Newmark's Door

Bits about two interesting-sounding books

Damn, It Feels Good to be a Banker.

About Wharton: "The fact it is attached to the University of Pennsylvania is [its] biggest and most tragic downfall . . . being lumped together with such a big, ugly mass of mediocrity creates insecure, overcompensating alumni."

About Harvard: "It's obvious that the university is trying to sell students on the notion that they could and should be the next Natalie Portman, John Roberts, or a writer for 'The Simpsons.'"

Why We Suck: A Feel Good Guide to Staying Fat, Loud, Lazy and Stupid (by the inimitable Denis Leary).

I'm sick of low esteem and fake fat-suit-wearing female talk-show hosts and extreme makeovers and steroid-laden home run hitters and Reese Witherspoon movies and Paris Hilton's himbo boyfriends and celebrity rehab and Dr. Phil.

Rivals

Interesting review of a new book by Bill Emmott, Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade. In the last paragraph the review writes:

Sketching a "plausibly pessimistic" scenario, he [Emmott] suggests that an economic downturn and popular discontent could lead the Chinese Communist Party to wrap itself in the flag of nationalism and slide into conflict with neighbors over Taiwan, the Korean peninsula, Tibet or Pakistan.

Nah. Russia is soon going to be the "sick man" of Europe. If China needs to expand, or to fight, it seems to me the least complicated target would be Russia.

Dwight Lee, 1; Richard Layard, 0

Dwight Lee, again. He reviews Richard Layard's book, Happiness: Lessons From a New Science (Journal of Bioeconomics, volume 10, pp. 97-99, 2008). He eviscerates Layard's primary policy proposal:

The crux of Layard’s policy argument is that by earning more income you are generating a negative externality—in his words, polluting—because your higher income makes others unhappy. . . .

If the public, and then politicians, take seriously the argument that earning money (being productive) is equivalent to pollution, there is no end to the destructive policies they could enact. An entrepreneur who puts existing firms out of business by providing consumers with better products at lower prices is, according to this argument, polluting those who own and work for the bankrupt firms, and there should be a stiff entrepreneurial tax to correct this externality. Maybe Layard would approve of such a tax, but would he approve of a special tax on academics when they have articles or books accepted by prestigious journals or university presses? Consistency certainly requires that he support such a tax, since those academics who are successful publishers impose externalities (unhappiness pollution) on their colleagues whose relative publishing success is diminished.

Not to mention that the proposal has a disconcerting "Harrison Bergeron" vibe.

Salute to Herb Kelleher and a story about predatory pricing

Making an honest buck in business is tough. Making that buck for 37 years is tougher. Making that buck for 37 years while retaining a huge amount of affection from your employees is tougher still. The Door seconds this salute to Herb Kelleher, retiring chairman of Southwest Airlines.

And yes, being able to operate out of Love Field helped, but there are a number of stories that testify to Southwest's smart business decisions. One of my favorites, useful in an economics course because it illustrates a weakness of the standard "predatory pricing" claim, is as follows:

In its early days Southwest Airlines competed primarily with Braniff. Southwest undercut Braniff's prices a little and provided better service and more convenience. But Southwest was making money on only one route, the Dallas-Houston route--it accounted for 72% of Southwest’s revenue--and Braniff slashed its price in half on that route.

Southwest took out full-page ads accusing Braniff of predatory pricing and it asked, “Remember What It Was Like Before Southwest Airlines?” The ad then offered to match Braniff's price, but it also asked customers to voluntarily buy the full-price ticket (with a small bottle of Scotch thrown in). Supposedly, more than 75% of Southwest's customers chose to pay full price.

Braniff reversed the price cut after two months, and about two years later exited the route completely. (This account is in a famous B-school case; I got the details second-hand from Peter Robinson's fine book, Snapshots from Hell: The Making of an MBA.)

Score another one for Michael Crichton

Michael Crichton, a multi-talented fellow--and whose speech "The Case for Skepticism on Global Warming" is underappreciated--predicted in 1993 that the mass media were headed for extinction. Slate says he was, albeit a bit early, mostly right.

