Recently Mentioned Books

8. Henry Oliver’s very good new book Second Act is being released in the U.S: today, it covers the topic of late bloomers, here is a dialogue about the book .

Victor Davis Hanson has a new book The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation .

J.C.D. Clark, The Enlightenment: An Idea and its History , sounds smart but somehow stays too much at the meta-level of commentary on the commentary?

Marieke Brandt, Tribes and Politics in Yemen: A History of the Houthi Conflict had far more detailed than I was seeking.  But I read about one fifth of it, and learned a great deal from that.

Pakistan is a drastically undercovered country, but now Lahore has some coverage, in Manan Ahmed Asif’s Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore .

There is Matt Grossman and David A. Hopkins, and their suitably titled and subtitled Polarized Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics .

4. Simon Morrison, Tchaikovsky’s Empire: A New Life of Russia’s Greatest Composer .  My favorite book about Tchaikovsky, engaging but it also covers the music for the music’s sake as well.  I liked this sentence from the book jacket: “His life and art were framed by Russian national ambition, and his work was the emanation of an imperial subject: kaleidoscopic, capacious, cosmopolitan.”  The book does go relatively light on Tchaikovsky’s um…personal life.

3. Ian Frazier, Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough .  An excellent, fun, and much-needed book.  I liked the parts about the 20th century best.  I am still longing for that cost-benefit analysis of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, though.  We know the Interstate Highway system passes the cost-benefit test massively, but do all of its constituent parts?

2. Ken McNab, Shake It Up, Baby! The Rise of Beatlemania and the Mayhem of 1963 .  At the beginning of that year, John and Paul despaired of making it as a rock band, and expected to end up as songwriters for other people, much like Goffin-King at the time.  By the end of the year however…  This is the story of how that happened.  Very well done.

1. Bécquer Seguín, The Op-Ed Novel: A Literary History of Post-Franco Spain .  I liked this book very much, as it gave me extremely useful background on the Spanish fiction I enjoy.  It may make less sense to read if you don’t already know the relevant fiction, but in any case a fine work.  Imagine, by the way, if America had an equally strong correlation between novelists and Op-Ed columnists.

7. New Cass Sunstein book on campus free speech .

The subtitle is The Origins of Modern Economics, and the author is Benjamin M. Friedman.  Here is the book’s home page , you can order here .  I very much look forward to reading this one.  Here is my earlier CWT with Ben Friedman .

BALL: Gosh, now there’s a question to start with. Where they have most effectively stood up to power — this is a question that I looked at in a book (it must be about 10 years old now) which looked at the response of German physicists during the Nazi era to that regime. I’m afraid my conclusion was, the response was really not very impressive at all.

He was an editor at Nature for about 20 years. His books cover such diverse topics as chemistry, physics, the history of experiments , social science, color , the elements , water , water in China , Chartres Cathedral, music , and more. But most notably, he has a new book out this year, a major work called How Life Works : A User’s Guide to the New Biology . Philip, welcome.

He was an editor at Nature for about 20 years. His books cover such diverse topics as chemistry, physics, the history of experiments , social science, color , the elements , water , water in China , Chartres Cathedral, music , and more. But most notably, he has a new book out this year, a major work called How Life Works : A User’s Guide to the New Biology . Philip, welcome.

He was an editor at Nature for about 20 years. His books cover such diverse topics as chemistry, physics, the history of experiments , social science, color , the elements , water , water in China , Chartres Cathedral, music , and more. But most notably, he has a new book out this year, a major work called How Life Works : A User’s Guide to the New Biology . Philip, welcome.

He was an editor at Nature for about 20 years. His books cover such diverse topics as chemistry, physics, the history of experiments , social science, color , the elements , water , water in China , Chartres Cathedral, music , and more. But most notably, he has a new book out this year, a major work called How Life Works : A User’s Guide to the New Biology . Philip, welcome.

He was an editor at Nature for about 20 years. His books cover such diverse topics as chemistry, physics, the history of experiments , social science, color , the elements , water , water in China , Chartres Cathedral, music , and more. But most notably, he has a new book out this year, a major work called How Life Works : A User’s Guide to the New Biology . Philip, welcome.

On the Housing Crisis: Land, Development, Democracy .  I just heard it is out today, of course I ordered my copy immediately…

4. Pre-order the new Houllebecq .

3. Bioy Casares on Borges, translated into English, at least in part, you can now pre-order .  One of the great Spanish-language books, hitherto unavailable in English.

I am a big fan of his forthcoming book We Have Never Been Woke , which I have blurbed.  Here is Musa’s home page , do read his bio .  Here is Musa on Twitter .

1. This DVD/Blu-Ray of Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt is one of the best performances I have seen, ever .

Speaking of Kraftwerk, I also enjoyed the new Simon Reynolds book Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today Reynolds is very good at covering parts of music history that other people ignore.

Jordan Ott’s Back to the Future: How to Reignite American Innovation is exactly that.