Recently Mentioned Books

Adam Winkler, We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights , is a useful and readable treatment of the history of how businesses acquired various kinds of “personhood.”

Sebastian Edwards has a new, forthcoming book American Default: The Untold Story of FDR, the Supreme Court, and the Battle Over Gold .

John Blair’s Building Anglo-Saxon England is a remarkable look at the archaeological and historical evidence on what went on before 9th century A.D.  This is not a book of irresponsible generalizations.

Linda Yueh, What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today’s Biggest Problems .  Think of this as the updated Heilbroner.

That is the new and excellent biography by Mark Eisner , here is one good bit:

Those are all from the newly forthcoming and entertaining Mark Kurlansky book Milk: A 10,000 Year Food Fracas .

Here is his earlier NYT essay (though I think the very first link in this post is the best place to start, do read that carefully), well done but not quite representative of the book either.  You can buy it here , this is definitely one of the books of the year and one of the best popular science books of any year.

I found this book by Sebastian Abbot very stimulating, though I wished for a more social-scientific treatment.  The focus is on Africa, here is one bit on the more conceptual side:

Buy it on Amazon here .  Here is a Heyes lecture on related ideas , also click through to part II .

The author is Thomas Piketty, and the subtitle is Inequality and Redistribution, 1901-1998 .  This is a reprint and translation of the author’s original French work from 2001.  It appears to be a very seriously researched volume.

That is from Katy Waldman in the NYT .  You will find similar themes discussed in my earlier book In Praise of Commercial Culture .  In her article I also enjoyed this part:

The authors are Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey and the subtitle is Garbage and Growth in India , here is one excerpt from this worthy book:

8. Like myself, Haven considers Theater of Envy to be his most underrated book.

That is the new book by Cynthia L. Haven , which I was very enthusiastic about.  I find about half of it to be a revelation, and the other half to be perfectly fine, though material I largely had seen before (but still useful to most readers).  Here are a few of the things I learned:

That list is from Robert D. Kaplan’s quite interesting The Return of Marco Polo’s World .  Are there others? Shanghai, for a while; Rangoon, what else?

Honorable mentions : Joe Haldeman, The Forever War ; Greg Bear, Eon ; Octavia Butler Xenogenesis trilogy ; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein .  My dark horse pick might be Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things , or Audrey Niffennegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife , if that one counts as belonging to the genre.  High marks to Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, and The Stand , again if they count.  Any of these mentions could make the top ten without shame.

Honorable mentions : Joe Haldeman, The Forever War ; Greg Bear, Eon ; Octavia Butler Xenogenesis trilogy ; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein .  My dark horse pick might be Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things , or Audrey Niffennegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife , if that one counts as belonging to the genre.  High marks to Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, and The Stand , again if they count.  Any of these mentions could make the top ten without shame.

Honorable mentions : Joe Haldeman, The Forever War ; Greg Bear, Eon ; Octavia Butler Xenogenesis trilogy ; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein .  My dark horse pick might be Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things , or Audrey Niffennegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife , if that one counts as belonging to the genre.  High marks to Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, and The Stand , again if they count.  Any of these mentions could make the top ten without shame.

Honorable mentions : Joe Haldeman, The Forever War ; Greg Bear, Eon ; Octavia Butler Xenogenesis trilogy ; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein .  My dark horse pick might be Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things , or Audrey Niffennegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife , if that one counts as belonging to the genre.  High marks to Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, and The Stand , again if they count.  Any of these mentions could make the top ten without shame.

10. Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game trilogy , it only gets great at the end of the first volume, nonetheless deeply worth it.

9. Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem trilogy .  Again note the first volume is tough sledding for quite a while.

6. Dan Simmons, Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion .  I’m not sure these are important science fiction, but they sure hold your interest.

6. Dan Simmons, Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion .  I’m not sure these are important science fiction, but they sure hold your interest.

5. Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End .  In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say.  And once again, why haven’t they turned this into a movie?

4. Ursula LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness , her masterpiece, sadly I find The Dispossessed pretentious and unreadable.