Three books to look forward to

Joshua D. Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke, Mostly Harmless Econometrics: An Empiricist's Companion. (Ya gotta love "mostly harmless".)

In addition to econometric essentials, Mostly Harmless Econometrics covers important new extensions--regression-discontinuity designs and quantile regression--as well as how to get standard errors right. Joshua Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke explain why fancier econometric techniques are typically unnecessary and even dangerous. The applied econometric methods emphasized in this book are easy to use and relevant for many areas of contemporary social science.

Richard B. McKenzie, A Defense of Rational Behavior in Economics.

Dora L. Costa and Matthew E. Kahn, Heroes and Cowards: The Social Face of War.

When are people willing to sacrifice for the common good? What are the benefits of friendship? How do communities deal with betrayal? And what are the costs and benefits of being in a diverse community? Using the life histories of more than forty thousand Civil War soldiers, Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn answer these questions and uncover the vivid stories, social influences, and crucial networks that influenced soldiers' lives both during and after the war.

"It's the soul of true parenting . . .

. . . and it's very rewarding": encouraging kids to read.

True dat.

Theresa Fagan, mother of eight, lists some of her family's favorite books.

I'll add, for little kids, the all-time classic, Goodnight Moon, and for middle-schoolers, the magnificent, Pulitizer Prize-winning novel by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling.

(In 7th grade I wrote Ms. Rawlings a fan letter, and she wrote me back. Eat your hearts out.)

A lot of potential good reading

"Free Speculative Fiction Online".

Sounds like an interesting book

The Lessons of Business History: A Handbook.

Over the last few decades, business historians have generated rich empirical data that in some cases confirms and in other cases contradicts many of today's fashionable theories and assumptions by other disciplines, says Harvard Business School professor Geoffrey Jones, who edited the volume with University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Jonathan Zeitlin.

   

A book full of life stories, each just six words

Sounds fun.

A plumber: "Fix a toilet, get paid crap."

Sappy or heartbreaking, you decide: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”    

Ms. H. Clinton: "From Ill.; met Bill; iron will."    

Notable recent science fiction for free

The 2007 Nebula award final ballot, with active links to most of the nominated novellas, novelettes, short stories, and scripts.

More from Margaret Wise Brown

I don't know whether this is good news for parents or not. Another manuscript by Margaret Wise Brown, author of the ubiquitous, much-loved-by-toddlers Goodnight Moon, has been discovered.

Useful book?

Mefites discuss the question, "What is the most useful book you own?"

Props to the person who picked Peter Kennedy's A Guide to Econometrics.

A big boo to the person who picked Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.

Sowell on his new book

Thomas Sowell interviewed briefly about his new book, Economic Facts and Fallacies.

What a surprise. (Not!)

Amazon's top book reviewers are not exactly pure, unbiased amateurs.

What the smart kids are reading

Interesting idea: Cal Tech graduate student correlates the "top ten" books among students at colleges (as computed by Facebook) with the average SAT scores of the colleges.

The books that correlate most with high SAT scores: Lolita, 100 Years of Solitude, Crime and Punishment, Freakonomics, Catch-22, and Atlas Shrugged.

Link via Marginal Revolution.

Super Crunchers review

About three months later than promised, here’s my review of a (relatively) new book by Yale economist and lawyer, Ian Ayres, titled Super Crunchers. I thank Jason D. Gordon, President of Precedent Media, Unlimited for sending me a copy.

As an old joke begins, “There’s good news and there’s bad news . . .”

The good news.

This could well be an interesting book for a high school or college student who is curious about applications of statistics. This could well be a useful book for a businessman who is unacquainted with statistics and who wants to know how experiments might help him run his business. For everybody else, there are a handful of good stories. The stories are about how, according to Ayres, “We are in a historic moment of horse-versus-locomotive competition, where intuitive and experimental expertise is losing out time and time again to number crunching. . . . Business and government professionals are relying more and more on databases to guide their decisions. . . . What is Super Crunching? It is statistical analysis that impacts real-world decisions.” (p. 10)

Here are the stories that I think are interesting.

Computer Science texts and "all questions answered"

"Classical Computer Science Texts". Several dozen, all online, free.

