “I have called this book Coromandel chiefly for sentimental reasons.  I first became aware of that sonorous word as a fifteen-year-old schoolboy exiled in England. Coromandel! was the title of the third in a series of Boy’s Own -style adventure stories set in India written by John Masters, an ex-Indian Army officer turned popular novelist.  It was all about a West Country lad who sails to India with a map to find the legendary Co...

2. Nell Dunn, Talking to Women .  Interviews with British (and Irish) women, circa 1964, remarkably frank and open, “ witty, anarchic, and sexually frank .”  Strongly recommended, is it possible that the quality of discourse on these matters has not much advanced or even declined?

1. Sevket Pamuk, Uneven Centuries: Economic Development of Turkey since 1820 .  The best economic history of Turkey I know, it comes with strong recommendations from Daron Acemoglu and Dani Rodrik.  Not an engaging read, but a useful survey.

If you are wondering, three of my favorite travel books are Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana , David G. Campbell, The Crystal Desert: Summers in Antarctica , and also Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found , perhaps the best travel book ever written.

If you are wondering, three of my favorite travel books are Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana , David G. Campbell, The Crystal Desert: Summers in Antarctica , and also Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found , perhaps the best travel book ever written.

If you are wondering, three of my favorite travel books are Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana , David G. Campbell, The Crystal Desert: Summers in Antarctica , and also Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found , perhaps the best travel book ever written.

My biggest complaint is that travel books seem not to discriminate between what the reader might care about or not.  Here is a randomly chosen passage from a recent travel book of Jedidiah Jenkins :