Recently Mentioned Books

Lewis E. Lehrman has published his autobiography The Sum of It All .  He was one of the important figures behind the Reagan Revolution, in addition to his longstanding presence amongst New York elites.

Rainer Zitelmann has a new book out How Nations Escape Poverty: Vietnam, Poland, and the Origins of Prosperity .

And the AEI Press has reprinted the 1951 Edward Banfield classic Government Project .

4. Michael Bliss, The Discovery of Insulin .  “Tassting the urine was the doctors’ original test for diabetes.”  An excellent biomedical history, noting that the key breakthrough came in Toronto in the 1920s.

3. Nabila Ramdani, Fixing France: How to Repair a Broken Republic .  What is wrong with France, from a French-Algerian point of view.  The book is full of substance, and there aren’t enough “stand alone books on countries,” so this is a good one whether or not you agree with all of the observations.

2. Adam Shatz, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Life of Frantz Fanon .  Well-written and well-organized, this checks all the boxes for what I would want from a Fanon biography.  Here is an Adam Shatz NYT Op-Ed on Fanon .

1. Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up .  I agree with many of the anti-therapy arguments in this book, but still I feel that “bad therapy” is a second-order phenomenon, not the initial cause of the growing mental health problems of America’s young people.  Furthermore, the analysis (much like Jon Haidt’s recent work) should be more tightly framed in the context of the “most interventions really don’t matter that much” results in social science at the very general level.

The author is Philip Ball , and the subtitle is A User’s Guide to the New Biology .  I thought this book was wonderful, one of the best popular science books I’ve read in a long time.  I’m sure its contents are familiar to many MR readers, but for me it was a very good introduction to debunking Richard Dawkins-like “primacy of the gene” stories, rather seeing genes as part of a broader, fairly flexible biological ecosystem.

4. You can pre-order the new Carola Binder book Shock Values: Prices and Inflation in American Democracy .

He was managing editor of Foreign Affairs at age 28, briefly a wine columnist for Slate, and much more.  His new book Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present is very classically liberal, and in my terms “Progress Studies”-oriented.

I will be doing a Conversation with him, based in part around his new book The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America .  On Coleman more generally, here is Wikipedia :

That is from the new and interesting Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World , by Marc-William Palen.

7. NYT profile of Coleman Hughes , a highly intelligent and reasonable man.  Again, here is Coleman’s new book The End of Race Politics .  I will be doing a CWT with him.

Her next book is Reading Genesis , on the Book of Genesis.  So what should I ask her?

By Coleman Hughes, coming soon !

Then there is Jian Chen’s Zhou Enlai: A Life , which seems like a major achievement.  I’ve only had time to read small amounts of it…is it “too soon to tell”?  I say no!

Recent and noteworthy is Peter Jackson, From Genghis Khan to Tamerlane: The Reawakening of Mongol Asia .  You may recall that the Mongol empire at its peak was much larger than the Roman empire at its peak, but how many young men think about it every day?

5. Erin Accampo Hern, Explaining Successes in Africa: Things Don’t Always Fall Apart .  I found this book highly readable and instructive, but I find it more convincing if you reverse the central conclusion.  There is too much talk of the Seychelles and Mauritius, and is Gabon the big success story on the Continent?  Population is 2.3 million, the country ranks 112th in the Human Development Index, and almost half the government budget is oil revenue.  Still, this book “tells you how things actu...

4. Charles Freeman, The Children of Athena: Greek Intellectuals in the Age of Rome: 150 BC0-400 AD .  Avery good guide to the intellectual life surround the period of the Pompeii library scrolls that will be deciphered by AI.  If you want background on the import of what is to come, this book is a good place to start.  And it is a good and useful work more generally.

3. Carrie Sheffield, Motorhome Prophecies: A Journey of Healing and Forgiveness .  A highly effective and harrowing tale of a lifetime journey from abuse to Christianity: “Carrie attended 17 public schools and homeschool, all while performing classical music on the streets and passing out fire-and-insurance religious pamphlets — at times while child custody workers loomed.”  The author is well known in finance, ex-LDS circles, public policy, and right-leaning media, and she has a Master’s from H...

2. Colin Elliott, Pox Romana: The Plague that Shook the Roman World .  Think of this as a sequel to Kyle Harper’s tract on Roman plagues and their political import , this look at the Antonine plague and its impact has both good history and good economics.  It is also highly readable.

1. Hannah Ritchie, Not the End of the World: How We Can be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet .  An excellent book with sound conclusions, think of it as moderate Julian Simon-like optimism on environmental issues, but with left-coded rhetoric.

That is from the very good 1996 Larry Sawers book The Other Argentina: The Interior and National Development .  It is related to my earlier post on Salta .

Yes, I will be doing another Conversation with him.  Here is my previous Conversation with him , almost eight years ago.  As many of you will know, Jonathan has a new book coming out, namely The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness .  But there is much more to talk about as well.  So what should I ask him?

That is the new book by Blake Butler , a memoir.  It is no spoiler to tell you that his wife Molly takes her own life at a young age.  I don’t know of any better argument for social conservatism than this book.  And perhaps suicide should be regarded as a sin, not something to get sentimental about on Twitter.  There is so much depravity in this book, at so many different levels.  There is the decline of a whole civilization in this book.  Here is a good New Yorker review by Alexandra Schwarz .