Recently Mentioned Books

3. Howard Sounes, Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney .  One of my favorite biographies, this book is also excellent on outlining the history of the Beatles (and subsequent McCartney groups) as problems in the theory and practice of management.  I now have ordered the author’s other books on music history .

2. Sriya Iyer, The Economics of Religion in India .  A useful survey, which delivers on what the title promises.

1. Santiago Levy, Under-Rewarded Efforts: The Elusive Quest for Prosperity in Mexico .  Probably the best current book on Mexico’s economy and why it has not grown more rapidly.  Most of all, Levy blames misallocation, and more specifically the attachment of too many workers to the low-productivity informal sector.  The author notes (p.34) that both the top 20 percent of the wage distribution, or even the top 1 percent, saw no wage growth from 1996 to 2015.

Here is Reihan’s new book Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders .  Here is Katie’s sketch of my blurb:

In the Great Thinkers in Economics series, buy it here .  Here is a related podcast .  This book is the result of Pete thinking about Hayek for now 35 (!) or so years.  There are good criticisms of me on pp.61-65.

My favorite part of the book is the section, starting on p.244, on bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics that have not yet been invented.  Overall this is likely to prove the best popular science book of the year, you can buy it here .  Here are various reviews of the book .

Many of the best parts are at or near the end, so do read or listen all the way through.  And you can buy Michele’s book here .

I thank you all for your pre-orders of my forthcoming book from Stripe Press, Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals (did you notice how the title draws from Liberty Fund ?), due out October 16.  It is my most philosophic book, most heartfelt book, and least current affairsy book, at least in the last twenty years.

You can order the book here .

4. Maxwell King, The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers .  Yes, that is Mister Rogers.  If you’ve seen the movie , this book is the perfect complement.  I hadn’t know that Mister Rogers was born into wealth, self-financed his early work, and consistently turned down opportunities to market “Mister Rogers toys” to kids for large sums of money.  His email address by the way was [email protected] , with the triple z’s indicating he slept soundly every night, and the 143 referring to th...

3. William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era .  Winner of a Pulitzer, this remains one of the essential takes on mid-20th century Soviet history and is highly readable as well.

2. Cass R. Sunstein, The Cost-Benefit Revolution .  One of the very best Cass Sunstein books, the product of decades of reflection, remarkably well thought out on every page to an extent which is rare these days.

1. Donna Zuckerberg, Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age .  Ten or fifteen years ago, would I have predicted that Harvard University Press would publish a serious academic argument claiming that on-line pick-up artists misread the classic texts they cite?

You can pre-order it here , or if you were in a rush as I was, order from the UK .

You can pre-order it here , or if you were in a rush as I was, order from the UK .

Remember when Ortega y Gasset wrote : “ Within the novel almost anything fits…”?  Well, Karl Ove Knausgaard has proven him right in this improbably wonderful conclusion to his ongoing semi-fictionalized autobiographical series My Struggle , the first two volumes of which stand as literary masterworks.  It’s not every day that a 1153 pp. rant, outside the author’s main fields of expertise, turns out to be so compelling.  But wait…I guess those are his main fields of expertise.

That is from American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant , by Ronald C. White, a good book by the way.  I had not known that a possible U.S. takeover of “Santo Domingo” (today’s D.R.) was such a big issue during Grant’s administration.

That is all from the new and interesting Brian Stanley, Christianity in the Twentieth Century: A World History, published by Princeton University Press.

That is all from Arnold A. Offner’s Hubert Humphrey: The Conscience of a Country .

That is all from the new and interesting Brian Stanley, Christianity in the Twentieth Century: A World History, published by Princeton University Press.

By Victor Sebestyen , this one definitely will make the year-end “best books” list.

5. Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer, A Crisis of Beliefs: Investor Psychology and Financial Fragility .  An “as smart as you would expect” take on the hypothesis that investor over-extrapolation of recent price trends can cause financial crises, including our recent financial crisis.

4. Robert Skidelsky, Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics .  The history of macro and money told through its historical development, which in my view is the right approach.  The coverage ranges from the classical economists up through the present day.  I hope this book does well.

3. Jason Brennan, When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice .  A well-argued libertarian take on exactly what the subtitle promises.

2. Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading .  An exquisitely written book, yet his reading narrative leaves me cold (too much an insider? not eccentric enough?).  I found the chapter on his husband and their relationship extraordinarily compelling.  A highly intelligent book, at the very least.