Recently Mentioned Books

Book clubs nationwide have been talking for months about whether you are “Abundance-pilled,” a reference to the recent book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that has made it into the lexicon of many public policy nerds.

By Charles Murray, now forthcoming, I expect it will be very interesting. Due out October 14 .

We will start with George’s new and excellent book False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery 1933-1947 .  But of course George has a long and distinguished record in monetary economics, free banking, macro, and ngdp ideas, as well as productivity norms for monetary policy.

A very good episode, definitely recommended.  I enjoyed all of Helen’s books, most notably the recent The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV , which was the orignial prompt for this episode.

By Sam Tanenhaus .  I held off reading this book at first, as I felt I already knew a lot about Buckley and his life.  But it is excellent.  Very well written and engaging throughout.  I learned a good deal, and it is one of the best books on the history of the American 20th century right wing.

An excellent book, Yale University Press, and currently priced below $15 in hardcover .

5. New Alex Rosenberg book on economic method and game theory .

7. Diana Darke, Islamesque: The Forgotten Craftsmen Who Built Europe’s Medieval Monuments .  Perhaps overargued in places, but an excellent book, with super-clear explanations and wonderful illustrations.  Excerpt: “No architectural style just ‘appears’ magically out of nowhere.  All the key innovations attributed to Romanesque — new vaulting techniques, the use of decorative frames, interlace and ornamental devices like blind arcades, Lombard bands, blind arches, lesenes, Venetian dentil and th...

6. Perry Anderson, Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War .  This strikes me as the kind of book where a very established author is seeking to work out issues that preoccupied him as a much younger man.  Such books tend to be interesting but also incomplete and unsatisfying?  Overall I am glad I read this one.

5. Sam Dalrymple, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia .  Are you excited by the prospect of learning more about why Burma split off from the rest of the Raj in 1937?  If so, this is the book for you.  It also has good coverage on the role of the Middle East in the history of the Raj.

2. Judith Scheele, Shifting Sands: A Human History of the Sahara .  A quite good, informative, and readable book on a very much undercovered topic.  Saharan civilization is something that runs deeper, and is more coherent, than any set of national boundaries in the region.  The author spent years living in the Saharan region of Chad.  Recommended, a good example of “you should read a book about a topic you are not thinking of reading about.”

1. Michael Kempe, The Best of all Possible Worlds: A Life of Leibniz in Seven Pivotal Days .  A good book, I had not realized the full import of Leibniz in the history of binary computation, his understanding of “novels as models,” his theory of social distancing during epidemics, or just how much attention he devoted to the historical episode of a woman as Pope.

The new Cercas book is El loco de Dios en el fin del mundo . That title translates roughly as “The crazy man of God at the end of the world,” noting there are ambiguities in who that man is (Cercas? The Pope?), and whether the end of the world refers to a trip to Mongolia or the apocalypse or perhaps death.

Here is the book’s home page .  Here is the Amazon link .

I am very sympathetic with Dean Spears and Michael Geruso, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People .

4. Rupert Gavin, Amorous or Loving?: The Highly Peculiar Tale of English and the English .  An excellent book that will make my best of the year list.  How did the English language come to be so diverse and also have so many words?  Along the way you get decent insights into economic history, the importance of London, and the Straussian readings of Macbeth.

3. Ned Palmer, A Cheesemonger’s Tour de France .  About half of this book is good and focused.  Think of it as one possible introduction to French regional history.  You can learn why Provence is so special for goat cheese, and why Dijon has kept so many original agricultural and cheese-making traditions.  Why cheese comes from Brittany only in recent times, and so on.

2. Christopher Clarey, The Warrior: Rafael Nadal and His Kingdom of Clay .  An intelligent and very good book, covering one of the greatest eras (Federer-Nadal-Djokovic) that any sport ever has had.

1. Alex Niven, The North Will Rise Again: In Search of the Future in Northern Heartlands .  If you can look past the usual ill-informed chatter about Maggie ruining northern England (the author needs to study growth models!), this is quite an interesting book.  I do not mind that it roams into the territory of popular music in what seems to be an arbitrary fashion.  Here is one bit: “I have written before about how a version of this cultural complex is one of the reasons why English identity — w...

Manu S. Pillai, Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity .  It may be fruitless to argue about this topic on-line, but almost all Westerners under-read when the topic is Hinduism.

Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn .  One of the best Trollope novels it seems, even though it is not (yet?) clear what the plot actually consists of. Currency decimalization is also one of the side plots , who can argue with that?

J.P. Mallory, The Indo-Europeans Rediscovered: How a Scientific Revolution is Rewriting Their Story .  The best book I know of on the origins and unities of Indo-European languages.  I had not known Edward Sapir was born in Pomerania.  And “…the Keres people who occupy seven pueblos (villages) in New Mexico speak a language totally unrelated to any of their neighbours and their origins have been frequently disputed.”

Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Never Known Men .  I enjoyed this novel: “Deep Underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage.  Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before.”

Francesca Wade, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife .  One of the best-written biographies I have read in years.  I would not say it is close to my core interests, but if you think you might like it you will.

Yes, I am doing another Conversation with him, in honor of the paperback edition of his highly engaging book On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything .  Here is the last installment of a CWT with Nate , here was my first Conversation with Nate .