It must be seasonal: there are lots of new books of interest just out, and lots of reviews.

The first batch on the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico are out. Blowout in the Gulf by William Freudenberg and Robert Gramling (MIT Press) and In Too Deep by Stanley Reed and Alison Fitzgerald (John Wiley). There's also of course the official report from the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Spill, Deep Water: The Gulf Oil Disaster and the Future of Offshore Drilling. The latter two are reviewed by Ed Crooks in the Financial Times. He says they reach the same conclusion – that deep water drilling will be needed – via different analyses. The blurb for the Freudenberg and Gramling book says, interestingly: “They note that—both in the Gulf of Mexico and
elsewhere—we have been getting into increasingly dangerous waters over
recent decades, with some in the industry cutting corners and with most
federal regulators not even noticing. In the process, the actual owners
of the oil—American taxpayers—have come to receive a lower fraction of
the income from the oil than in almost any other nation on earth.”

The political and social implications of the internet are another prominent current theme. Anybody interested in this subject can't have failed to notice the widely-reviewed book by Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World. The political impact of Twitter, Facebook etc have been a big subject of discussion – not least on Twitter and Facebook – during the recent events in Tunisia and Egypt. Malcolm Gladwell caused online outrage by claiming in an essay (Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted) that social networks weren't changing anything. Morozov thinks things are changing but isn't optimistic about the outcomes. I haven't yet read the book – there are tons of reviews already though, including the FT and Guardian, Charlie Beckett's excellent blog, and The Economist.

Alongside The Net Delusion there are two other sceptical to pessimistic analyses: Sherry Turkle's Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other, and a volume edited by John Brockman, Is The Internet Changing the Way You Think. They're covered in the same FT review. This is a burgeoning literature.

Other titles I picked up in my morning's reading were: Consumptionomics: Asia's Role in Reshaping Capitalism and Saving the Planet by Chandran Nair (why Chinese consumers shouldn't aspire to consumer goods as the economy develops) (NB publishers – that's enough 'somethingonomics' titles, thanks); The Future of Power by Joseph Nye; How To Run The World by Parag Khanna; and – completely different – Edgelands: Journeys Into England's True Wilderness by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts.