News from the front

It’s pretty obvious by now Neil Gaiman only has one story. It goes like this, a quite normal person, preferably a child, somehow falls through a crack in space-time and finds herself in a strange, magical, parallel world. She procedes to become a hero in that world, defeating a great evil and managing to make it back to her own reality.
It’s also pretty obvious every single time Neil Gaiman tells it, he manages to spin a wonderful tale. All the versions are special, delightful and new. And he’s a really good reader too so go listen to Neil reading The Graveyard Book and pre-order The Graveyard Book from amazon.co.uk.

That reminds me of The Day I Swapped my Dad for Two Goldfish which is as close as Neil Gaiman can come to a children’s book. It’s a much lighter story than The Story but it’s highly fun and not childish at all. Why does The Graveyard Book reminds me of The Day I Swapped my Dad for Two Goldfish ? Because the edition I have is not only beautifully illustrated but also comes with a bonus audio cd with Neil reading. That, I believe, is well worth buying The Day I Swapped my Dad for Two Goldfish even if you don’t have children.

The Undercover Economist is not an economy text book. It won’t teach you how to economize, nor how to balance double ledgers nor about how the fluctuations of oil interact with rice market in Kuala Lumpur. It’s a book about open markets and how they can make mostly everything better. Marxists, don’t stop reading.

The Undercover Economist tells how “free market” or “open market” are not the same as capitalism. It guides through how the USA managed to create an absolutely non market on some fields and how european socialism can create much more efective markets for the same services. It also recounts the last century of China’s history from an undercover economist point of view and discusses globalization, from sweatshop workers in Indonesia to coffe farmer in Vietnam, using the tools at hand.

In short, The Undercover Economist is a book about understanding market forces intuitively and in human terms instead of with formulas. That’s the hardest path for the professor and the easiest for the student, in this case Tim Harford comes through with straight AA.

Buy The Undercover Economist from Amazon.co.uk