Recently Mentioned Books

David Albright with Andrea Stricker, Revisiting South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Program: Its History, Dismantlement, and Lessons for Today .  It is odd how little-mentioned this episode in world history has become, in any case this is the go-to book on it, interesting throughout.

Charles King, Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah .  This is what you would want from a book on Handel’s Messiah.  I hadn’t known that Handel was briefly supported by the Medici in Florence.  By the way, Suzuki will be conducting the Messiah in DC in late December, be there or be square!

Ebbe Dommissse, Anton Rupert: The Life of a Business Icon is a very favorable biography of who was probably South Africa’s richest man, with cigarettes being the central part of his business empire.  For a contrasting perspective, read Pieter h de Toit, The Stellenbosch Mafia: Inside the Billionaire’s Club .

Ebbe Dommissse, Anton Rupert: The Life of a Business Icon is a very favorable biography of who was probably South Africa’s richest man, with cigarettes being the central part of his business empire.  For a contrasting perspective, read Pieter h de Toit, The Stellenbosch Mafia: Inside the Billionaire’s Club .

Hugh Warwick, Cull of the Wild: Killing in the Name of Conservation .  A well-written and subtle account of the tensions and paradoxes involved in attempts to conserve nature.  What if conserving one animal leads to the destruction of others?  I am slowly learning how many British people are obsessed with hedgehogs.  And I hadn’t known how much the importation of earthworms in the 18th century, from Britain to North America, shaped the environment.

Jill Ciment, Consent: a memoir .  A good short book on how you can have a creepy life for decades, and not be so aware of it.  In this case, a 17-year-old girl (Ciment) ends up marrying a man who first slept with her when he was 47 and married.  They had an apparently normal marriage for decades, or did they?  How much does “creepy” matter anyway?  She doesn’t seem to be complaining about unhappiness.  But is it just wrong anyway?

5. U.S. edition now out for Cynthia Haven edition of Rene Girard essay volume .

That is from New History of South Africa , by Hermann Giliomee, Bernard Mbenga, and Bill Nasson, a very excellent book.  I found it to be one of the best single-volume histories of any country I have read.  The other South Africa book I found especially helpful was Understanding South Africa , by Carien du Plessis and Martin Plaut.  One of the best things about travel is you understand a country — through books — much better than before you went there.  Everything is more vivid, and you retain m...

That is from New History of South Africa , by Hermann Giliomee, Bernard Mbenga, and Bill Nasson, a very excellent book.  I found it to be one of the best single-volume histories of any country I have read.  The other South Africa book I found especially helpful was Understanding South Africa , by Carien du Plessis and Martin Plaut.  One of the best things about travel is you understand a country — through books — much better than before you went there.  Everything is more vivid, and you retain m...

The author is Charles Taylor (yes, the Charles Taylor) and the subtitle is Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment .  This book is a very good introduction to romanticism, and also to the poetry of romanticism, noting that its degree of originality may depend on how much you already know.  I liked the chapters on Rilke and Mallarme best, here is one excerpt:

Talk about “model this”!  Comparative thanatology edition, of course.  You can pre-order here .

You may recall that Roy wrote the earlier The Failure of Political Islam , which I also found very interesting.  So he is one of today’s top intellectuals, and still going strong at 74 years of age.  I still am not sure how many of his propositions I agree with, but I feel he is making real progress on the issues under question.

I have been reading Olivier Roy’s new book The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms .  It is the best book on culture in years, and if you enjoy Martin Gurri and Bruno Macaes you should try this one too.  This book actually got me excited at the theoretical level.

The subtitle is How Money & Markets Really Work .  I am a big fan of Kyla Scanlon (see the link for her other work), who is a force of nature.  She graduated from Western Kentucky University in 2019, and she has a new and very effective approach to how to talk.  I first learned of her through her explanatory videos, and it turns out she does one almost every day.

The author is Yuval Levin and the subtitle is How the Constitution Unified Our Nation — And Could Again .  Excerpt:

3. Kyla Scanlon now has a book .

Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering , due out in October.

That is a reader query, I take it there is no point in my trotting through the obvious picks, starting with I, Robot and Her .  Sophisticates will ponder Stanislaw Lem’s Cyberiad , which very well understood the quirky and semi-religious potential in LLMs, even though he was writing in Communist Poland a very long time ago (those people loved to talk about cybernetics).

The author is Bjorn Lomborg, and the subtitle is The 12 most efficient solutions for the world’s poorest and our global SDG promises .  I missed this book when it first came out last year.  Here is what Lomborg presents as the twelve best global investments, in no particular order:

4. As a practical matter, the experiment shows us that you can do relatively well looking for talent in some new or unusual places.  I agree, and Daniel Gross and I pushed that theme in our book on talent .

In return for a referee report, I requested Chen-Pang Yeang, Transforming Noise: A History of Science and Technology from Disturbing Sounds to Informational Errors, 1900-1955 .  This book is good background for understanding late Fischer Black, as ideas derived from Brownian motion lie behind both options pricing theory and Black’s essay “ Noise. “

Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice is not a book for me right now (thus I haven’t read it), but the authors are very smart and thus it is worthy of mention.

4. Kunal Purohit, H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars .  If you are an outsider and looking for a good “micro-study” to understand India, this is a good place to start.  Trying to better understand a country typically should consist of both macro overviews and micro-studies, of course.

3. Martin Plaut and Sarah Vaughan, Understanding Ethiopia’s Tigray War .  Clear and to the point, the best book I know on this topic.  It is also especially clear on the roles of Eritrea and Somalia.

2. Cixin Liu, Supernova Era .  An A+ plot premise (I won’t spoil it), the story goes downhill somewhat but still worth reading.