This week’s New York Times Book Review fea­tures a number of books that have appeared here­abouts in the last couple of months:

+ Guy Martin reviews Patrick Symmes’s The Boys from Dolores, call­ing it “a mas­terly account of Cuba’s pathology” and “a rich, per­sonal, metic­u­lous, deeply lay­ered work of nar­ra­tive journalism.” Follow the linked title for more reviews.

+ Ben­jamin M. Fried­man reviews Gre­gory Clark’s A Farewell to Arms. Fried­man seems attracted to Clark’s genetic hypoth­e­sis even though he can’t find much evi­dence for it:

One frus­trat­ing aspect of Clark’s argu­ment is that while he insists on the “biological basis” of the mech­a­nism by which the sur­vival of the rich­est fos­tered new human attrib­utes and insists on the Dar­win­ian nature of this process, he repeat­edly shies away from saying whether the changes he has in mind are actu­ally genetic…. Nor does he intro­duce any evi­dence, of the kind that nor­mally lies at the core of such debates, that traits like the capac­ity for hard work are her­i­ta­ble in the sense in which biol­o­gists use the term.

Click here for my pre­lim­i­nary take on Clark’s argu­ment, which Ken Sil­ver­stein men­tioned favor­ably on his Harper’s blog.

+ David Orr reviews Michael O’Brien’s Sleep­ing and Waking, which he describes as “a qui­etly star­tling col­lec­tion that ought to earn O’Brien not only poetry-​world atten­tion, but actual readers.”

Buried under a head­line that rivals one in yesterday’s NYT for incom­pre­hen­si­bil­ity is an arti­cle by Nicholas Wade that struck me as inter­est­ing for all the wrong reasons.

Wade presents the work of Gre­gory Clark, an econ­o­mist whose research focuses on the changes that occurred in human pop­u­la­tions before, during, and after the Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion. Clark’s hypoth­e­sis is that genetic, and not merely cul­tural, changes are ulti­mately respon­si­ble for the increase in pro­duc­tion that allowed Euro­pean soci­eties to escape the so-​called “Malthusian trap.”

Clark’s book isn’t out yet, but Wade’s long arti­cle gives one good rea­sons to sus­pect that Clark’s hypoth­e­sis is at least untestable, if not wrong. (Most of the econ­o­mists quoted in Wade’s arti­cle praise Clark’s data gath­er­ing but are skep­ti­cal of his genetic claims.) But as a new episode in the long flir­ta­tion eco­nom­ics has kept up with biol­ogy, it’s worth paying atten­tion to.