Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, October 2010

Three-Toed Sloth 2015-07-01

Summary:

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste.

Mind candy: literary fiction about life in a mental hospital. Enjoyable and humane; I'll look out for more by LaValle.

Mind candy, at the border between literary fiction and several genres. A recurring theme of epic fantasy is that the great days are past, and yet some echo of them comes through at the last desperate moment. This captures that exactly, only it's all mad science (well, mad technology) and the secret history of the British Empire (minus the massacres of civilians, concentration camps, and famines in the name of ideology), British technology developed along a Lovelace-Ruskin axis that ought to have existed, and London crime.

Johanna Bockman, Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism

This feels like three rather unequal and not-altogether-related books:

A history of neo-classical economics's engagement with theoretical models of socialism, including the role of "social planners" in welfare analyses of capitalism. It's a fairly explicit, and I think successful, attempt to argue that there is much more to the story than Hayek's self-serving account of "the socialist calculation debate", or even than Lange's equally self-flattering if more intellectually honest account.
A history of the market socialist tradition in the Communist countries, especially Yugoslavia and Hungary, with some glances at the actual economic institutions in those countries.
An attempt to explain how eastern Europe went from aiming at some sort of market socialism in early 1989 to disaster capitalism by 1992.

The first endeavor seems pretty successful to me. The second is decent but spends so much time establishing that Yugoslav and Hungarian economists were in contact with the profession in the rest of the world, and that many of them saw no conflict between being market socialists and being neo-classical economists, that it never really explains their positive ideas, or how their countries' economies actually worked, much less the relations between the ideas and the workings. The third is just sketchy; I don't think it goes anywhere near far enough either within any one country or comparatively to actually explain much.

Even with this, and the fact that Bockman's style is the sort of thing people mean when they complain about "writing like a sociologist", there is a lot of valuable and original information in here, and some important insights about the relations between economics and ideology. It'll be required reading for anyone seriously interested in the history of market socialism and the political role of neo-classical economics. (Bockman might've been a good contributor to the Red Plenty seminar.)

M. F. Bloxam, The Night Battles

Mind candy, psychological horror division. In which a seriously messed-up Italian-American academic specializing in anthropological micro-history may or may not con her way into a small town in Sicily whose inhabitants may or may not be living out one of Carlo Ginzburg's anthropological micro-histories. In the classic tradition of English-language ghost-stories, it is systematically left ambiguous whether anything supernatural ever happens, but there's no doubt that lots of subtly horrid things occur, and the atmosphere of oppressive secrecy and reckless despair is skillfully invoked.

Disclaimer: I got a review copy of this book through LibraryThing, way back when it was published.

Kelley Armstrong, Omens and Visions

Mind candy contemporary fantasy. I liked the sections where other characters gave their perspectives on the one who's usually the first-pe

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Date tagged:

07/01/2015, 04:19

Date published: