Recently Mentioned Books
Showing 25 of 6798 mentions, ordered by most recent.
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 .
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 .
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 .
2. Michael E. Hobart, The Great Rift: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Religion-Science Divide . I wanted to love this book, and I still think it is quite important and worthy, but I don’t love reading this book. Yet here is the first and marvelous sentence of the preface: “This book uses the history of information technology — in particular, the shift from alphabetic literacy to modern numeracy — to narrate and explain the origins of the contemporary rift between science and religion.” After that...
1. Kathryn Lomas, The Rise of Rome: From the Iron Age to the Punic Wars . A very thorough, reasonable, and well-researched account and synthesis of what we know about the origins of the Roman empire. By my standards it is insufficiently concerned with generalizations, but I do understand how many might consider that an advantage.
If you say “I don’t know much about Algeria. I should read Alastair Horne on the country, watch Battle of Algiers, and try to speak with some Algerians,” you are again organizing knowledge, and your quest for knowledge, in terms of place.
5. Political thinker : Czesław Miłosz , The Captive Mind , about the capitulations of artists to communism, though subtler than just an anti-state polemic. He once stated: ” I have never been a political writer and I worked hard to destroy this image of myself.” I do not feel I can judge his poetry, though last year’s biography of him was a good book.
1. Novel : Stanislaw Lem, Solaris , all about identity and erotic guilt. Next in line would be any number of Isaac Singer novels, I don’t have a favorite offhand. Soon I will try The Family Moskat . Gombrowicz is probably wonderful, but I don’t find that it works for me in translation. Quo Vadis left me cold.
1. Novel : Stanislaw Lem, Solaris , all about identity and erotic guilt. Next in line would be any number of Isaac Singer novels, I don’t have a favorite offhand. Soon I will try The Family Moskat . Gombrowicz is probably wonderful, but I don’t find that it works for me in translation. Quo Vadis left me cold.
1. Novel : Stanislaw Lem, Solaris , all about identity and erotic guilt. Next in line would be any number of Isaac Singer novels, I don’t have a favorite offhand. Soon I will try The Family Moskat . Gombrowicz is probably wonderful, but I don’t find that it works for me in translation. Quo Vadis left me cold.
The above passage is from the highly useful and deeply comprehensive The Great Rent Wars: New York, 1917-1929 , by Robert M. Fogelson. Note that back then both rent control and “building more” won. As for today, Megan has a relevant column .
The author of the book is Evan Osborne and the subtitle is How Society Gains When We Govern Less .
Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity .