Recently Mentioned Books

The author is Bob Harris, and the subtitle is The Life and Times of Lord Daer 1763-1794 .  Who is Lord Daer ?  Don’t worry about that!  So many books on the Scottish Enlightenment cover one particular thing, but somehow fail to give the reader a proper sense of life on the ground.  I found this is the best book I know for actually communicating what it was like to live during, and participate in, the Scottish Enlightenment.  Maybe to achieve that end it is necessary to focus on the life of a fig...

That is the title of a recent book by Beatrice Magistro .  Some key results are:

7. The new Richard Hanania book is out .

Somebody actually went out and looked at Joseph Needham’s many volumes on Chinese technology and science, or Science and Civilisation [in China] , as he called it, and he discovered something—which I guess we all knew, but they put numbers on it—almost nothing that Needham pointed out as an innovation happens after 1400. There’s complete stagnation setting in and some of the things that they knew how to make in earlier times, like the sophisticated clocks that they built in the 11th century, the...

He has a new and excellent book out, namely 1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World .

A very good book, forthcoming, by Karol J. Borowiecki and Marc Lawx, here is the Amazon link , here is the Princeton University Press page .

5. Michael Polanyi’s book The Contempt of Freedom is now reissued .  Amazon link here .

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him, based around his new book Ausländer: One Family’s Story of Escape and Exile .  Mike of course was a pioneering venture capitalist through Sequoia, and before that had a distinguished career as a journalist, which included books on Chrysler, Apple (the first such book I believe?), and soccer coach Alex Ferguson of Manchester United.  Here is his Wikipedia page .

5. Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light .  Yup.  “Earth is long since dead.  On a colony planet, a band of men has gained control of technology, made themselves immortal, and now rule their world as gods of the Hindu pantheon.”  First published in 1967.

3. James Hawes, The Shortest History of Ireland .  From a useful series, even if some of the claims are wrong and the judgments intemperate.  Such books force you to think through your own views and interpretations, they serve as refreshers for the basic history, and they do give you conceptual frameworks of a sort.  You are more likely to remember the core histories when you read books like this, but caution typically is in order as well.

2. Andrea Wulf, The Traveler: One Man’s Epic Quest for Discover Our Shared Humanity .  This book meets her usual high standards.  In this case the traveler is George Foster, who sailed with Cook to the South Seas and had relatively sympathetic attitudes toward the indigenous peoples there.

Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him.  Obviously Acemoglu has published plenty, but likely this chat will focus on his recent writings and pronouncements on AI, and most of all his forthcoming book What Happened to Liberal Democracy? Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity .  So what should I ask him?

That is from the recent fun book Lancashire: Exploring the Historic County that Made the Modern World , by Chris Moss.  And I enjoyed this paragraph:

A good episode with many points of interest.  And I enjoyed Joanne’s recent book Thomas More: A Life .

The new book you can order here .

Christopher de Hamel’s Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is one of the very greatest books of the last twenty years.  So I buy whatever else he puts out, and I did not regret my purchase of this one.  Imagine an intersecting tale of a boyhood in New Zealand (!), the medieval manuscript collecting habits of Colonial Secretary Sir George Grey, and a Bildungsroman of both aesthetic taste and personal maturation.  The back cover notes that “Christopher de Hamel has probably handled more medieval ...

All those details are from the new and fun book by Alistair Moffat, To See Ourselves: A Personal History of Scotland Since 1950 .  From these tidbits I conclude that “Scotland as we knew it” is not just evolving, but also disappearing.

And there is Jeremy A. Simmons, Sea of Treasures: A Cultural History of Ancient Indian Ocean Trade .

Daniel Susskind, What Should My Children Do?: How to Flourish in the Age of AI is a book that needed to be written.

5. Justin Gest, Democratic Drain: Global Migration and the Struggle for Democracy is a political economy argument that widespread immigration can drain home countries of their democracy supporters to some extent.

4. Alastair Reynolds, “ Zima Blue ,” one of the better short stories about AI, and also aesthetics.  Via R.

4. Frank Callanan, James Joyce: A Political Life .  An excellent book, and it truly induces us to revalue Joyce and understand him in a new light.  Joyce was in fact highly politically conscious, heavily influenced by Parnellism, and in part writing a critique of Irish nationalism from an internal perspective.

3. I liked all of Thomas F. Madden’s The Fall of Republics: A History from Ancient Carthage to the American Constitution , but most of all the section on Venice.

2. Dialogues of Confucius , translated and edited by Brian Buya and Wenwen Li.  It seems these works, once considered doubtful in provenance, are likely by Confucius after all?  So this is an epic volume of real import.  But does it raise my opinion of Confucius as a thinker?  No.

1. Allison Schrager is very good, including her new book Worth the Risk: The Seven Myths that Keep Us from Taking the Chances We Need to Take .