A recent trip to the library and bookstore, similar to my posts back on March 15-16 (omitting titles found then).

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Chitrita Banerji: Eating India: An Odyssey Into the Food and Culture of the Land of Spices (2007, Bloomsbury): Travel, history, culture, all introduced through food, which is pretty much the way I learned whatever I know about India.

Maude Barlow: Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water (2008, New Press): Canadian antiglobalization activist, about dwindling fresh water supplies and the politics surrounding them.

Jared Bernstein: Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed? (And Other Unsolved Economic Mysteries) (2008, Berrett-Koehler): Short book by an economist who doesn't toe the party line about the gospel of economics. I ordered a copy, and will get to it before long.

Timothy P Carney: The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money (2006, Wiley): Described as a "small government conservative," at least he sees business as no better than government. Imagine he has some examples.

Nicholas Carr: The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google (2008, WW Norton): Another big thinking book about the internet. Not clear whether it's good thinking, although the historical sketch might be useful.

Peter Chapman: Bananas!: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World (2008, Canongate): The force behind the CIA in Guatemala, and so much more. Does feel like old news, but that's history for you.

Stan Finkelstein/Peter Temin: Reasonable Rx: Solving the Drug Price Crisis (2008, FT Press): Short book on drug pricing and economics. Important subject. Don't know whether they figured it out.

William A Fleckenstein: Greenspan's Bubbles: The Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve (2008, McGraw-Hill): Pretty harsh on Greenspan, but probably more accurate than Woodward's book -- what was it called, Maestro? Note that Peter Hartcher has a similar book, Bubble Man.

Bart Jones: ¡Hugo!: The Hugo Chavez Story From Mud Hut to Perpetual Revolution (2007, Steerforth): Newsday reporter's biography, 568 pages, regarded as well written and sympathetic. I have no real interest in or feelings about Chavez, although in general I'd rather see any leftist in power vs. any rightist.

Michael Kinsley: Please Don't Remain Calm: Provocations and Commentaries (2008, WW Norton): Recycled columns, some of possible interest, although I don't see why such recycled goods don't go straight to paperback.

Heidi Squier Kraft: Rule Number Two: Lessons I Learned in a Combat Hospital (2007, Little Brown): A clinical psychologist goes to Iraq. There are hundreds of war memoirs by now, but this is likely to be a little different.

Edward J Larson: A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign (2007, Free Press): Not only the first properly partisan campaign, the first serious emergence of treachery in high stakes political activity. Checked this out to answer some questions raised by the HBO John Adams series, poked around, wound up reading most of it.

Quil Lawrence: Invisible Nation: How the Kurds' Quest for Statehood Is Shaping Iraq and the Middle East (2008, Walker & Co): A history of the Kurds, or at least their nationalist political struggle, semi-successful in Iraq as of late.

John Marks: Reasons to Believe: One Man's Journey Among the Evangelicals and the Faith He Left Behind (2008, Ecco): Journalist account, went searching for evangelicals and found some, toyed with joining but ultimately didn't. Sounds sympathetic but skeptical, a reasonable stance.

Stephen Marks: Confessions of a Political Hitman: My Secret Life of Scandal, Corruption, Hypocrisy and Dirty Attacks That Decide Who Gets Elected (and Who Doesn't) (2008, Sourcebooks): Republican operative, worked for the likes of Jesse Helms and Jeb Bush. Sounds like a sleaze bag, which no doubt helps his credibility.

Matt Mason: The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism (2008, Free Press): Business manifesto, finding opportunities for innovation on the fringes of intellectual property law.

Giles MacDonogh: After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (2007, Basic Books): 656 pages. A deeper look into the final weeks of WWII and the subsequent occupation of Germany, including the forced transfers of Germans from Eastern Europe. This stuff rarely gets looked at, probably because no one wants to offer sympathy that might be seen as balancing or lightening Germany's own crimes. However, the tendency to sweep such issues from memory allowed Americans to remember their occupation of Germany (and Japan) as more enlightened, setting a precedent for Iraq. Tony Judg covered this ground briefly in Postwar.

