Books
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China – Didn’t It Already Shake The World?
The Peking Duck offers a review of a new book, China Shakes the World, by James Kynge. Sounds like a great read – I haven’t seen it yet but will order it. China Law Blog also recommends it. … Continue reading
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Against Perfectionism
Add this to The Useless Tree summer reading list: Michael Sandel, The Case Against Perfectionism: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering (Harvard, 2007). It was reviewed today in the NYT by William Saletan. I have only read… Continue reading
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Are We Born Moral?
In the most recent New York Review of Books, John Gray asks this question in connection with two books: Marc Hauser’s Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, and Frans de Waal’s Primates… Continue reading
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Virtue Ethics and Confucius
A great book review by Jim Holt of Deirdre McCloskey’s, The Bourgeois Virtues. I laughed out loud when I read the last line: "Somewhere within this loose, baggy monster there has to be a slim, cogently argued treatise… Continue reading
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Confucian Social Science
Now here is a book I am going to go out and buy right away, based on the review by Malcolm Gladwell review in this week’s New Yorker: Charles Tilly, Why? Princeton University Press, 2006. I… Continue reading
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It’s Chuang Tzu – Even Though They Don’t Mention Him
James Reston, Jr. has a new book out, Fragile Innocence, which is reviewed in today’s Washington Post. I am working from the review here, but it rings very familiar to me: the story of a father discovering and… Continue reading
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The Pursuit of Happiness
In an article in this week’s New Yorker, "Pursuing Happiness," John Lanchester reviews some new books on that contented emotion. It is a sweeping piece, engaging recent research in psychology and brain scanning technology, and running across a… Continue reading
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