I was intrigued by the title of a Donald Knuth piece, "All Questions Answered". Here's the opening:

In every class that I taught at Stanford, the last day was devoted to “all questions answered”. The students didn’t have to come to class if they didn’t want to, but if they did, they could ask any question on any subject except religion or politics or the final exam. I got the idea from Richard Feynman, who did the same thing in his classes at Caltech, and it was always interesting to see what the students really wanted to know.

Interesting. I've actually tried a small-scale version of this. On a few occasions when I've been really tired and I note the students look tired, too, I've started class by asking "So, what do you want to talk about today?"

The result is usually stunned silence, even after I repeat the question and add that I really am willing to consider other topics for ten or fifteen minutes or so.

But one time I got some interesting questions.

Attention, please: you do not--I repeat, you do not--want to irritate or anger P. J. O'Rourke.

That is all.

Request for book suggestions

An economics professor and long-time reader of the Door is requesting book suggestions. Post 'em in the comments, or e-mail me. Here's his request:

For my class blog this spring I want to feature "good news" book reviews. The general idea is to review books that dispel pessimism with regard to the economy and economic growth. I will probably do one of these per week for the students.

Here is what I have so far:

1. Myths of Rich and Poor, by Cox and Alm

2. The Progress Paradox, by Easterbrook

3. It’s Getting Better all the Time, By Moore and Simon

4. The Improving State of the World, by Goklany

5. The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, by Fogel

6. The Skeptical Environmentalist by Lomborg

7. The State of Humanity, by Simon

Something you probably won't see in the mainstream media: Bruce Bawer, a self-declared gay, registered Democrat, writes a scathing review of Barack Obama's book, Dreams of My Father.

But the mainstream media--the Boston Globe, no less--did give us this smart op-ed on Obama by Joan Vennochi, "When Hope is Not Enough".

Why Catch-22 was almost Catch-18 and why it's so much better that it wasn't.

(Who knew "22" had such symbolic importance? The author finds much meaning in "22" even though we now know the author didn't pick that number and was, in fact, opposed to it.)

The opposite of Atlas Shrugged?

I mentioned last week that next year I will teach a course on the moral foundations of capitalism. One of the pro-capitalism readings will be Atlas Shrugged. So I was interested in this MeFi discussion: "What book is the opposite of Atlas Shrugged?"

Is terror really because of what we did to them? A new book, The Siege of Mecca, analyzes "A Missing Link in Terror's Chain".

Kind of cute: "10 Overrated Business Books (and What to Read Instead)".

Review of a book about a public high school that's three times as hard to get into as Harvard: NYC's Stuyvesant.

If Tyler Cowen makes it in New York, can he make it anywhere?

Congratulations to Tyler Cowen whose new book, Discover Your Inner Economist, is well reviewed by New York magazine. And it's always nice to see a mainstream journalist sneeringly assert that economics began, more or less, in 2005.

Not so long ago, economists not named Milton Friedman mostly kept to themselves, impressing each other with their inscrutable theories. Now they’re the pop stars of academia. Spurred on by Freakonomics, the 2005 best seller by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, economists realized that, if only they can learn to communicate normally, they have the tools to explain people’s lives to them. Like, why won’t my teenage daughter wash the dishes?

Weddings: expensive and inexpensive

A review of One Perfect Day: more on the strange business that is the modern American wedding.

And courtesy of faithful reader Chris M., this news on how some couples are saving a little money on their weddings. Once again, one can only marvel at the creativity of capitalism.

Anyone notice how much better things have become since the Democrats again assumed charge of Congress? George Will has a few words for the ever-popular (not!) Harry Reid.

Speaking of our Liberal friends, Harry Stein notes Charles Pickering's new book A Price Too High and asserts that what that distinguished gentleman experienced at the hands of Liberals has no precedent.

More dramatically than any confirmation battle in memory, the Pickering case demonstrates that liberals will seemingly say anything—and tarnish even the most sterling character—to keep control of the nation’s courts.

Of course, cynics see this as merely part of the game. Politics, they’ll say, ain’t beanbag, and weren’t many Clinton nominees to the federal bench similarly done in by Republicans? No, not really—never with the same degree of ruthlessness.

