Recently Mentioned Books

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.

Molly Worthen, Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History From the Puritans to Donald Trump is a very good book on an underexplored topic.  In some ways tech has mattered less than you might think.

There is Gregor Craigie, Our Crumbling Foundation: How We Solve Canada’s Housing Crisis .

Richard Overy, Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and the Surrender of Japan is a short but very good and substantive look at the non-nuclear and also nuclear bombing campaigns.

Charles Callan Tansill, The Purchase of the Danish West Indies .  Who would have thought that this 1966 volume, and Tansill, would be making a comeback?  The biggest lesson for me here was how much the purchase was a live issue as early as 1867.  And as the final purchase approached in 1917, the other European powers were by no means happy.

Stuart A. Reid, The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination .  For whatever reason, there are more good books about the Congo than most other parts of Africa.  This is one of them.  From 2023, but good enough to make a “best of non-fiction” list for a typical year.  Very cleanly written as well.

Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism .  A very good short book, defending “left wing modernism,” a much maligned target on the right these days.  Hatherley himself is a much underrated figure, a commie who came along at the wrong time but a very good writer and thinker about aesthetics.