Recently Mentioned Books

4. Carlo Scarpa: The Complete Buildings , edited by Emiliano Bugatti.  Mostly a picture book, this one convinced me I need to visit Treviso, Italy.  The Brion Tomb is nearby, not to mention the Canova museum, both designed by Scarpa.  He also showed that first-rate architecture never quite ended in Venice proper.  I hadn’t known that Scarpa’s earliest works date as far back as the mid-1930s, and that he died by falling down a flight of stairs.

3. Harriet Baker, Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Rosamond Lehmann .  What is it like to be an unusual woman writer, with unusual proclivities, and have to build up or rebuild your work life in the countryside?  There is now a whole book on this topic.  Does it really mean you have to write down a complete inventory of all household possessions? (apparently)  Beautifully written, very British, will frustrate those who seek generalization but recommen...

As a follow-up, I’ve also been reading Norbert Lynton, Tatlin’s Tower: Monument to Revolution , also very good.

2. Sjeng Scheijen, Avant-Gardists: Artists in Revolt in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union 1917-1935 .  My biggest learning from this volume was simply how important Vladimir Tatlin was as a leader of the Soviet avant-garde in the 1920s.  He might have mattered as much as Malevich?  It is worth buying and reading a book for an insight such as that.  Here is a short video of a good Tatlin exhibit from Basel, twelve years ago.  The book also offered this sentence: “The affinity between the an...

1. Kimmo Rentola, How Finland Survived Stalin: From Winter War to Cold War .  An excellent book, especially good on linking the Winter War with the fighting of 1944 and also the postwar settlments.  Winner of the Lauri Jäntti prize, who would have thought otherwise?

Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious , pre-order here .  Self-recommending, some would say God recommends it too.  Here is the chain of links to my earlier exchange with Ross on whether one should believe in God.

I very much enjoyed his new book Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Future of War , co-authored with Raj M. Shah.  Here is his home page .  The book just received a very strong review from the FT .

You can buy it here .  Here is a good short piece on the art .

Yes, I will be doing another Conversation with Nate, based in part on his new and forthcoming book On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything (I have just started it, but so far it is very good, dealing with issues of poker and also risk-taking more generally).

Arthur Brown Ruhl, New Masters of the Baltic , a travel book from 1921.  If you visit any place, you always should try to read a much earlier travel book on said place.  Fantastic for perspective, indefensible but nonetheless insightful generalizations, and these books give you a sense for just how contingent history can be.  Who was “the good guys” was often more up for grabs than you might have thought.

Neil Taylor, Estonia: A Modern History , is by far the best history I have found on that country.  It also has a rave blurb from Robert Service.

Zeke Hernandez, The Truth About Immigration: Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers , delivers exactly what its title promises.

Celine Dietziker and Lukas Gruntz, Aalto in Detail: A Catalogue of Components .  I hadn’t realized just how much he was a “micro architect.”  This book, for instance, has a fantastic collection of different photos of stairs he designed.  There is a chapter “Handrails,” “Door Handles,” and also “Drainage.”  This is a book for me.

Frederick C. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition .  Lengthy and dense, but full of good material and written with extreme indeed almost unbelievable clarity.  The historicists are these days the underdiscussed approach in the history of German thought.  Have you ever wondered why Justus Möser was important, and why he focused on the history of Osnabrück?  Or how Leopold Ranke saw his work as an answer to Hegel?  How about the difference between Dilthey and Rickert?  If nothing else, this bo...

“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.

Garett Jones, telephone !

That is the new book by Nick Lloyd, it will be making my best non-fiction of the year list.  Reviews are very strong, and you can either pre-order and wait , or order it from the UK , or buy it in the excellent Hedengrens bookshop in Stockholm.  Here is one short bit:

Among its other virtues, I feel this book captures British history and British intellectual history very well.  In any case, you can buy the book here , and I have ordered some additional Morris works to read.  If I really like any of them, I will let you all know.

Still in my pile is Nathaniel Popper’s The Trolls of Wall Street: How the Outcasts and Insurgents are Hacking the Markets , which covers the WallStreetBets phenomenon.

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?