How has life turned out for Charles Webb, author, 44 years ago, of The Graduate? Not well, but he says he "wouldn't have had it any other way".

Review of The Economic Naturalist

I received Robert H. Frank's The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas as a gift. Tyler Cowen liked it. Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post gave it a mixed review:

The result is often repetitious and too often simplistic and unsatisfying. . . . It is pleasant enough to read, but it breaks little new ground and winds up being more clever at asking questions than at answering them.

While I, too, spent a pleasant couple of hours with the book, I have, like Pearlstein, some complaints.

However, I completely support what Professor Frank is trying to do. He wants students taking introductory economics to begin applying economics as soon as possible. He assigns his students to write short essays that are "to use a principle, or principles, discussed in the course to pose and answer an interesting question about some pattern of events or behavior that you personally have observed." About 90 such questions-and-answers that his students proposed are the core of the book. (Another couple dozen or so derive from Professor Frank's research and the research of other professional economists.)

This is a very worthwhile objective. And Professor Frank states, ". . . their answers to the questions should be viewed as intelligent hypotheses suitable for further refinement and testing. They are not meant to be the final word." So, the questions-and-answers also have benefit of stimulating further discussion and further hypothesizing.

But a problem with teaching through these assignments is that finding good questions and answers is quite difficult. Many of the students' questions or answers, or both, won't be very good. Given that the 90 in the book probably represent the best responses of several Cornell classes' worth of assignments, four problems with using these assignments in the classroom are apparent.

I haven't read Joel Best's Flavor of the Month: Why Smart People Fall for Fads yet, but this is one hell of an interesting beginning:

I could not have—and would not have—written this book without the inspiration provided by various administrators at the three universities where I’ve spent nearly twenty-five years chairing academic departments. Department chairs attend many meetings at which the future is unveiled, priorities are articulated, and innovations are announced. Over the years, I have been assured that our university—if not all of higher education—was about to be transformed by affirmative action, the Pacific Rim, assessment, active learning, cooperative learning, distance learning, service learning, problem-based learning, responsibility-based management, zero-based budgeting, broadening the general education requirements, narrowing the general education requirements, capstone courses, writing across the curriculum, multicultural education, computer networking, the Internet, water (don’t ask), critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, and I don’t know what else. I have gone on retreats; participated in program reviews; served on task forces; puzzled over mission statements; written five-year plans, three-year plans, and niche reports; and listened to proclamations from provosts, assistant provosts, deans, associate deans, and wannabe deans. I have been assured with tight-lipped seriousness: “This is not a fad.” Still, after all these amazing transformations, today’s universities do not seem all that different than they were when I was a student.

Tyler Cowen puzzles over why some people dislike long books. Hedge Fund Guy has one answer:

Too many arguments, or too many references, reflects a weak point. Dawkin's The Selfish Gene was 266 pages, Hayek's Road to Serfdom 240, Philip K. Howard's Death of Common Sense 213, Bryan Caplan's Myth of the Rational Voter 280.

Movies should all be less than 120 minutes, books under 300 pages. Of course, there should be exceptions for great works like The Godfather and Godel, Escher, Bach, but these are very rare. And this is the problem, because too many creative people think their work is as good as the Godfather or Godel, Escher, Bach.

One of the mistakes I think high school English teachers make is to emphasize novels rather than short stories. So it's no surprise that I think Classic Short Stories is a good idea.

Fewer and fewer people these days read short stories. This is unfortunate--so few will ever experience the joy that reading such fine work can give. The goal of this site is to give a nice cross section of short stories in the hope that these short stories will excite these people into rediscovering this excellent source of entertainment.

Interesting passage in a review of Jerome Groopman's new book:

For their part, doctors should be wary of diagnoses that appear instantly obvious. Groopman quotes one doctor who jumped to the conclusion that a woman had pneumonia when, in fact, she had an aspirin overdose, which can cause some of the same signs and symptoms. "I learned from this to always hold back, to make sure that even when I think I have the answer, to generate a short list of alternatives."

This, of course, is one of the fundamental lessons of critical thinking: in the absence of controlled experimentation, figuring out causality is almost guaranteed to be hard. Investigators should entertain multiple hypotheses, and they should not be too quick to discard any.

