Recently Mentioned Books

Reviel Netz, Why the Ancient Greeks Matter: The Problematic Miracle that Was Greece . Uneven but periodically fascinating: “But science was but a small part of the Greek cultural sphere and it would be surprising if the overall contours of Greek cultural life could be explained through science alone. It seems much more promising to consider…what mattered the most to the Greeks themselves. This was their literary legacy: their canon.”

Diane Coyle has a new book coming out, The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters .

David Sheff, Yoko: A Biography .  An excellent work, I view Yoko as a quite good visual and conceptual artist, a sometimes quite interesting but hard to listen to in any volume musical creator, and overall a pretty stunning woman.  Sheff has known Yoko well for decades, so you get a real sense of her from this book, even if you wonder that perhaps not all details are being reported.  I learned also that the same guy at Sarah Lawrence dated by Yoko and Sylvia Plath.

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him.  He has a new book coming out, namely Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider’s View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead .

Ezra is getting plenty of coverage for his very good and very on the mark new book with Derek Thompson, Abundance .  So far it is a huge hit after only a few days.  I figured this conversation would be most interesting, and add the most value, if I tried to push him further from a libertarian point of view (a sign of respect of course).  Here is the audio, video, and transcript .  Here is part of the episode summary:

Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him.  Chris is a managing partner at Andreessen-Horowitz, and has recently published Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet .  Here is Chris on Wikipedia .  Here is Chris on Twitter .  Chris has some writings on his home page .

I very much enjoyed Carl’s latest book Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Air We Breathe .

There is Paul Bluestein, King Dollar: The Past and Future of the World’s Dominant Currency .

John McWhorter, Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words .  Mostly about actual pronouns, not the PC debates.

5. Zaha Hadid, Complete Works 1979-Today .  Architecture, plus excellent preliminary sketches of the works. The Weil am Rhein works are my favorite of what I have seen by her.  Exactly the kind of picture book that will become more valuable in an age of strong AI.  Here are seventeen buildings by her .

4. Making and Meaning: The Wilton Diptych , National Gallery of London.  If you want to learn about a historical figure (in this case Richard II), read a book about an art work associated with them.

3. Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us .  A reasonable, evidence-based, non-crazy account of governance failures and excesses during the Covid crisis.  For me there was not so much new here, but I am glad to see saner voices moving into the discourse.

2. Daniel Dain, A History of Boston , 772 pp., clearly written and consistently interesting.  Most of all one receives the sense of Boston as a place with a long history of radical ideas.  Has it moved away from that tradition or cemented it in?  I find that more and more of America has little acquaintance with New England and its history, and this book is one good way to remedy that.  Remember Rt.128?  Paul Revere?

1. Eric Topol, Super Agers: An Evidence-Based Approach to Longevity .  Longevity research goes mainstream!  Very clearly written, well argued, and focused on the science.  I cannot pretend to evaluate the details of the material, but this seems a step ahead of the other, typically less serious books on the same topic.

1. Paul McCartney will be publishing a history of Wings .

There is also Brandy Schillace, The Intermediaries: A Weimar Story .

There is Daniel Brook, The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld Visionary of Weimar Berlin .  It is good to see him getting more attention.

Kathleen deLaski, Who Needs College Anymore? Imagining a Future Where Degrees Don’t Matter .  One of a growing chorus of books suggesting higher education is on the verge of some radical changes.

I agree with the central arguments of Samir Varma’s The Science of Free Will: How Determinism Affects Everything from the Future of AI to Traffic to God to Bees .  I was happy to write a foreword for the book.

Carlos M.N. Eire, They Flew: A History of the Impossible .  Ross Douthat recommended this one to me.  It is well done, and worth reading, but I don’t find it shifted my priors on whether “impossible” events might have really happened.

Philip Freeman, In the Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music of Cecil Taylor .  Call me crazy, but I think Sun Ra and Taylor are better and more important musically than say Duke Ellington.  Freeman’s book is the first full-length biography of Taylor, and it is well-informed and properly appreciative.  It induced me to buy another book by him.  The evening I saw Taylor was one of the greatest of my life, I thank my mother for coming with me.

Eddie Huffman, Doc Watson: A Life in Music .  A fun book about one of America’s greatest guitarists .  Watson was blind from an early age, and he was collecting state disability benefits until he was 40 — a classic late bloomer.

Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams .  I was in the mood of thinking I don’t need to read another book about these people.  Yet this one was so good it won me over nonetheless.

Alain Mabanckou, Dealing with the Dead .  Most African fiction does not connect with me, and there is a tendency for the reviews to be untrustworthy.  This “cemetery memoir,” from the Congo (via UCLA), connected with me and held my interest throughout.

Yes I will be doing a podcast with him.  And he has a new and very good book coming out with Derek Thompson, namely Abundance .  So what should I ask him?