Charles R Morris: The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash (2008, Public Affairs): This looks like the basic background brief on the current and coming economic crisis. I ordered Kevin Phillips' Bad Money instead, but this book is getting a lot of attention.

Ian Patterson: Guernica and Total War (2007, Harvard University Press): The Spanish Civil War, specifically the 1937 German air attack on the Basque town of Guernica, immortalized in Picasso's painting. A case study in the expansion of war to indiscriminate civilian slaughter -- a powerful sign of what was to come.

Allen Raymond: How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative (2008, Simon & Schuster): Like Stephen Marks, another slimeball hawking a memoir as an exposé. Or maybe he's just bragging.

Michael Reid: Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America's Soul (2008, Yale University Press): Survey of Latin American political currents by writer for The Economist, critical both of neoliberalism and leftism.

William Rosen: Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe (2007, Viking): Microbial history, on the impact of disease on human events, specifically the plague epidemic that hit Constantinople in 542 CE, helping to usher in the dark ages.

Jeffrey D Sachs: Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (2008, Penguin Press): Bought but haven't read Sachs' The End of Poverty, which has taken a beating from critics like William Easterly. (Bought but haven't read one of his books too.) A "sobering but optimistic manifesto."

Frank Schaeffer: Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back (2007, Da Capo Press): Memoir. Parents were big-time evangelicals, and he followed in the family business, mixing in politics along the way. Not sure why he fell out, or what it means.

Jeremy Scahill: Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army (2007, Nation Books): Basic review/expose of one of the major mercenary companies today, a principal beneficiary of the Iraq war. Amazon raters are highly polarized politically.

Clay Shirky: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (2008, Penguin): How social tools based on the internet change the ways we interact and collaborate. Shirky has writen a number of seminal papers on these subjects, notably one on how the price of data always converges to zero. I checked this out, read it, and will report further.

Neil Shubin: Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (2008, Pantheon): Fish paleontologist, explores evolutionary links preserved in human ontogeny.

Ronald H Spector: In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia (2007, Random House): Covers the political aftermath of WWII, especially in China, Korea, Vietnam, Malaya and Indonesia, with US involvement in most of those areas.

Clive Stafford Smith: Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side: Seeking Justice in Guantánamo Bay (2007, Nation Books): Lawyer involved in defending many Guantánamo cases. No doubt has much to say. Not a subject I'm able to get agitated about, although I don't doubt that there are plenty of horrors to expose.

Michael Stephenson: Patriot Battles: How the War of Independence Was fought (2007, Harper Collins): Fairly detailed military history, factoring in viewpoints gained from other anticolonial wars of national liberation.

Joseph E Stiglitz, Aaron S Edlin, J Bradford DeLong, eds.: The Economists' Voice: Top Economists Take on Today's Problems (2007, Columbia University Press): A bunch of essays, many look quite interesting.

Richard H Thaler/Cass R Sunstein: Nudge: Improviding Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (2008, Yale University Press): Economist and lawyer, respectively, they expound a viewpoint they call "libertarian paternalism," which provides options for free choices but biases them in ways deemed to be socially constructive. I gather that Thaler is an influential Obama adviser.

William E Unrau: The Rise and Fall of Indian Country, 1825-1855 (2007, University Press of Kansas): Covers the period from the designation of territory from the Louisiana Purchase for "Indian country" to the partial dismemberment of that territory as Kansas was carved off from what eventually became Oklahoma.

Muhammad Yunus: Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism (2008, Public Affairs): Won Noble Prize for his work in microcredit, already detailed in his book Banker to the Poor.

Jonathan Zittrain: The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It (2008, Yale University Press): Favorable plugs by Lawrence Lessig, Laurence Tribe, Cass Sunstein. Presumably on how important it is to keep the internet free, to escape lockdowns by big brother and/or moneyed interests.