If our medical doctors, in their many years of training, are not learning this, we're in bigger trouble than I've thought.

But maybe this shouldn't be surprising: even esteemed columnists for the Washington Post admit that they need to brush up on basic critical thinking.

Last time I checked, Edward Tufte's infamous rant, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, was available for downloading here.

I haven't looked at it, but free is good and linear algebra is important, so a heavily praised textbook on linear algebra available for free might be of interest.

The Raleigh News and Observer's J. Peder Zane surveyed "125 of the world's most celebrated writers" to compile the "Top Ten Greatest Books of All Time".

Two by Tolstoy, one by Nabokov, The Great Gatsby; none by Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, or Hemingway.

Being a "celebrated" writer evidently doesn't mean one is a good judge of writing.

Is string theory a waste of time? Review of two books that think so. Reviewer concludes:

As for string theory, it’s likely to unravel only when its practitioners begin to get bored with their lack of progress. Like the old Soviet Union, it will have to collapse from within. The publication of these two books is a hopeful sign that theoretical physics may have entered its Gorbachev ­era. 

A Harvard Business School professor writes what sounds like an impressive biography of Andy Grove.

Carnegie Mellon faculty recommend economics books

An ambitious student occasionally asks me for a list of economics books to read. Here, courtesy of the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon, is a good list. (Well, except for The Affluent Society.)

Review of How to Spend $50 Billion, edited by Lomborg

I recently finished How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place (hereafter, $50 Billion), edited by Bjorn Lomborg. I thank Jeffrey Anderson of FSB Associates for providing me a review copy.

$50 Billion has an introduction by Professor Lomborg, and nine chapters written by other scholars that discuss the following world problems: global warming, communicable diseases, civil wars, lack of education, poor governance, population growth and migration, hunger and malnutrition, unhealthy drinking water, and trade barriers. Each chapter discusses the magnitude of the problem, and some potential solutions. Each chapter is followed by a brief statement of “opposing views”. $50 Billion concludes with a summary of the answers given by eight distinguished economists to the question, “What would be the best ways of advancing global welfare, and particularly the welfare of developing countries, supposing that an additional $50 billion of resources were at governments’ disposal?” The economists rank as the best uses for the money projects for controlling HIV/AIDS, providing micronutrients to people in poorer countries, liberalizing trade, and controlling malaria. They rank as least attractive uses projects to reduce global warming.

And still another public service on the Web: "The Top 50 Movie Endings of All Time". The Usual Suspects, Planet of the Apes, and Casablanca should all be ranked higher but these are just quibbles.

Somebody needs to do this for books and short stories. Off the top of my head, I'd have to list A Farewell to Arms and Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream".

Review of To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever: A Thoroughly Obsessive, Intermittently Uplifting, and Occasionally Unbiased Account of the Duke-North Carolina Basketball Rivalry.

Mark Steyn reviews a book, Before the Dawn, that argues that primitive peoples weren't as peaceful as some have led us to believe:

Lawrence Keeley calculates that 87 per cent of primitive societies were at war more than once per year, and some 65 per cent of them were fighting continuously. "Had the same casualty rate been suffered by the population of the twentieth century," writes Wade, "its war deaths would have totaled two billion people." Two billion! In other words, we're the aberration: after 50,000 years of continuous human slaughter, you, me, Bush, Cheney, Blair, Harper, Rummy, Condi, we're the nancy-boy peacenik crowd. "The common impression that primitive peoples, by comparison, were peaceful and their occasional fighting of no serious consequence is incorrect. Warfare between pre-state societies was incessant, merciless, and conducted with the general purpose, often achieved, of annihilating the opponent."

"Find out what's wrong with anything, fast." Debugging Rules!

BusinessWeek Online has posted some of my book recommendations.

Show off your creativity: blogger Tim Worstall is looking for titles for bad business books, such as

Sex and Career Choices, by Larry Summers

Practical Accountancy, by Jeff Skilling with Andy Fastow

Drop by and put some titles in the comment section. All I've got is Tolerance of Other Religions, by Henry Ford and The Key to the Car Business: Buy Non-Car Companies!, by Roger B. Smith.

