Recently Mentioned Books

The subtitle is Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities , and might this be the must-read book of the year?  It is “to the right” of my views on immigration policy, but still I found it informative, fascinating, and relevant on just about every page.  Here is the author’s opening framing:

That is from the new and useful The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain , by Brett Christophers.  Land, land, land!  The author, by the way, is mostly critical of this privatization.

That is the new book by University of Maryland philosopher Dan Moller , and it is one of the most sensible expositions and defenses of libertarianism you will find.  Here is from the Amazon summary:

Those are all from Kevin’s new and very important book Shut Out: How a Housing Shortage Caused the Great Recession and Crippled Our Economy .  The simple “housing bubble” story is not in fact as true as it might seem, as Kevin shows, and furthermore just look at how many parts of America now have home prices at or above their “bubbly peaks.”  I hope this work gets the attention it deserves.

The Cato Institute has put out Michael D. Tanner, The Inclusive Economy: How to Bring Wealth to America’s Poor , and Randal O’Toole Romance of the Rails: Why the Passenger Trains We Love are Not the Transportation We Need .

The Cato Institute has put out Michael D. Tanner, The Inclusive Economy: How to Bring Wealth to America’s Poor , and Randal O’Toole Romance of the Rails: Why the Passenger Trains We Love are Not the Transportation We Need .

Joshua S. Goldstein and Staffan A. Qvist, A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow , is a good and correct “green” take on the case for nuclear energy.

4. Cass Sunstein, How Change Happens .  How does social change happen, organized around Cass’s favorite topics, such as nudge and polarization and cascades.  This book doesn’t cover everything, but it is one of the essential introductions to a topic that is very difficult to handle.  And I am happy there is no subtitle.

3. Guy Arnold, Africa A Modern History: 1945-2015 , second edition.  It is hard to image that a 1077 pp. doorstop kind of a book on “Africa” might be very good, but in fact this one is.  It is the best book on contemporary Africa and its (recent) historical roots that I know.  I am reading this book all the way through.

2. John L. Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire: the Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844 .  “…the rise of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints can only be understood if it is placed in the context of the hermetic tradition.  The distinctive doctrines of the church — preexistent spirits, material spirit, human divinization, celestial marriage — are opaque unless we explore their relationship to the evolving fusion of hermetic perfectionism and radical sectarianism occupying the extreme edge of...

1. Jackie Chan, with Zhu Mo, Never Grow Up . “My ankle joint pops out of its socket all the time, even when I’m just walking around, and I’ll have to pop it back in.  My leg sometimes gets dislocated when I’m showering.  For that one, I need my assistant to help me click it back in…I can’t lift heavy objects.”  He needed brain surgery after filming Armour of God, and he sustained permanent hearing loss in his left ear.  Recommended, if you like the movies.  And: “That was how I pursued girls, I ...

You can pre-order the book here .

Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny does not quite intersect with cultural economics and Joe Henrich, but someday somebody will write a book like this and start making the connections.

Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti, Love, Money & Parenting: How Economics Explains the Way We Raise Our Kids .  Note this book is sober rather than actually telling you how to raise your kids.  And it has sentences like: “In earlier times, men and women had sharply distinct roles.”

Margaret C. Jacob, The Secular Enlightenment , again delivers good coverage of what the title promises.

Sophus A. Reinert, The Academy of Fisticuffs: Political Economy and Commercial Society in Enlightenment Italy , is the best English-language book I know of on the Italian Enlightenment.  Everything you wanted to know about Pietro Verri but were afraid to ask.

David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming .  The title aside, a very good and very well-written book on the basics of climate change.

Alexandra Popoff, Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century covers what the title promises.

Much Christian doctrine, and especially Catholicism, emphasizes the value of confession, forgiveness and redemption. Thus it is not hard to convince many Americans that sinners should be given a second chance. This impulse occasionally finds its way into policy; just last month, a prison-reform bill became law , reflecting notions that criminals can indeed be rehabilitated. In her book “ The Up Side of Down ,” Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle stresses how many features of American life, i...

They are my colleagues, and both are economic historians, and they have an important forthcoming book Persecution and Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom .  I will be doing a Conversation with them.

That is all from Walter Licht, Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century .

That is all from Walter A. McDougall, Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877 , p.60.

Noteworthy is Kieran Healy, Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction .  I have not read it, but had positive impressions from my paw-through.

4. Colin M. Waugh, Paul Kagame and Rwanda: Genocide and the Rwandan Patriotic Front .  This is perhaps the most conceptual book I know on the Rwandan genocide, most of all because it ties the killings to both prior and posterior events very well.  Recommended, but (for better or worse) note the author is relatively sympathetic to Kagame in the post-conflict period.  I did just buy Waugh’s book on Charles Taylor and Liberia , which you can take as a credible endorsement of this one.

3. Timothy Larsen, The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith .  On the surface this is an account of various famous British anthropologists and their views toward Christianity.  At a deeper level it contrasts the anthropological and religious approaches to understanding society.  Why do so many anthropologists have more tolerant attitudes toward the religions they study than to Christianity?  Do the Christian beliefs of an anthropologist help or hurt that individual’s understanding ...