Recently Mentioned Books

2. Michael McVicar, Christian Reconstruction: R.J. Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism .  Another very good book no one told me about, somehow I stumbled on it browsing Amazon.  You can make Rushdoony sound like a nut, but you also can make him sound like one of the most influential figures in the 20th century history of American conservatism and also libertarianism.  Would the modern home schooling and Christian home schooling movements exist without him?  And yet he believed in extre...

1. August Strindberg, The People of Hemsö .  Hardly anyone (non-Swedish?) reads this classic novel any more, but it holds up as one of the more compelling creations of its time.  Direct and compelling.  Swedish people on an island, but will this marriage work?  Why has it so faded from our attentions?  I’ve long loved Strindberg, so why did it take me until so late in life?

That is from p.202 of Manfried Rauchensteiner, The First World War and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914-1918 .  That is by the way an excellent book, gripping throughout despite its length.

Andrew O’Hagan, Caledonian Road .  This is the British novel that now everyone there is reading and talkinig about.  A “cast of characters” and “biting portrait” sort of thing, reflecting modern Britain, most of all London, today.  I read about fifty pages, found it highly engaging, and then decided the rest would be a waste of my time.

Douglas Porch, Resistance and Liberation, France at War 1942-1945 .  Too detailed for my purposes, so I stopped reading it.  But this volume seems to be a major historical achievement, and a must read for at least some subset of humans.

Sulmaan Wasif Khan, The Struggle for Taiwan: A History of America, China, and the Island Caught Between .  I’ve been following this issue for a long time, so I don’t feel I learned much from this book.  But for most people, especially younger people, it is a very good introduction to the longer history.

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies , offers a scientific look at how fatherhood and raising children changes the minds, bodies, and behaviors of men.

Rochelle Gurstein, Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art .  On the importance of classics, and common standards for classics, if art is going to challenge and improve us.  The book is also sufficiently appreciative of Canova, one of the most impressive artists of all time but somehow these days underdiscussed.

Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky: The Second Exile, France and America 1934-1971 .  Yes, it made me order and want to read the first volume as well.  This is likely the best biography of Stravinsky and his musical times.

James J. Walsh, The Thirteenth Greatest of Centuries .  Eccentric, published long ago, not correct, yet full of vitality and insight.  So many of the key pieces of the West already were in place by that time.  So recommended, this one just has been reissued.  How was the Giotto chapel in Padua possible?  Parsival?  This book gives you a start on those questions.

By Anil Ananthaswamy, an excellent book , it will make the end of year best non-fiction list.  It focuses on machine learning and its offshoots, and you can read it for the story even if you don’t followall of the matrix algebra and the calculus.  It is also the best book I know on how science advances by laying different “bricks,” and later bringing them all together toward a practicable solution.  Recommended.

In my pile is Anthony Gregory, New Deal Law and Order: How the War on Crime Built the Modern Liberal State .

Jack Weatherford, Emperor of the Seas: Kublai Khan and the Making of China is a good follow-up to his earlier work.

I enjoyed Susan Tomes, Women and the Piano: A History in 50 Lives , but it is too skimpy on the moderns.  No coverage of Uchida or Ursula Oppens or Angela Hewitt?

4. Carlo Scarpa: The Complete Buildings , edited by Emiliano Bugatti.  Mostly a picture book, this one convinced me I need to visit Treviso, Italy.  The Brion Tomb is nearby, not to mention the Canova museum, both designed by Scarpa.  He also showed that first-rate architecture never quite ended in Venice proper.  I hadn’t known that Scarpa’s earliest works date as far back as the mid-1930s, and that he died by falling down a flight of stairs.

3. 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 recommen...

As a follow-up, I’ve also been reading Norbert Lynton, Tatlin’s Tower: Monument to Revolution , also very good.

2. Sjeng Scheijen, Avant-Gardists: Artists in Revolt in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union 1917-1935 .  My biggest learning from this volume was simply how important Vladimir Tatlin was as a leader of the Soviet avant-garde in the 1920s.  He might have mattered as much as Malevich?  It is worth buying and reading a book for an insight such as that.  Here is a short video of a good Tatlin exhibit from Basel, twelve years ago.  The book also offered this sentence: “The affinity between the an...

1. Kimmo Rentola, How Finland Survived Stalin: From Winter War to Cold War .  An excellent book, especially good on linking the Winter War with the fighting of 1944 and also the postwar settlments.  Winner of the Lauri Jäntti prize, who would have thought otherwise?

Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious , pre-order here .  Self-recommending, some would say God recommends it too.  Here is the chain of links to my earlier exchange with Ross on whether one should believe in God.

I very much enjoyed his new book Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Future of War , co-authored with Raj M. Shah.  Here is his home page .  The book just received a very strong review from the FT .

You can buy it here .  Here is a good short piece on the art .

Yes, I will be doing another Conversation with Nate, based in part on his new and forthcoming book On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything (I have just started it, but so far it is very good, dealing with issues of poker and also risk-taking more generally).

Arthur Brown Ruhl, New Masters of the Baltic , a travel book from 1921.  If you visit any place, you always should try to read a much earlier travel book on said place.  Fantastic for perspective, indefensible but nonetheless insightful generalizations, and these books give you a sense for just how contingent history can be.  Who was “the good guys” was often more up for grabs than you might have thought.

Neil Taylor, Estonia: A Modern History , is by far the best history I have found on that country.  It also has a rave blurb from Robert Service.