Recently Mentioned Books
Showing 25 of 6797 mentions, ordered by most recent.
That is all from the new and interesting Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style , by W. David Marx. And here is New Yorker coverage of the book .
You can pre-order it here .
That is the new book by Claire Adida, David Laitin, and Marie-Anne Valfort . Some parts are interesting, especially those showing both statistical and taste-based discrimination against Muslims in France . But most of the book — above all the title — makes claims which are far too strong. A better description would have been “Why France Has Not Integrated Its Muslims.”
That is from pp.187-188 of August Meier, Negro Thought in America 1880-1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington . You can see that Du Bois did not “have it in” for Wilson.
A Brilliant Young Mind [ X + Y is the title of the original UK release], one of the better autism movies, nice scenes of Taipei too.
Elaine C. Kamarck, Primary Politics: Everything You Need to Know About How America Nominates its Presidential Candidates . From a quick glance, appears to be very useful.
Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the 15th Century to the 21st .
Edward Lucas, Cyberphobia: Identity, Trust, Security and the Internet .
David E. Bernstein, Lawless: The Obama Administration’s Unprecedented Assault on the Constitution and the Rule of Law .
3. Simon Critchley, Memory Theater . Very short book, hard to explain, often brilliant, here is one bit: “Hegel’s philosophy is a mnemotechnic system in the ancient and Renaissance tradition. The difference is that what Hegel adds to his memory theater is time , that is, the experience of becoming.” Not for everyone.
2. Adam Sisman, John Le Carr é : The Biography . Entertaining, and puts him in the proper context, deserves its strong reviews.
1.Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam?: The Importance of Being Islamic . Too much hermeneutics for my taste, but intelligent and interesting throughout. The authors downplays the prescriptive side of Islam and plays up the experiential and polyvalent aspects of the religion. If you are reading books in this area, this one should be part of your program.
Greg Ip presented his new book Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe at Mercatus/GMU, with an emphasis on financial crises and a bit on forest fires too. I was the moderator, and the commentators were Alex J. Pollock and Jared Bernstein.
9. This won’t end well. Now go read a book on the Taiping rebellion .
That is the forthcoming book by Scott Sumner, and the subtitle is Financial Markets, Government Policy Shocks, and the Great Depression . Here is one of Scott’s brief capsule descriptions of the book:
Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: At her Zenith: In London, Washington, and Moscow , vol.2 of the biography, 1984-1987. This one I haven’t finished yet. I ordered my copy advance from UK Amazon, it doesn’t come out in the U.S. until early January. There is some chance this is the very best book of the year.
Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World . The best of the various recent books on Humboldt.
Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine , a good general history of the country.
Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, Bewilderments: Reflections on the Book of Numbers . You can never read enough commentary on the Torah.
Michael Meyer, In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China . Adam Minter has a very good and useful review of a good book.
Scott Sumner, The Midas Paradox . Boo to the gold standard during the Great Depression.
Mastering ‘Metrics: The Path from Cause to Effect , by Joshua D. Angrist and Jörn Steffen-Pischke, technically late 2014 but it was too late to make that list.
Homer’s Iliad , translated by Peter Green. Also gets rave reviews.
Tale of Genji , by Murasaki Shikibu, translated by Dennis Washburn.
The Poems of T.S. Eliot, volume 1 and volume 2 , annotated. Rave reviews for those.