Recently Mentioned Books

1. Karl Ove Knausgaard, Autumn .  While this volume of very short essays does reflect a literary sensibility, I didn’t find it fun or insightful to read.  By the way, “Vomit is usually yellowish and can range from pale yellow to yellowish-brown, with certain areas of quite different colours, like red or green.”  So I suppose the Knausgaard canon really is just the first two volumes of My Struggle .

That is from William Wilson in American Affairs , hat tip goes to Garett Jones and Rogue WPA Staff .  Here is Jason Kuznicki’s new book , which I have not yet seen.

Here is an adaptation from the book on the history of barbed wire .  Here is another BBC adaptation on why electricity did not change manufacturing more quickly.  You can pre-order the book here .

The Kindle edition at least you can pre-order.

Ideology and the Evolution of Vital Economic Institutions: Guilds, The Gold Standard and Modern International Cooperation . (with Charles Hickson). Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000. This book is an attempt to summarize and extend Thompson’s work on institutions, growth collapses, and globalization. The book is exploding with ideas. Some of them you will find convincing. Others you might find crazy. However, the book will make you think. You won’t get these types of arguments or this type of thin...

You can pre-order here .  Here is the book’s home page .

6. New major study of the Bank of England coming out .

David Osborne, Reinventing America’s Schools: Creating a 21st Education System , covers how charter schools are transforming the American educational landscape.

Jack Schneider, Beyond Test Scores: A Better Way to Measure School Quality .  Under a true value added measure, the schools in Somerville, Massachusetts turn out to be quite good, even though their raw test scores are not impressive.

4. Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored: Europe After Napoleon: The Politics of Conservatism in a Revolutionary Age .  Published in 1964, before Kissinger became Kissinger, although he is a war criminal this volume shows the quality of his thought: “…an equilibrium based on considerations of power is the most difficult of all to establish, particularly in a revolutionary period following a long peace.  Lulled by the memory of stability, states tend to seek security in activity and to mistake imp...

3. Michael D. Barr, The Ruling Elite of Singapore: Networks of Power and Influence .  From 2013, but all the more relevant today.  Barr’s coverage is insufficiently appreciative of good results, but nonetheless offers an invaluable “how things really work” guide to Singaporean government, most of all on where accountability lies and where it does not.  There is guesswork involved, but this book offers plenty of details and analysis you won’t get elsewhere.

2. Johnny Rogan, Byrds: Requiem for the Timeless: Volume 2: The Lives of Gene Clark, Michael Clarke, Kevin Kelley, Gram Parsons, Clarence White and Skip Battin .  Full of amazing and loving detail, this volume covers the less famous of the Byrds, and why their careers did not go further; whether in business or the arts, we spend too much time studying the winners.  Here are my earlier remarks on Rogan’s earlier editions as an extended essay on management theory and career advice.

1. Daphne Hampson, Kierkegaard: Exposition and Technique .  Dense but carefully argued and consistently insightful, perhaps the best introduction to its subject matter.  It is especially strong on how Kierkegaard’s Lutheranism informed his critique of Hegel, his supernaturalism, and his strong opposition to complacency.

That is from Slavoj Žižek”s book, the subtitle being Enjoyment as a Political Factor , one of his best, intermittently lucid and sometimes brilliant, most of all on Hegel.   Žižek also reminded me of an old Christopher Hitchens quotation: “mass delusion is the only thing that keeps a people sane.”

5. Clive Geoffrey, The Romantic Enlightenment , has my favorite essay on Mozart.  A reasonably priced reissue is needed.  The standard biographies are very good, also read Mozart’s letters .

4. The Milos Forman Mozart movie is worth a viewing, if you don’t already know it.  I thought I would hate it, but didn’t.  Don’t try to learn history from it, however.

5. Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg .  I had never read this in German before.  For all its extraordinary intellectual and emotional peaks, it is also remarkably witty.

4. Rousas John Rushdoony. The Foundations of Social Order: Studies in the Creeds and Councils of the Early Church .  Uneven in argumentative quality, but brilliant in parts, this is one of the conceptually most interesting books on early Christianity.  It turns out your views on Christology really do shape your politics, and furthermore there is a coherent version of libertarian Calvinism, except it isn’t very libertarian, and it comes from…having the right Christology.  Recommended, it opens up...

3. Mark Bowden, Hue 1968: A Turning Point in the American War in Vietnam .  Both a very good Vietnam War book, and a very good Vietnam book.

2. Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War .  Pseudoerasmus calls this the best book on the most underrated big war in human history ; he is right.  It also gives you a good sense of how 50-100 million people might have died.

1. Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad .  At first I feared it was too trendy, but I ended up engrossed.

That is from the still-engaging Theodore H. White The Making of the President 1968 .  And here is Rod Dreher on crime and morality .

That is from the new and interesting Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power , by Howard W. French.  I believe the definitive economic history of the Grand Canal remains to be written, it will be a major achievement when it happens.

I’m not counting Canetti, Kafka, and the like, who are not properly Austrian, though they lived in the Empire. Rilke does not count either, though he is one of the greatest of poets. Joseph Roth was born in Galicia, yet I think of him as an Austrian rather than Polish writer, again still somewhat neglected in the English-speaking world.  Try Radetzky March . Franz Werfel I find ordinary, though I have not yet read Forty Days of Musa Dagh , for some his masterpiece, I did buy a copy of that one r...

12. Stefan Zweig . The World of Yesterday is a favorite, sad and bittersweet, and it treats the European civilization that was passing away at the time of the Second World War, still relevant.  Zweig committed suicide in Brazil, here is an excellent biography .  The rest of his fiction still is read around much of the world (not so much America, famously in Russia), but I find it pretty ordinary and of its time.