Recently Mentioned Books

Benn Steil, The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War .

Robert Wuthnow tries his hand at The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America .

Matthew Engelke, How to Think Like an Anthropologist , is a very good introduction to exactly what the title promises.

Michela Wrong, I Didn’t Do It For You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation , is in fact, as a number of you had suggested, probably the best book on Eritrea.

Jeremy Bailenson, Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do . Usually I am allergic to “general summary about some new topic in tech” books, but this one is quite good.

Self-recommending, and I am delighted to again express my enthusiasm for Charles’s new The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World .  Here is Bill Easterly’s enthusiastic WSJ review of the book .

Soon I will be having a conversation with Robin Hanson — the Robin Hanson.  What should I ask him?  The jumping-off point will be his new book with Kevin Simler , but of course we won’t stop there.

Bryan Caplan’s new book is now out!

As I’ve already mentioned, the author is Ann Hulbert and the subtitle is The Hidden Lives and Lessons of America’s Child Prodigies .  This is an excellent book, and so far I am overwhelmed by the high quality and quantity of books coming out this January (in comparison to last year’s near drought).  You don”t have to care about prodigies per se, I would recommend this to anyone in Silicon Valley or finance who thinks about how to find and recruit talent, or anyone interested in the history of ar...

That is from Vlad Tarko’s new and very useful biography of Ostrom .  Of course in 2009 she was both the first political scientist and the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics.

2. “Interestingly, some prodigies may actually do better when their eccentricities are seen by loving adults as disabilities first — and talents second.”  Here is a good NYT review of Ann Hulbert’s Off the Charts: The Hidden Lives and Lessons of America’s Child Prodigies .

Timothy Tackett, The Coming of Terror in the French Revolution .

Joshua B. Freeman, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World .

Tim Rogan, The Moral Economists: R.H. Tawney, Karl Polanyi, E.P. Thompson, and the Critique of Capitalism .  The subtitle says it all.  People talk less about Tawney these days, but his book is well worth reading if you don’t already know it.

John C. Hulsman, To Dare More Boldly: The Audacious Story of Political Risk .  A consistently interesting history of political risk analysis, I most liked this sentence: “The chapters themselves are baroque in structure, a fond homage to the genius of the pioneering musician and peerless producer Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, particularly his work on his masterpiece Pet Sounds .”

Shaun Walker, The Long Hangover: Putin’s New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past .  Most of all useful for the Russia-Ukraine recent history.

I do not have time to read it now, but this appears to be an amazing and very high quality volume: David Biale, et.al., Hasidism: A New History , over 800 pp. but it does all appear to be well-written and also interesting, often gripping.

That is the subtitle, the title is No Ordinary Woman , and the author is Angela Penrose, daughter-in-law of Edith.  Here is one sentence:

And I very much enjoyed reading Ross’s forthcoming book To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism , which I found totally engrossing.

I think it’s probably fair to say that Chesterton’s Father Brown stories had as much influence on my worldview as his more sort of polemical and argumentative writings. And, again, I think therein lies some important insight that I haven’t thought through, but I think you’re correctly gesturing at, about a particular way of thinking about God and theology that isn’t unique to Christianity, but that is strongly suggested by just the structure of the revelation that we have. Marilynne Robinson has...

Here is the full review, which also covers Susan Wise Bauer’s Rethinking School .  You can buy Bryan’s book here .

Here is the full review, which also covers Susan Wise Bauer’s Rethinking School .  You can buy Bryan’s book here .

That is from Charles Albro Barker’s Henry George , still a useful biography.  Barker points out, by the way, that the notion of a “single tax” on land barely appears in Progress and Poverty , as at that time George was more focused on land nationalization.  The single tax idea became more prominent a bit later in the 1880s.

That is from Ingrid Semmingsen, Norway to America: A History of the Migration , and I believe the original reference is to ” Immigration and Insanity: A Study of Mental Disease Among the Norwegian-born Population of Minnesota,” Ø Ødegaard – Acta psychiatrica Scandinavica, Suppl, 1932.”  Here is a related post on gene-culture interaction .

19. Japan : In the old days I might have suggested Karel von Wolferen , but now it is badly out of date.  What else?