I'll have to try to read this book because Professor Pfeffer is an interesting guy, but he's also had some harsh--and I think very misleading--things to say about economics.

Business Week review.

I've got plenty to read, thank you, but if any readers of the Door are looking for suggestions, you might find this page helpful.

(If you're thinking about starting your own business, Bruce Judson's Go It Alone! is available online for free.)

Given UNC-CH's recent propensity for picking controversial books for entering freshmen to read, this is interesting: Appalachian State has picked Freakonomics. Link via The Liberal Order.

I recently read The Number by Lee Eisenberg. I thank Free Press for providing me a review copy.

The message of The Number is simple. If you find financial planning for your retirement to be confusing, discouraging, or difficult, you are not alone. If you’re not saving for your retirement, or you’re not saving enough, you’re not alone.

The author is not a scold. He does not try to make you feel ashamed in the manner of the perky young dental hygienist who asks, “Do you floss?” (Unless you reply, “Absolutely; three times a day and four on Sunday,” she sighs, gives a fake little smile with her perfectly aligned, brilliant white teeth, and chastises you: “You really should floss. It’s soooooo important”. And then she looks at you the way she would look at a cockroach.)

The author, instead, empathizes. He writes that for most of his life he was one of those people, too. He understands why people are that way. He contends it is because uncertainties abound: the old defined-benefit retirement plans are disappearing; Social Security seems shaky at best; the dot-com bust makes the stock market look riskier than it did just a few years ago; and anyway, who can understand all those products your friendly stockbroker is trying to sell you?

So the book is not preachy or condescending. The tone is friendly and helpful. The writing is crisp and entertaining. He cites approvingly the books of financial writer Andy Tobias who “. . . was a wisecracking New Yorker clever enough to understand that dry and earnest wasn’t how you talked money management to a generation that (a) had never known financial adversity, and (b) didn’t take managing it very seriously.” I think he succeeds in writing about money as well as Tobias does.

Jonathan Yardley reviews a new biography of one of the greatest American businessmen ever: Milton S. Hershey.

(And take a look at how Hershey stock--quiet, low-tech, unsexy--has done over the past 20 years: it's beaten the pants off the S&P. I make it a CAGR of about 16.4%.)

Two interesting links courtesy of reader Michael Greenspan.

A review of a new book, Crap Cars, that discusses "fifty of the most craptastic cars ever to hit the American highway".

"My Golden Rule: 49 Leaders, from Buffett to Spitzer, share their secrets of success". One good one: Jim Goodnight, formerly of NC State and now head of SAS writes, "At any company, it's easy to get into a rut of spending your day reading e-mail and going to meetings. That's not a productive way of doing business."

Study reveals that almost every UNC-Chapel Hill freshman has an entry in Facebook.

Study also reveals that the third-favorite book among Chapel Hill freshmen is The Great Gatsby. What the hell? It's got to be yet another sign of the Decline of Our Youth.

My thanks to Alan Reynolds who sends this link to his list of suggested readings in economics, which he suggests might be especially appropriate as gifts for young people.

I'd add two quick comments.

I've used The Economics of Public Issues by Miller, Benjamin, and North for several years as a supplementary text in introductory economics. It is well-written, assumes no prior economics, is not technical or mathematical, and is just generally excellent. It has a decidedly pro-market, anti-government slant, which is all to the good.

And the Myths of Rich and Poor: Why We're Better Off Than We Think by Cox and Alm is a well-argued, creative response to economic gloom-and-doomers. Certain government statistics--"average wage rate" and "median family income" for two--are often cited to suggest that the U.S. economy has done poorly in the last 20 to 25 years. But these statistics have some significant problems. And this conclusion runs counter to what we can see with our own eyes: if things are so bad, how come U.S. houses are so big and how come there are so many $40,000+ vehicles on the road? Cox and Alm explain that, for most Americans, things have been improving at a rapid rate.

Thomas Sowell lists some "Mind-Changing Books". He mentions in passing that his favorite among his own books is A Conflict of Visions. Which is cool, because it's my favorite book of his, too.

