I’m working from the public library this morning, and there’s a display called Jolly Holidays, filled with holiday books with titles like The Christmas Box Miracle, Jingle Bell Bark, Wreath of Deception, Redeeming the Season, Once Upon a Christmas, and…
Behavioral economist Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational
I grabbed it! No better holiday reading for my trip to Senegal tomorrow!
Over breakfast I read The Humboldt Current. (Breakfast is my Read A Friend’s Book time, and there’s no better!) On the bus I read The Book of Mormon. Then, in my carpool on the second half of my commute, I puzzle my way through Le Petit Prince in French. When I need a break during the day I read Cristina Garcia’s Handbook to Luck. And I’m starting – for the ride home – a book of Brazilian short stories (collected for students) in Portuguese.
Trying to stave off dementia.
As we draw near the close of the Africa Reading Challenge, I’m delighted to share another 11 reviews from across the continent. You can read the other 100 here.
I recently read this fascinating book. It’s an innovative mix of wordless pictures interspersed with pages of text. It’s a quick read, and I loved it!
delightful, exciting mix of mystery, adventure, books and film
This book is geared toward young adults, but don’t let that stop you. Selznick offers an exciting story in a novel format. The book is neither traditional novel nor graphic novel: Selznick mixes pages of text with pages of wordless illustrations which flesh out characters and advance the plot.
Hugo Cabret is an orphan who lived in the train station, where his uncle keeps the clocks running. But his uncle has disappeared, so Hugo keeps the clocks going while trying to fix a mysterious automaton his father left behind. Add in a toy peddler, an audacious young girl, a bookseller, and an adolescent cinephile, and you have a recipe for success! (And we learn something about early cinema to boot.)
Although the book is 550 pages, it took about two hours to read (due to all the picture pages): It was the most pleasurable and easy two hours I’ve spent in a long time!
Din, Don, Din, Do, Re, Mi
Libros y amor para ti.
Lee mucho y serás
en la vida muy feliz.
Amigos, hasta mañana,
ya es la hora de dormer.
Allí tienes mi filosofía. From the delightful Rin, Rin, Rin, Do, Re, Mi, in Spanish and English by José-Luis Orozco y David Diaz. My four-year-old son just had me read it four times in a row.
I just read this during my trip to West Africa (Sierra Leone and the Gambia). I enjoyed it, and I would have even more if I hadn’t been familiar with much of the research already: I teach at least two of my papers in my graduate economic development class. My thoughts:
witty, clever, upbeat, all while tackling some of international development’s most difficult issues
Eight years ago, as I crossed the Uganda-Kenya border, I was sequestered in a shack, interrogated, threatened with prison, and ultimately required to pay a bribe by border guards. After that harrowing experience, I returned to my hotel and recounted the story to the first friendly face I saw: my sympathetic colleague Ted Miguel. Ted and his colleague Ray spent the succeeding years studying violence and corruption in poor countries; and this sweet book is the latest fruit of those labors.
What can economics tell us about corruption and violence around the world? More, perhaps, than you’d expect. Ray and Ted use surprise changes in a dictator’s health to measure the value of political connections in Indonesia, rainfall to capture the effect of recessions on violence in Africa, and tricks in the trade data to reveal smuggling. (That’s not to mention the parking tickets – Chapter Four.) They present their clever research in surprisingly clear English, and they draw on the related research of other economists as well. They really know how to tell a story: I was captivated by the opening recounting of Kenyan author Ngugi’s woes and delighted by the creative policy making of Antanas Mockus, mayor of Bogota.
It’s hard not to compare popular economics books today to Freakonomics: Gangsters has the advantages of Ted and Ray’s witty, pleasant voice, more of a thematic focus, and none of the self-adulation that took away some Freakonomics’ shine.
Despite the focus on corruption and violence, ultimately the book is presenting a miscellany of work that is related but isn’t (and perhaps cannot be) circumscribed into a larger theory. Occasionally I found myself wishing a central theory like you find in Malcolm Gladwell’s books. But then again, those theories usually aren’t convincing for exactly the reason that Ted and Ray don’t have one: they are careful and big, broad theories are not. I really enjoyed the clear policy recommendation of Rapid Conflict Prevention Support in Chapter 6, and I look forward to more clear recommendations in the next book. Again, Ted and Ray are careful and tend not to recommend policies that don’t have clear evidence to stand on. Not all scholars are comfortable laying out strong recommendations on limited evidence; two books by scholars who are more comfortable are The Bottom Billion and The End of Poverty. (As I recall, that’s also the self-definition given by an economic hit man!) The main policy recommendation, ultimately, is more evidence-based policy making, particularly randomized trials of development programs (but with a healthy view of the realistic scope for these kinds of trials).
This book won’t just show you that economists can be clever (although it will show you that): It shows that economics, cleverly applied, can illuminate some of the most intractable development problems of our time. I strongly recommend it. And if you don’t trust me, Publishers Weekly said that in this “surprisingly spry” read, “fascinating insights abound” [1]. Take it from both of us and learn something.
[1] Publishers Weekly, 6 October 2008.
During the last couple of weeks, as I’ve ridden through busy streets of Freetown (Sierra Leone) and Banjul (the Gambia) as well as some lonely roads, I look hard at my surroundings, seeing so much more than I can photograph and yet that I would like to store. As Walt Whitman said
Once I pass’d through a populous city imprinting
my brain for future use with its shows,
architecture, customs, traditions
I haven’t yet found a good way to make the imprint stick.
Edward Bruner worked as an anthropologist cum tour guide in Indonesia in 1987.
On the second day of the tour in Jakarta, we had gone to the port, to the National Museum, and to visit other attractions. Because I had been to these sites many times, I began to photograph the tourists photographing the Indonesians. At the end of the day, Lisa [Bruner’s boss] told me to stop taking photographs of the tourists as it made them uncomfortable. My hope had been to discuss with the tourists how the Indonesians might feel being photographed by the members of an American tour group, as the tourists never asked the Indonesians for their permission. My aim was to induce some reflexivity and awareness of tourism itself, to ask the tourists to examine their own subject position, but it was not to be.
from Bruner’s Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel, p2, which I almost didn’t start because the book jacket calls Bruner a professor of “interpretive theory,” among other things.
Fisman and Miguel’s Economic Gangsters starts out with the story of Kenyan novelist Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s return to Kenya in 2004 with optimism in the face of a newly elected democratic government.* He was subsequently victimized horrifically at the hands of thugs, which victimization many imagined was politically motivated. “This isn’t the way it was supposed to be.” I’m only in chapter two, but I’m thoroughly enjoying the book. I always worry that these popular economics books will just be Freakonomics 7.0 (like Ian Ayres’s Super Crunchers, which is basically that albeit enjoyable nonetheless).
Thus far, Fisman and Miguel distinguish themselves in two ways: (1) the theme is clearly defined. Corruption and violence are massive elements of development, and this book tries to look inside those phenomena. (2) The writing is really good. It’s nice to read.
As always, I’ll let you know when I get through it; but thus far, it’s a recommended read.
Here is an interview with the authors.
[Caveat: Miguel is a good friend of mine, which affected my getting to the book a little faster than I would have otherwise, but not – at least consciously – my evaluation of it.]
*I’m a fan of Ngugi and reviewed his latest book here.
These ten reviews have shown me lots of books I am interested to explore myself…
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