Recently Mentioned Books

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?

You can order it here .

I have been reading the new Liz Pelly book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist .  It is a very intelligent and well done book, though it is more pessimistic than I am about the future of music.

That is from the new and fun book by Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events that Created New York and Shaped America .

The author is David Eltis and the subtitle is Rethinking the Atlantic Slave Trades .  Here is one summary passage:

Interesting throughout, definitely recommended.  And again, I am happy to recommend Ross’s new book Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious .

Here is her Wikipedia page .  Her book on guilds is well known, and her latest is Controlling Contagion: Epidemics and Institutions from the Black Death to Covid .  Here are her main research papers .

Here is her Wikipedia page .  Her book on guilds is well known, and her latest is Controlling Contagion: Epidemics and Institutions from the Black Death to Covid .  Here are her main research papers .

Rainer Zitelmann, The Origins of Poverty and Wealth: My World Tour and Insights from the Global Libertarian Movement is a kind of travel memoir from a man who has become one of our most prolific writers on behalf of liberty.

Marc Hijink, Focus: The ASML Way, Inside the Power Struggle Over the Most Complex Machine on Earth .  You have to already want to read a book about ASML, but this is in fact the relevant book about ASML.  To call it boring is to miss the point, because the company itself is somewhat boring.

Stephen Witt, The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip .  A fun and well-informed look at its subject matter.  There should be more books on one of the world’s most valuable companies, and yes here supply is elastic.