The Telegraph has an interesting article on an element of literature I've long thought deserves more attention: endings.

First lines are great fun. But they aren't really as important to a novel as the last lines. From a terrible first line, a novel may recover; the last line is what it leaves a reader with.

If you haven't spent a little time at Books-A-Minute yet, you're in for a treat. There are many good ones but among my favorites are the ones for As I Lay Dying, The Great Gatsby, The Old Man and the Sea, and The Collected Works of Jane Austen.

Ivo Welch's textbook-in-progress, A First Course in Corporate Finance, free for the taking, for now. Other free textbooks listed at Textbook Revolution. (Link via Digg.)

I haven't read it, but here's an abstract for a paper forthcoming in the Michigan Law Review that claims the Harry Potter books have a decidedly libertarian perspective.

Time Magazine's critics pick the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. (Not my list: I spent a few very long weeks in high school plodding through A Passage to India. Oom boom, indeed.)

Thanks to Susan MacTavish Best of Best Public Relations for calling my attention to Lulu.com, a site for people wanting to self-publish books, calendars, images, music, or video, or to buy same. The site is also initiating a "Blooker Prize", for the best book based on a blog or a website.

Glenn Reynolds makes an economics point about the Singularity

Glenn Reynolds reviews Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near and makes a neat point. While Kurzweil is generally an optimist, he does worry some about the potential bad consequences of accelerating technological change. But Reynolds argues that the best way to cope with those potential consequences is not more government, but more market activity and more technology.

Tim Worstall, a friend of Newmark's Door and proprietor of an excellent blog, has edited a book which will be out soon, 2005: Blogged, Dispatches from the Blogosphere. (Some details on the book are here. It is currently available at Amazon UK but not Amazon US.)

It would be especially appropriate for a friend or relative who wants to know "what is this blogging business I hear so much about?"

Marc Siegel, associate professor of medicine at NYU, offers a very sharp observation: "Irrational health anxieties boost your risk of the conditions you should fear the most".

Still on the health beat, "20 Tips to Help Prevent Medical Errors".

Finally, Jane Brody reviews a book, Happiness in a Storm, that encourages seriously ill people to keep their hopes up.

For most patients, the path to the best scientifically established treatment starts with learning all you can about your condition, the available therapies and their likely consequences, then deciding on a treatment plan and choosing a medical team well-equipped to carry it out. . . .

Humor helped Dr. Harpham over many rough spots. When her second recurrence was diagnosed on the same day as the first but a year later, she quipped, "I've consolidated my recurrences so that I won't have too many bad-news anniversaries."

Nice summary of A Conflict of Visions

For those who haven't read it--and as I've lectured you before, you really should read it--Gene Healy offers a nice, concise summary of Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions. I quibble with one sentence of the review:

The book was written in 1987, so there's probably more focus on central planning than the modern reader needs, that fight having largely been won, and the unconstrained vision mugged by reality.

Oh yeah? Somebody forgot to tell our Liberal friends.

But Mr. Healy should be forgiven this small lapse because he describes himself using the wonderful words of Elvis Costello: ""I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused."

(Link to the summary via my older daughter.)

This summer I read Wonderland, A Year in the Life of an American High School. The hook is the Pennsbury High prom. At Pennsbury the prom is a storied traditon, it is extravagant, and it--apparently rare these days--is held in the school.

So the book is interesting. The author, middle-aged, views all the goings-on with more than a touch of melancholy:

"No examined life is ordinary."

"Wow, the father thought. That's my little girl? . . . When did she get so grown up? They were the words that have been expressed, one way or another, forever: Where did the time go?"

"He had just turned eighteen. In a few weeks he would be voting for the first time. All he had ahead of him was the prom, graduation, the summer before college, and all the tomorrows that would come after it. The wind was dying with sunset. It was a Saturday night. The school was closed--no debate tournament, no football game, no dance--but the village of Pennsbury was up and running. What Bob would do, he did not know."

For an update on one of the key events in the book, go here (scroll up to the first post at the top of the page). It's interesting that the kid writing this thinks the book was named for a recent pop song; the author explicitly declares otherwise. Some kids should have a touch more history and literature.