Recently Mentioned Books

4. Alexander Thurston, Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement .  Makes a murky history relatively easy to follow, by the way: “Put all these ideas together, and “Boko Haram” means something like “Western culture is forbidden by Islam” or “the Westernized elites and their ways of doing things contradict Islam” — not just in schools but also in politics and society.”

3. Helen Dale, Kingdom of the Wicked .  Here is Helen on her book :

2. The Acts of the Lateran Synod of 649 , translated with notes by Richard Price.  I hadn’t realized how many of these early Church debates were kept and passed down to the current day.  The participants really do seem to know they are debating the intellectual framework for everything else to follow, and yet people hardly talk about these books.  They are among the most significant remaining traces of the ancient world, Rome and Constantinople in particular.  How can you beat this?: “If anyone ...

1. John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids .  A remarkably readable and indeed prescient British work from 1951, you’ll find so much of the science and speculative fiction of the last few twenty years in here, a bit of Saramago too.  What if most (but not all) of the world goes blind but then has to fight-off plant-like invaders which turn out to be more intelligent than we had thought?  Underrated.

I will be having a Conversation with him December 4th, by the way, you can register here .  His forthcoming book is spectacular, but we will talk about everything under (and above) the sun, what should I ask him?

Honorable mentions : Jonathan Livingston Seagull , Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance , and The Joy of Sex , all given to me by my mother.  I believe they helped inculcate some of the 1960s-70s ethos of individual freedom into my thinking.  I also consumed numerous sports memoirs, such as Jerry Kramer’s Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer and also the war memoir Guadalcanal Diary .  From those I began to think about the relationships between character, work habits, teamwor...

Honorable mentions : Jonathan Livingston Seagull , Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance , and The Joy of Sex , all given to me by my mother.  I believe they helped inculcate some of the 1960s-70s ethos of individual freedom into my thinking.  I also consumed numerous sports memoirs, such as Jerry Kramer’s Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer and also the war memoir Guadalcanal Diary .  From those I began to think about the relationships between character, work habits, teamwor...

Honorable mentions : Jonathan Livingston Seagull , Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance , and The Joy of Sex , all given to me by my mother.  I believe they helped inculcate some of the 1960s-70s ethos of individual freedom into my thinking.  I also consumed numerous sports memoirs, such as Jerry Kramer’s Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer and also the war memoir Guadalcanal Diary .  From those I began to think about the relationships between character, work habits, teamwor...

5. Rudolf McShane and Jakow Trachtenberg, The Trachtenberg System of Basic Mathematics .  From this I learned how powerful the individual human mind could be, and also how much school wasn’t teaching me.  It began to occur to me that the mainstream doesn’t necessarily have the best or only methods.  That said, non-mainstream approaches still have the responsibility of coming up with the right answer.  Query: does it these days ever make sense to actually use this stuff?

4. David Kahn, The Code-Breakers, The Story of Secret Writing .  I read this one quite young, and learned that problems are to be solved!  I also developed some sense of what a history could look like and what a history should report.  I recall my uncle thinking it deeply strange that a boy my age should be reading a book of such length.

3. Reuben Fine, Basic Chess Endings .  I wasn’t influenced so much by this book itself as by a long series of articles in Chess Life and Review , showing the analysis was full of holes.  See my remarks on Kotov.

2. Bobby Fischer, My Sixty Memorable Games of Chess .  Reflects a certain kind of classicism in thinking and method.  Later, it was revealed much of the analysis was faulty and in part was from Larry Evans and not Fischer himself.

Due out in March, pre-order here .  The book also has Jon Elster, Timur Kuran, and Jonathan Haidt, dare I call it self-recommending?

Strongly recommended.  I was pleased to see that Publisher’s Weekly named Sujatha Gidla’s book as one of the ten best of 2017, you can order it here .

He is the author of the new and interesting Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials .  Most of the book is about millennials as the generation that invests in itself.  Towards the end he lays out a somewhat separate discussion of what a future dystopia might look like, I am very briefly summarizing his seven points, noting that some of the headings are my rewordings:

The subtitle is Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy , and the author is leading Syrian intellectual Yassin Al-Haj Saleh.  Imagine having a well-written book, totally conversant in the arguments of the social sciences, that set out to explain the Syrian tragedy to an intelligent reader.  Here is one typical bit:

5. I am most worried by the prominent center table at the entrance, which presents “Books with 4.8 Amazon stars or higher.”  I saw a book on mixology, a picture book of Los Angeles, a Marvel comics encyclopedia, a book connected to the musical Hamilton , and a series of technique-oriented cookbooks, such as Harold McGee, a very good manual by the way.  Isabel Wilkerson was the closest they had to “my kind of intelligent non-fiction.”  Neil Hilbon represented poetry, of course his best-known book...

My view is not exactly that of Bryan’s, but this will be one of the most interesting and important books of the year, pre-order it here .

Here is excellent New Yorker coverage of the book from Keith Gessen .  You can buy here on Amazon .

You can pre-order here .

That is from Eugen Weber’s classic Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 .

I am indebted to Sujatha Gidla for a useful conversation on this topic.  My formal Conversation with her will be up in a bit, I still recommend her book on caste, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India .

That is all from Randall Munroe’s What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd and Hypothetical Questions .

But if you are otherwise not so keen on this Brennan-Buchanan argument , what exactly are the grounds for opposing this?  It taxes the relatively wealthy, and it taxes income from wealth.  It taxes finance.  I haven’t heard anyone oppose the tax on the investment income of private foundations, other than diehard anti-tax types.  That tax has hardly vanquished the private foundation form.  On top of all that, university endowments seem to have long time horizons, and to play the g > r game pretty...

Here is a link to the podcast version of the chat, plus further explanation of my interview method for the two .  Better yet, you can order their new book The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality .