Recently Mentioned Books

You can order the book here .  How is it that Weber — the author of numerous fine books on modernist art — does not have a Wikipedia page of his own?

Uncle Rabbit & the Wax Doll , edited by Jonathan Amith, illustrations by Inocencio Jiménez Chino , a very good and beautiful children’s book, also in Nahuatl and Spanish.

Emily Van Duyne, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation .  I don’t feel this book is what I need at the margin, but it is a very good and engaging addition to the canon surrounding Plath.

Ola Olsson, Paleoeconomics: Climate Change and Economic Development in Prehistory surveys plenty of information about what the subtitle suggests.  I found the material difficult to evaluate, and so only read part of this one.  Nonetheless I suspect it is the best book on its topic.

Caroline Potter, Pierre Boulez: Organised Delirium .  An excellent work, explores the deep links between Boulez’s music and French surrealism (and to a lesser degree expressionism).  One of the best books for understanding Boulez and indeed serialism more generally.  Is serialism is most misunderstood musical movement to this day?

Sohrab Sardashti, Iranian Architecture:A Visual History .  One of the very best picture books, both for intrinsic reasons and because many of us cannot expect to see these landmarks anytime soon if at all.

Gina Consing McAdam and Siobhan Doran, Houses that Sugar Built: An Intimate Portrait of Philippine Ancestral Homes .  An excellent picture book, these are art traditions, and bits of history, you otherwise never would see.

John Ma, Polis: A New History of the Ancient Greek City-State from the Early Iron Age to the End of Antiquity .  I didn’t read much of this book, mostly because it is too good for me to understand just how good it is.  Que triste!  It is like those GPT “advanced reasoning” answers that also can be too good to digest fully.  A small number of you, however, should read this book very carefully and perhaps you already have.

That is the new book by Marty Makary .  Since Makary has been nominated to head the FDA, I am surprised this work is not receiving more attention.

Sally Rooney, Intermezzo .  Here is a good Henry Oliver review .

Guadalupe Nettel, La hija única , or Still Born

Richard Flanagan, Question Seven .

Karen Jennings, Crooked Seeds .

Itamar Vieira Junior, Crooked Plow .

The author is Theodore M. Schwartz and the subtitle of this excellent book is A Biography of Brain Surgery .  Excerpt:

Alisa Lozhkina, The Art of Ukraine .

Harriet Baker, Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Rosamond Lehmann .  What is it like to be an unusual woman writer, with unusual proclivities, and have to build up or rebuild your work life in the countryside?  There is now a whole book on this topic.  Does it really mean you have to write down a complete inventory of all household possessions? (apparently)  Beautifully written, very British, will frustrate those who seek generalization but recommended...

Carlos Scarpa, The Complete Buildings .

One of the problems with an RFK Jr. ascendancy is that his core views, which run strongly against vaccines and pharmaceuticals, make it unlikely that any of these reimbursement revisions will be done in a rational or scientific way. The best evidence indicates that pharmaceuticals are a relatively cost-effective ways of saving lives, and conversely that many costly surgical procedures are not very effective . One of the main drawbacks of the US health-care system is often described as overtreatm...

The author is Patchen Barss, and the title is The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius .  I liked this book very much, and feel there should be more works like this.  It was made with the full cooperation of Penrose himself, though he had no veto over the final work.  Here is one bit:

By Wolfgang Münchau, this book is the best and most detailed account of the German economic decline to date.  Excerpt:

By Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber, a new Stripe Press book .

I very much enjoyed Neal’s new book Polostan .  And here is my first Conversation with Neal Stephenson .

John Cassidy has a forthcoming collection of readings, Capitalism and its Critics, A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI .

I have not yet had a chance to start Agustina S. Paglayan, Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education .