Recently Mentioned Books

3. New book coming on Carlsen vs. Niemann .

That is from W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland , from 1937, which is one of the better travel books, if indeed that is what it is.

That is from the new and notable Mark Solms, The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing .  This is a good book for people who underrated Freud, or think he is a mere charlatan.

5. Kevin Hartnett, The Proof is in the Code: How a Truth Machine is Transforming Math and AI .  A very useful book about the history of proving math theorems by computer.

4. Mark B. Smith, Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization 1953-1991 .  I am seeing an increasing number of excellent books on what the Soviet Union really was.  This one is well written, broad in scope, and yet rich in detail, treating the covered era as a living, breathing time in human history.  It makes the time and place imaginable .  The book also goes a long way toward disaggregating different Soviet eras, rather than just the end of Stalinism.

3. David Stuart, The Four Heavens: A New History of the Ancient Maya .  We keep on learning lots about the Maya, and this is the best book to follow what has been going on.  Well-written and clear, and it does not numb your mind with details you may not care about.

2. Nic von Wielligh and Lydia von Wielligh-Steyn, The Bomb: South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Programme .  I had been looking for a book on this topic for a long time, and finally I found the right one in a South African bookshop.  They did build six atomic bombs, almost seven, and this is the story of how that started and was later reversed.  Hundreds of pages of substantive detail, and I had not realized how much the conflict in Angola, and Cuban/Soviet involvement, was a major factor in the whol...

1. Allister Sparks, The Mind of South Africa: The Story of the Rise and Fall of Apartheid .  This history book actually tries to explain to the reader how things were.  Oh such books are so rare!  (Why is that?)  Definitely recommended, written at the very end of the apartheid era which gives it yet another angle of interest.

He is one of the world’s leading art critics, all of his books are excellent, and he has a new and very good work coming out titled Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found .  He also has a well-known book on Caravaggio, on Michelangelo, and I am especially fond of his book on British art.

Perhaps the exchange is a little slow to start, but otherwise fascinating throughout.  I am also happy to recommend Harvey’s recent book The Rise and Fall of Rational Control: The History of Modern Political Philosophy .

The subtitle is The Real Reasons Economies Shrink and What To Do About It .  Here is from the book’s summary:

That is from the very good book by Hermann Giliomee The Afrikaners: A Concise History .

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him.  He is one of the leading historians of ancient Egypt, and he has a recent book out on Ptolemaic Egypt, namely The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra .

Here is one obituary .  My favorite book of his was The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society .

To this day, when I think about the economics of AI, and many other matters, Lachmann’s book Capital and its Structure is one of my go-to inspirations.

One of the things I like best about South Africa is how quickly one enters another and very different intellectual world.  Walk into a good used book shop, such as Clarke’s in Cape Town , and you find a slew of quality history books and biographies you otherwise would not have heard of.  Buy them and read them and be transported.  So many of them exist apart from the usual dialogues.  For instance, I recently bought Digging Deep – A History of Mining in South Africa by Jade Davenport.  It looks ...

The Five Tastes: Delicious Recipes for Chinese Flavor , due out this fall.  Via Joe Powers in the MR comments section.  Hers are the very best Chinese cookbooks and they are also wonderful books more generally.  She has been a CWT guest three times now .  Let us hope a fourth episode is in order…

Murphy : People don’t like change, but also people are bad at long term planning. Yeah. You’ve spoken before about how faith is a key requirement in terms of being able to plan over the long term. How do you bring that idea to policymakers?

Vladimir Jurowski has recorded Maher 1, 2, 4, 8, and with 9 on the way and I read somewhere he will be doing the entire cycle.  I expect these will end up as my set of choice.

The Marek Janowski box of Bruckner symphonies I find to be the best Bruckner overall.  And yes I do know many other versions, even Hermann Abendroth, though I cannot hold a candle to one MR reader I met recently who may know seventy or more versions of Bruckner’s 8th.

José Donoso, The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History is a good lshort overview, noting that Donoso’s own The Obscene Bird of Night is one of the great underrated works of 20th century literature.

José Donoso, The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History is a good lshort overview, noting that Donoso’s own The Obscene Bird of Night is one of the great underrated works of 20th century literature.

Davd Epstein, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better .  A good popular look at what the subtitle promises.

Partha Dasgupta, On Natural Capital: The Value of the World Around Us , is a popular summary of some of his thinking on valuing the environment and natural resources.

Muriel Spark, The Driver’s Seat .  If you like her at all, you will be entranced by this one.  With a radical ending, as you might expect.