Recently Mentioned Books

Self-recommending, you can order it here.

All that and more is from the new and fun book The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English , by Lynne Murphy.

The author is Priya Satia, and the subtitle is The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution .  Here is one good bit:

5. Thomas Weber, Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi .  Perhaps you, like me, are totally sick of Hitler books.  But how exactly did his ideas morph into…what they became?  This book is detailed, well-documented, psychologically insightful, at times even brilliant.

4. James Crabtree, The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age .  Delivers on exactly what it promises, a strong look at India’s wealthy class.

3. Matthew Polly, Bruce Lee: A Life .  A quite good, serious, and well-researched biography of the master, especially good in setting up the context of the martial arts in Lee’s time.  I hadn’t known that James Coburn took 106 private lessons with Bruce, nor that Steve McQueen was another notable pupil.  Nor had I known how much Bruce studied the fights of Muhammad Ali for some of his film sequences .

2. Helen DeWitt, Some Trick .  Conceptual and informationally dense short stories for highly intelligent people.  Here is a good James Wood review .

1. Susan Napier, Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art .  A thorough and serious treatment of Miyazaki’s career, focusing on his creative works rather than biography per se.

By Robert L. Bradley, this is the first of several volumes, covering the entire history of the company. Due out in August , it will be definitive.

This is a depressing but thought-provoking book.  Bangladesh, by the way, is smaller than the state of Florida, but has 165 million people.  And I had not known there are about 800,000 Nigerians in South Africa.  You can order the book here .

The authors are Primavera De Filipp and Aaron Wright, and the subtitle is The Rule of Code and it is published by Harvard University Press.  I am sent many books on crypto and blockchains, but this is the one I feel is useful to an educated readership.  It’s not for specialists, but if you have a good general economics and also law background, as one would expect from MR readers, but don’t “get” crypto, this is the book-length treatment for you.  It sees merit and potential in crypto, without bu...

Dean Keith Simonton springs readily to mind, noting he has a new book coming out this year on genius.  Here are some overview pieces on simultaneous discovery , and of course those tend to stress environmental factors.  Here are some approaches to the multiplicative model of creative achievement .  I am a fan of that one.  What else?

I’ve now see the page proofs for Steven Pearlstein’s Can American Capitalism Survive?: Why Greed is Not Good, Opportunity is Not Equal, and Fairness Won’t Make Us Poor .  His view is not mine, but if you want his view this book is the place to get it…

Joshua Keating, Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood looks at Abkhazia, Kurdistan, Somaliland, Liberland, and a Mohawk reservation straddilng the U.S.-Canada border, as well as a Pacific Island that might disappear.  An interesting book for fans of alternative governance arrangements.

Linda Yueh’s What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today’s Biggest Problems , is probably the closest we will come to having an updated version of Robert Heilbroner.

David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History .  A very strong work about race relations on the other side of the Atlantic.  I had not known that “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” is Yoruba for “life goes on.”  The song as a whole was intended by Paul McCartney as a parable of the possibility of West Indian assimilation and it was a direct response to Enoch Powell.  Definitely recommended.

Peter Cozzens, The Earth is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West .  Very good overall history of the post-Civil War campaigns against Native Americans, still highly relevant for understanding American foreign policy, and attitudes toward guns, among other things.

Tarjei Vesaas, The Ice Palace .  Not well known in the United States, but still one of the better Norwegian novels.  Short, readable, concerns a boy who goes missing.

Gregory Claeys, Marx and Marxism , a better than expected take on where Marxism came from and how Marx’s different intellectual periods fit into his life.  One of the better introductions to Marx, noting that it does not stress issues of economic theory.

Definitely recommended, surprisingly gripping throughout, you can buy it here .

Bekelech Tola, Injera Variety from Crop Diversity .  She explains where all the different types of injera come from.  I hadn’t realized for instance that teff is sometimes mixed with maize, or sorghum flour, or cassava powder, all in the service of variety.

Emily Dufton, Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America .  I loved this book, which I also consider a paradigmatic example of how to write a wonderful non-fiction work.  Throughout it is clear, substantive, balanced, passes various ideological Turing tests, and it focuses on essentials, as well as framing everything in terms of broader theories of social change.  It is sure to make my best books of the year list, and if she had ten other books I would buy them all sight uns...

Allen C. Guelzo, Reconstruction: A Concise History .  Could this new book be the single best brief introduction to Reconstruction available?  Recommended.

Economic Science Fictions , edited by William Davies.  I didn’t quite come away with a takeaway from this book, but still I feel obliged to pass knowledge of it along to you.  It is a bunch of essays about economic themes in science fiction, and/or how the two “genres” might be more closely integrated, with a lead essay by Ha-Joon Chang.

1. Elinor Ostrom’s book Governing the Commons .  Ostrom dismantles the market / government dichotomy, sketching out ways common pool resources (and, to some extent, public goods) can be provided using non-market, non-government solutions.