Recently Mentioned Books

The author is Juan Marsé , this novel is set in 1956, first published in Spain in 1966, and only now appearing in English.  Here is the Amazon link .  Marsé is one of the handful of great authors who has no real presence in the Anglo world, Bioy Casares would be another.  You can think of the story as covering class conflict, romance, and their intersection in the Barcelona of the 1950s.  Definitely recommended, I am excited to see this finally out and am reading it avidly (in Spanish it is too ...

All of the blessings of modernity, Ryan Avent argues in a fascinating new book, rest on faith. It is our faith in others, our ability to trust strangers we will never meet, that makes possible the large-scale cooperation that has given us science, modern economic growth, and liberal democracy. But if everything depends on our ability to weave and maintain particular webs of complex meaning, what happens when we allow those webs to weaken and fray? In his book In Good Faith , Ryan contends that t...

The subtitle is How the Nature of Belief Shapes the Fate of Societies .  Here is Ryan doing a podcast with Brink Lindsey .  As Brink writes:

That is from Allen James Fromherz, The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age to the Present .  From this same book I learned that Milton refers to the Straits in Paradise Lost , but under the name of Ormus:

He is on the business faculty at Catholic University and has a background on both Wall Street and in the startup world, where he founded several companies. His first book, Wanting (2021), has been translated into 20+ languages and is selling more than copies than ever five years in. He is an expert on Rene Girard.  His new book, The One and the Ninety-Nine , is out from St. Martin’s June 16 — a theory of how identity gets formed or deformed under conditions of technological social contagion. He ...

5. Lázár , by Nelio Biedermann.  An excellent novel of ideas, in the style of earlier Continental literature, by a 23-year-old Swiss phenom.  It is very good in German, I have not sampled the translation.

4. Iain Pears, Parallel Lives: A Love Story from a Lost Continent .  A delightful story/indirect memoir, telling the tale of the lives and marriage of Frances Haskell, the British art historian, and Larissa Salmina Haskell, a Russian woman who survived the siege of Leningrad as a girl.  Pears had the full cooperation of Larissa, at an age where she doesn’t give a damn any more.  This story truly comes to life, and that is helped by Pears’s background as a writer of very good fiction.

3. Lena Dunham, Famesick: A Memoir .  Not exactly my thing, so I did not finish it.  But it is pretty good, so if you are tempted give it a try.

2. Mangol Bayat, Mysticism and Dissent: Socioreligious Dissent in Qajar Iran .  A very good, clear, and useful book on different dissident religiouis developments in Iran, leading up to the Bahai faith.  Recommended, one of the best books I have found for grappling with the history of current Iran.

1. Mason Currey, Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life .  The best overall book I know on the different methods top artists have used to keep themselves going financially.  It is perhaps more anecdotal and less theoretical than I would prefer, still a nice work.

That is from the very useful The Origins of the Arab-Iranian Conflict: Nationalism and Sovereignty in the Gulf between the World Wars , by Chelsi Mueller.

That is from Ervand Abrahamian’s A History of Modern Iran .

That is from John Ghazvinian America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present , a very good book.

Interesting and engaging throughout, definitely recommended.  You can buy Kim’s excellent book here .

That is all from the new and noteworthy Venice and the Mongols: The Eurasian Exchange that Transformed the Medieval World , by Nicola di Cosmo and Lorenzo Pubblici.

That is from Michael Axworthy’s A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind , a good general introduction to the history of the country.

That is from the new and interesting book The World in Flames: A Global History of the Seven Years’ War by Marian Füssel.

3. New book coming on Carlsen vs. Niemann .

That is from W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland , from 1937, which is one of the better travel books, if indeed that is what it is.

That is from the new and notable Mark Solms, The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing .  This is a good book for people who underrated Freud, or think he is a mere charlatan.

5. Kevin Hartnett, The Proof is in the Code: How a Truth Machine is Transforming Math and AI .  A very useful book about the history of proving math theorems by computer.

4. Mark B. Smith, Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization 1953-1991 .  I am seeing an increasing number of excellent books on what the Soviet Union really was.  This one is well written, broad in scope, and yet rich in detail, treating the covered era as a living, breathing time in human history.  It makes the time and place imaginable .  The book also goes a long way toward disaggregating different Soviet eras, rather than just the end of Stalinism.

3. David Stuart, The Four Heavens: A New History of the Ancient Maya .  We keep on learning lots about the Maya, and this is the best book to follow what has been going on.  Well-written and clear, and it does not numb your mind with details you may not care about.

2. Nic von Wielligh and Lydia von Wielligh-Steyn, The Bomb: South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Programme .  I had been looking for a book on this topic for a long time, and finally I found the right one in a South African bookshop.  They did build six atomic bombs, almost seven, and this is the story of how that started and was later reversed.  Hundreds of pages of substantive detail, and I had not realized how much the conflict in Angola, and Cuban/Soviet involvement, was a major factor in the whol...

1. Allister Sparks, The Mind of South Africa: The Story of the Rise and Fall of Apartheid .  This history book actually tries to explain to the reader how things were.  Oh such books are so rare!  (Why is that?)  Definitely recommended, written at the very end of the apartheid era which gives it yet another angle of interest.