Recently Mentioned Books

David Kynaston, Till Time’s Last Sand: A History of the Bank of England, 1694-2013 , seems to be a fine work of history, but it is not organized analytically in the way I might wish.  Still, some of you should be interested, as this is 796 pp. of well-written, carefully researched material on the BOE.

William Blake and the Age of Aquarius is a beautiful exhibition catalog, with text, edited by Stephen F. Eisenman, for a show currently on at Northwestern University.

I have only browsed my library copy of Masha Gessen’s The Future of History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia , but it looked very good and so I ordered it from Amazon.

4. Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine .  “As Dolot remembered it, the presence of the Soviet state in his village in the 1920s had been minimal.”  And “Initially, collectivization was supposed to be voluntary.”  And “When their potatoes were gone…people began to go to the Russian villages and to exchange their clothing for food.”

3. Neil Monnery, Architect of Prosperity: Sir John Cowperthwaite and the Making of Hong Kong .  I didn’t find this inspiring to read, but still it is a useful account of the under-covered early days of how Hong Kong evolved into a freedom-oriented economy after World War II.  Here is a review from The Economist .

2. Grant N. Havers, Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy: A Conservative Critique .  Havers argues against Strauss from “the Right,” but sympathetically.  He suggests Strauss underrated Christianity and had too high an opinion of antiquity, and was a true liberal democrat, while the American founders consciously rejected ancient political thought.

I will be having a Conversation with them, in part connected to their very important forthcoming book The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality .  But not only.  What should I ask these two leading lights?

That is from the quite interesting Two Tales of Crow and Sparrow: A Freudian Folkloristic Essay on Caste and Untouchability , by Alan Dundes.

She is the author of the new and superb Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India .  I will be interviewing her later in the month, with a podcast and transcript forthcoming, no public event.  Here is her Macmillan bio:

Sometimes I draw a distinction between “branching” books, whose arguments spread out in many different directions and draw many distinctions, and “channeling” books, which try to put the material into a narrower, common framework.  (Reading each requires quite distinct sets of skills!)  This is a branching book.  You can order it here .

For economic historians I can recommend Bruce M.S. Campbell, The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World .

Barry Eichengreen, Arnaud Mehl, and Livia Chitu, How Global Currencies Work: Past, Present, and Future .

4. Nils Karlson, Statecraft and Liberal Reform in Advanced Democracies .  How did liberal reforms happen in Australia and Sweden?  This book tells you about the world, rather than the theory or the taxonomy.  There should be many more books of this sort, a study in actual public choice.

3. Barry Hatton, The Portuguese: A Modern History .  “Portugal largely missed the Enlightenment.”  This is the best introduction I know to that charming country.  In 1986, Portugal had only 123 miles of highway.  It had not occurred to me, by the way, that the 1974 coup was the first Western European revolution since 1848, unless you count the Nazis.  Here is a picture showing Portugal as an Atlantic rather than Mediterranean economy .  Explanation here .

2. Richard McGregor, Asia’s Reckoning: China, Japan, and the Fate of U.S. Power in the Pacific Century .  I am sick of books on these topics, because they tend to repeat the same old same old.  This one has fresh content on almost every page, and it is especially strong on explaining how the revisionist history debates in China and Japan fit into domestic politics and also foreign policy.

1. The New Testament , translated by David Bentley Hart, Yale University Press.  I’ve spent a good bit of time with this book, and if you own and read a few New Testaments, this should be one of them.  It is the most accurate translation conceptually and philosophically, taking care to render the Greek of that period as faithfully as possible.  It doesn’t try to make the text “read nice,” nor does it make all of the books sound the same.  Of course, with any Bible translation you care both about...

Doug has a very exciting new book on the history of trade coming out , which I covered here .  Here is Doug on Twitter .  Here is Doug’s recent WSJ Op-Ed on Steve Bannon, trade, and the history of America’s greatness .

6. Like David Brooks , I enjoyed Eli J. Finkel’s The All-or-Nothing Marriage .

The author is Mehrsa Baradaran, and the subtitle is Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap .  Here is one excerpt:

5. William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust . Miller’s books from the 1990s remain an underrated source of “stuff for smart people.”  His book on disgust could be the best in that series, for me this is a reread and yes it did hold up.

4. Stephen Greenblatt, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve .  In general I am a Greenblatt fan, and not persuaded by the critics of his popularizations, but this book is not doing it for me.  For the Hebrew Bible I prefer to read densely argued Straussians.

3. Fred Hersch, Good Things Happen Slowly: A Life in and Out of Jazz .  How someone from a previous generation a) became a star jazz pianist, b) discovered gay liberation, and c) woke from a coma to resume a miraculous career.

2. Declan Kiberd, After Ireland: Writing the Nation from Beckett to the Present .  A very high quality and original look at how Irish literature reflects the nation’s development, though it assumes a fair knowledge of the works being discussed.

1. Peter Sloterdijk, Selected Exaggerations: Conversations and Interviews, 1993-2012 .  No, he’s not a fraud, and this volume is probably the best introduction to his thought.  Is there an extended argument here?  I am not sure, but I did enjoy this bit:

1. Robert H. Bates, The Development Dilemma: Security, Prosperity, & a Return to History , provides an interesting look at Kenya vs. Zambia with regard to state capacity, and drawing some parallels to earlier England vs. France.