Nonfiction
Peter T. Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates: If this book were half as good as the title, it would be awesome. Sadly, it’s extremely repetitive and uses really crude rational actor economics. There’s still some fun stuff about how pirates governed themselves, why pirates were democratically governed among themselves, why pirates were so violent to those who resisted piracy, etc. But I can’t recommend a book that says (1) government is coercive by nature, which is its distinctive feature; (2) private organizations like condo associations are not coercive, because you can decide not to follow their rules and leave (ignoring that what ultimately puts you to that choice is that the government will enforce the property/contract rights of the condo); and (3) because people can leave the jurisdiction of a government, governments are subject to Tiebout competition. (2) doesn’t make much sense under any circumstances, but it’s laughable to say all three things in a single argument. Also, Leeson is a big proponent of the idea that racial (and other) discrimination won't happen because if you can hire a discriminated-against person cheaper you'll have an economic advantage, which will eventually eliminate discrimination among economically rational employers, which is a position much like disbelieving infant baptism. And, particularly annoying to me, he misunderstands the nature of a trademark, claiming that the Jolly Roger was a trademark even though multiple pirates used it; at most it was something like a geographic indication.
Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman, NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children: Got this after reading the cover story in Newsweek, which is a condensed and misleadingly headlined version of the race chapter, basically “what white liberal guilt gets wrong and how it teaches white children to be aversive racists when parents think it’s teaching colorblindness.” Very interesting; the lessons are going to be very hard to implement. Other chapters cover topics like the often counterproductive effects of praise, the truth about lying, sibling relationships, and other topics where current research sometimes matches conventional wisdom and sometimes veers far away from it. I liked it a lot.
Augusten Burroughs, Dry: Running with Scissors is Burrough's memoir of his extremely fucked-up childhood, and this book is about his alcoholism, with occasional PSTD-like flashbacks to some of those childhood memories. He works in advertising and drinks constantly; his employers stage an intervention; he goes to rehab and does really well with it, until he doesn't. It reads pretty honest, and I got a sense of what he meant when he talked about struggling to feel his own emotions--he's believable not understanding when he's in love and struggling with whether he can trust what he thinks he's feeling.
A.B. McKillop, The Spinster and the Prophet: H.G. Wells, Florence Deeks, and the Case of the Plagiarized Text: Florence Deeks spent years writing a history of the world focused on women’s role. H.G. Wells spent a couple of months writing a history of the world; when he wrote about women, it was disparagingly, which was of a piece with his treatment of them in real life. How did Wells manage to write a best-seller of several hundred thousand words, never having written history before, in such a short time that he had to have averaged thousands of words a day? Well, McKillop makes a good circumstantial case that he leaned heavily on Deeks’s unpublished manuscript, which she’d sent to Wells’s Canadian publishers, who hung on to it for a really long time before rejecting it and returned it to her dogeared and dirty. Deeks spent years and perhaps a hundred thousand dollars on her ultimately futile lawsuit-futile because she was a spinster and he was a well-respected author, as well as futile because the similarities were very much in idea rather than expression, and only copying expression can lead to legal liability. But it was clear throughout that narratives of hysterical women were more important than what actually happened to that manuscript. As a copyright minimalist, I found myself unwilling to call what Wells did infringement, but I’d join in the plagiarism conclusion.
comments on DW
Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman, NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children: Got this after reading the cover story in Newsweek, which is a condensed and misleadingly headlined version of the race chapter, basically “what white liberal guilt gets wrong and how it teaches white children to be aversive racists when parents think it’s teaching colorblindness.” Very interesting; the lessons are going to be very hard to implement. Other chapters cover topics like the often counterproductive effects of praise, the truth about lying, sibling relationships, and other topics where current research sometimes matches conventional wisdom and sometimes veers far away from it. I liked it a lot.
Augusten Burroughs, Dry: Running with Scissors is Burrough's memoir of his extremely fucked-up childhood, and this book is about his alcoholism, with occasional PSTD-like flashbacks to some of those childhood memories. He works in advertising and drinks constantly; his employers stage an intervention; he goes to rehab and does really well with it, until he doesn't. It reads pretty honest, and I got a sense of what he meant when he talked about struggling to feel his own emotions--he's believable not understanding when he's in love and struggling with whether he can trust what he thinks he's feeling.
A.B. McKillop, The Spinster and the Prophet: H.G. Wells, Florence Deeks, and the Case of the Plagiarized Text: Florence Deeks spent years writing a history of the world focused on women’s role. H.G. Wells spent a couple of months writing a history of the world; when he wrote about women, it was disparagingly, which was of a piece with his treatment of them in real life. How did Wells manage to write a best-seller of several hundred thousand words, never having written history before, in such a short time that he had to have averaged thousands of words a day? Well, McKillop makes a good circumstantial case that he leaned heavily on Deeks’s unpublished manuscript, which she’d sent to Wells’s Canadian publishers, who hung on to it for a really long time before rejecting it and returned it to her dogeared and dirty. Deeks spent years and perhaps a hundred thousand dollars on her ultimately futile lawsuit-futile because she was a spinster and he was a well-respected author, as well as futile because the similarities were very much in idea rather than expression, and only copying expression can lead to legal liability. But it was clear throughout that narratives of hysterical women were more important than what actually happened to that manuscript. As a copyright minimalist, I found myself unwilling to call what Wells did infringement, but I’d join in the plagiarism conclusion.
comments on DW