Recently Mentioned Books

I am a big fan of Musa’s work, most of all his new book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite .  As for the podcast, here is the video, audio, and transcript .  Here is the episode summary:

That is from the truly excellent Perils and Prospects of a United Ireland , by Padraig O’Malley.  Imagine a detailed, thoughtful 500 pp. book on political issues you probably don’t care all that much about — is there any better way to study politics and political reasoning?  Every page of this book offers substance.

Weep, Shudder, and Die: On Opera and Poetry , is Dana’s forthcoming book on opera.  He claims that Sweeney Todd is one of the two greatest American operas.

Dana Gioia: Poet & Critic , edited by John Zheng and Jon Parrish, is a series of essays in honor of Dana and a very good introduction to his life and work.  Here is my earlier CWT with Dana, information billionaire and aspiring information trillionaire.

Ben Yagoda, Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English is great fun, either to read or to browse.  I do for instance use some of these words: one-off , go missing , curate , early days , kerfuffle , easy peasy , and cheeky.

Josephine Quinn, How the World Made the West: A 4,000 Year History is too chatty/friendly a book for me, but for many readers it is probably worthwhile.

Michael Huemer, Progressive Myths .  Michael is a very smart philosopher, but this book seemed like a waste of time to me.  Will it persuade anyone?  Do we need Michael writing seven-page essays rebutting various claims of the BLM movement and the like?

Tim Lankester, Inside Thatcher’s Monetarism Experiment: The Promise, The Failure, The Legacy , the author was on the scene in the Thatcher government.

Richard J. Evans, Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich .  This very well-reviewed book does not seem to have either new data or new theory, as yes it does show a lot of the Nazis were “pretty ordinary people.”  Yet it is so well-written and well-presented that it deserves a high recommendation nonetheless.

Kurt Weyland, Democracy’s Resilience to Populism’s Threat .  This book has useful data, and perhaps it is a useful corrective to the most extreme fears out there.  But overall it does more to persuade me of the opposite conclusion, namely that populism is a real threat.  the author himself writes: “In fact, wide-ranging statistical studies find that only in about one-third of cases have populist chief executives done substantial damage to democracy. and they have truly suffocated liberal plurali...

Fiona Maddocks, Goodbye Russia: Rachmaninoff in Exile .  Captures the spirit of the man and his music, and a good addition to the growing literature on European cultural exiles in America.  Readable and to the point.

That is from the new and interesting Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian, The Great Transformation: China’s Road to Reform .

That is from the new and highly useful Diarmaid Ferriter book The Revelation of Ireland 1995-2020 .

You can buy the book here .

Yes I will be doing another Conversation with him, in honor of his forthcoming book Polostan , which initiates a new series.  It is set in the 1930s, has some spies in it, and parts are set in the town of Magnetogorsk in the Ural mountains, as well as Montana and WDC in the U.S.  So far I like the first thirty pages very much.

That is from the quite interesting 1998 book Allen J. Matusow, Nixon’s Economy: Booms, Busts, Dollars, and Votes .

An excellent book , stressing Rand’s Jewish heritage and its ongoing influence over her work, in spite of her self-professed atheism.  The author is Alexandra Popoff, who wrote the wonderful biography of Vassily Grossman as well .

An excellent book , stressing Rand’s Jewish heritage and its ongoing influence over her work, in spite of her self-professed atheism.  The author is Alexandra Popoff, who wrote the wonderful biography of Vassily Grossman as well .

3. Robert Moses, The Power Broker, finally coming to eBook September 16 .

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 .