Recently Mentioned Books

1. Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men, Star Maker .  Who needs characters and plot when such a compelling mega-Hegelian take is on the table?  His other novels are underrated as well.

I will be having a Conversation with her soon.  She is a philosopher at the University of Chicago, and her new book Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming is coming out in early April.  Here are some of her papers .  Here is her recent NYT Op-Ed .  So what should I ask her?

What should you read by him ?: Violence and the Sacred , Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World , Theatre of Envy .

What should you read by him ?: Violence and the Sacred , Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World , Theatre of Envy .

What should you read by him ?: Violence and the Sacred , Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World , Theatre of Envy .

Politico is running an excerpt from my essay in the new Cass Sunstein book .  Here is one opening bit:

The authors are Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl, and the subtitle is Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society .

You should all buy and read Robin’s new book, with Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life .

While promoting my new book , I’ve repeatedly argued that foreign language requirements in U.S. schools are absurd and should be abolished.  For two distinct reasons.

Many of you have asked me for further commentary on Bryan Caplan’s education book , which is doing very well.  I’ll be doing a Conversation with Bryan, but for the time being I’ll say this: everyone obsesses over the mood-affiliated “I’m going to lower the status of education signaling argument.”  Hardly anyone has discussed what to me is Bryan’s strangest assumption, namely a sociologically-rooted, actually anti-economics “conformity is stronger than you think” argument, which Bryan uses to ass...

The subtitle is The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism .  Imagine a novel and interesting coverage of the post-war Austrian School, here relabeled the “Geneva School,” a well-done partial history of the WTO and EU, and a book where the central characters are not only Mises and Hayek, but also Alexander Rüstow , Wilhelm Röpke , and Michael Heilperin .

Domenico Starnone’s self-contained short novel Trick is now out, translation and introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri.

William Deringer, Calculated Values: Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative Age , covers the rise of numerical reasoning in 17th century Britain.

2. Martin Goodman, A History of Judaism .  Imagine a scholarly history of Judaism, told from the points of view of the time, rather than treating so many events as lead-ups to later anti-Semitism: “My attempt to provide an objective version of Judaism may strike some readers as naive.”  I found the book to be a useful mood affiliation jiu jitsu, plus it has plenty of information that competing sources don’t, most of all about the immediate post-Temple period.  Recommended.

1. Jörn Leonhard, Pandora’s Box: A History of the First World War .  This is probably the meatiest and most comprehensive WWI book yet published.  It covers the origins of the war, preparation for fighting, public reactions, war aims, the course of battle, war economies, internal politics, the battlefields, how it ended, and more, all at 1,060 Belknap Press pages.  Translated from the German, it doesn’t exactly spring to life in your lap, but it is consistently intelligent and thoughtful.  Amazi...

Those figures are from the new and excellent Big is Beautiful: Debunking the Myth of Small Business , by Robert D. Atkinson and Michael Lind.

You can pre-order it here .

That is from Anne Goldgar, there is much more at the link , including an explanation of how the myths about Tulip Mania spread, fake news basically.  Here is her earlier book on the topic , here is an earlier Peter Garber piece .

The book’s subtitle is The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress .  And here is my earlier discussion with Pinker , video, podcast, and transcript.

It will be out soon, you should buy it .  I’ve only read my own essay in the book, but that one is very good and also original, I haven’t made the argument elsewhere.  Presumably the other essays are better yet, as they feature Jon Elster, Timur Kuran, Samantha Power, Duncan Watts, Noah Feldman, and other luminaries.

7. Matthew Restall, When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History .  A radical revision of the usual story, based on a careful reexamination of Spanish and Nahuatl stories.  Restall seems to be mostly correct, but I will add two points: a) I never took the older account very seriously anyway, and b) I am more interested in the new macro-story than the micro-revisions of the march and the encounter and surrender and so on.  One big difference seems to be there was ...

6. Jeffrey C. Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke .  I don’t have the time to make my way through the details of this 900+pp. book, but upon browsing it appears to be a work of incredible quality, scope, and original research.

5. Ran Abramitzky, The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World , covers the economics of the Kibbutz.

4. David Hockney and Martin Gayford, A History of Pictures .  How artists have thought about space and light over the centuries, consistently interesting and insightful, wonderful color plates too.  I am not persuaded by all of Hockney’s claims about art history, but overall he is much underrated as a writer and thinker, including on the nature and import of photography.

3. Robert Irwin, Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography .  The most interesting material concerns Khaldun’s history as a Sufi.  Which brings me to Alexander Knysh’s Sufism: A New History of Islamic Mysticism , which I enjoyed.  Overall I find this a fruitful area to study, and I benefited from some parts of Alexander Bevilacqua’s The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment .