Recently Mentioned Books

6. David Warsh’s Harvard Russia book is back on Amazon .

That is from Jere Van Dyk, The Trade: My Journey into the Labyrinth of Political Kidnapping .

That is all from the excellent Harold G. Marcus, A History of Ethiopia .

That is from Sarah Howard’s Ethiopia: Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture .  An Ethiopian I had dinner with told me that Amharic is “eighty percent implication.”  Here is a research paper about ambiguity in Amharic .

3. Is there a new David Warsh book on Harvard and Russia ?

That is the title of a new and excellent book by Michael Zakim .  Here is one bit:

That is from Arkebe Oqubay’s Made in Africa: Industrial Policy in Ethiopia .  In Ethiopia, they sell this book for less than half of its Amazon list price.

That is from the new, excellent, and consistently interesting Finding Equilibrium: Arrow, Debreu, McKenzie and the Problem of Scientific Credit , by Till Düppe and E. Roy Weintraub.  Unlike many history of economic thought books, this one tells you “what actually happened,” such as how an Econometrica editor (Robert Strotz) decided to publish the McKenzie paper before the Arrow-Debreu paper, when he had both in hand.

That is the new and noteworthy book by Jürgen Osterhammel, and the subtitle is The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia .  Here is one good bit of many:

This book is very well done.  It is not revelatory to me, but it serve very well as the standard, up to date major biography of Marx.  You can order it here .

That is from the new, excellent, and short The Radical Fool of Capitalism: On Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon, and the Auto-Icon , by Christian Welzbacher.

The editors and co-creators are Benjamin Spall and Michael Xander, and the subtitle is How Successful People Start Every Day Inspired .

I have many collections of gospel music, but might this be the best one?  The subtitle is Small Group Black Gospel 1951-1965 .

That is the new and entertaining book by David Graeber , probably you already have heard of it.  Here is a brief summary .

That is from the new and often quite interesting Martin Doyle, The Source: How Rivers Made America and America Remade its Rivers .

1. New David Yosifon book on corporate law .

Jan Assmann, The Invention of Religion: Faith and Covenant in the Book of Exodus .  One of the best introductory works on the best and most important book ever written.

Heiner Rindermann, Cognitive Capitalism: Human Capital and Wellbeing of Nations perhaps covers too much ground, but is still a very useful 500 pp. plus survey of exactly what the title suggests.

Nick Polson and James Scott, AIQ: How People and Machines are Smarter Together , is a new and (believe it or not) original and very good take on this theme.

Gabriel Said Reynolds, The Quran and the Bible: Text and Commentary .  I won’t have the time soon to work through the thousand pages of this book, but it appears to be a major achievement and of very high quality.  Here is the book’s home page .  Here is a good piece by Reynolds on related topics .

Karl Ove Knausgaard, Spring , a comeback for Knausgaard.

The Virtue of Nationalism , by Yoram Hazony.  Falls into the “contrarian, but shouldn’t need to be contrarian” category.  It makes good points, but I felt it was interior to my knowledge set.

You can order the book here .  Here is my earlier NYT column on the economics of parking .

You can order the book here .

Those are from the new Paul Simon biography by Robert Hilburn .