Recently Mentioned Books

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

Louis Kaplow, law and economics professor at Harvard, rethinks merger analysis in Rethinking Merger Analyses .

The Legacy of Robert Higgs , edited by Christopher J. Coyne, is a very good collection for those interested in the topics Bob worked on.

Coming in 2025 is David Spiegelhalter, The Art of Uncertainty: How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck .

4. Geoffrey Wawro, The Vietnam War: A Military History , is the single best book on its topic and is both intelligent and highly readable.

3. Rebecca Charbonneau, Mixed Signals: Alien Communication Across the Iron Curtain .  This book fit well into my recent “Soviet science” reading program.  This is more of a “Cold War” book than a “UFO book.”  And I learned the full saga behind the Byrds song “ C.T.A. – 102 ” for the first time.

2. Peter Doggers, The Chess Revolution: From the Ancient World to the Digital Age , is a good book, though it is mostly interior to my current knowledge set.

1. Edwin Frank, Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth Century Novel .  Very good short portraits of various classic novels, including Machado de Assis, Mann’s Magic Mountain, Dr. Moreau, Carpentier, Perec, and others.  At this point I am usually sick of such books but this one I stuck with as it is rewarding throughout.

5. New Emmanuel Carrère book is coming .

4. New Murakami novel is coming .

Intelligent and interesting throughout.  Again, I am happy to recommend Christopher’s recent book Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Future of War , co-authored with Raj M. Shah.

I would say this was a good not great movie, but I pass along word because it is rare to have a movie so exclusively devoted to both public choice and social choice theory, and realistically so.  (Thomas Reese said in an interview that the details on the conclave were pretty realistic too; if you don’t know of Reese his book Inside the Vatican is perhaps the best book on bureaucracy ever.)

2. Forthcoming Nvidia book .

I loved this Craig Brown book , although many of you won’t.  A good biography typically brings a subject to life.  This biography sets out to convince you that Queen Elizabeth II could never be understood whatsoever, that she was a literal cipher and always was going to stand outside our typical categories.  She did love jigsaw puzzles.

I am a big fan of Musa’s work, most of all his new book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite .  As for the podcast, here is the video, audio, and transcript .  Here is the episode summary:

That is from the truly excellent Perils and Prospects of a United Ireland , by Padraig O’Malley.  Imagine a detailed, thoughtful 500 pp. book on political issues you probably don’t care all that much about — is there any better way to study politics and political reasoning?  Every page of this book offers substance.

Weep, Shudder, and Die: On Opera and Poetry , is Dana’s forthcoming book on opera.  He claims that Sweeney Todd is one of the two greatest American operas.

Dana Gioia: Poet & Critic , edited by John Zheng and Jon Parrish, is a series of essays in honor of Dana and a very good introduction to his life and work.  Here is my earlier CWT with Dana, information billionaire and aspiring information trillionaire.

Ben Yagoda, Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English is great fun, either to read or to browse.  I do for instance use some of these words: one-off , go missing , curate , early days , kerfuffle , easy peasy , and cheeky.

Josephine Quinn, How the World Made the West: A 4,000 Year History is too chatty/friendly a book for me, but for many readers it is probably worthwhile.

Michael Huemer, Progressive Myths .  Michael is a very smart philosopher, but this book seemed like a waste of time to me.  Will it persuade anyone?  Do we need Michael writing seven-page essays rebutting various claims of the BLM movement and the like?

Tim Lankester, Inside Thatcher’s Monetarism Experiment: The Promise, The Failure, The Legacy , the author was on the scene in the Thatcher government.

Richard J. Evans, Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich .  This very well-reviewed book does not seem to have either new data or new theory, as yes it does show a lot of the Nazis were “pretty ordinary people.”  Yet it is so well-written and well-presented that it deserves a high recommendation nonetheless.

Kurt Weyland, Democracy’s Resilience to Populism’s Threat .  This book has useful data, and perhaps it is a useful corrective to the most extreme fears out there.  But overall it does more to persuade me of the opposite conclusion, namely that populism is a real threat.  the author himself writes: “In fact, wide-ranging statistical studies find that only in about one-third of cases have populist chief executives done substantial damage to democracy. and they have truly suffocated liberal plurali...

Fiona Maddocks, Goodbye Russia: Rachmaninoff in Exile .  Captures the spirit of the man and his music, and a good addition to the growing literature on European cultural exiles in America.  Readable and to the point.