Recently Mentioned Books
Showing 25 of 6684 mentions, ordered by most recent.
The author of this excellent book is Nancy Scheper-Hughes, and the subtitle is Mental Illness in Rural Ireland . One of the most interesting themes of this book is how life in rural Ireland became so “de-eroticized,” to use her word. Here is one bit:
As usual, I will issue an addendum at the end of the year, because I will be reading a lot between now and then. I haven’t even received my 1344-pp. Jonathan Israel biography of Spinoza yet. Here is my earlier list on the year’s fiction . And apologies for any of your books I have forgotten to list, there are always some such cases.
Fuchsia Dunlop, Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food .
Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 .
Sophia Giovannitti, Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex .
Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi, The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism .
David Edmonds, Derek Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality .
I will of course provide an update by the end of the year, if only because the new Ha Jin novel is coming soon.
Ovid, Metamorphosis , new translation by Stephanie McCarter. I have only browsed this one, but expect it to be very good.
Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov , new translation by Michael R. Katz. I am on about p.200, so far my favorite of the major translations.
J.M. Coetzee, The Pole .
Rebecca F. Kuang, Yellowface .
Tezer Özlü, Cold Nights of Childhood . A Turkish novella, originally published in 1980, newly translated into English and the first English-language book by her. Here is more on the author . Only 76 pp., can be read in one bite.
That is the new book by Emmanuel Todd, subtitled An Outline of the History of Women and mostly on the feminization of society. It does not cohere, and spends too much time wallowing in pseudo-anthropology, but it has a number of interesting bits. Here is from the preface:
I have my pick: Nancy Scheper Hughes’s 1992 study Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil .
A very interesting book, recommended, due out in February .
Definitely recommended, and Jennifer’s new book Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative is one of my favorite books of the year. It will likely stand as the definitive biography of Friedman.
That is from Shlomo Avineri’s Herzl’s Vision: Theodor Herzl and the Foundation of the Jewish State . Here is a new bulletin from MIT .
There’s a wonderful book by Brett Martin, called Difficult Men , that’s about showrunners. It starts, in a way, with Bochco and Milch in that time period. It’s a great look into how this idea of showrunners created modern television. HBO needing something, all these business reasons underneath it, but how people who came up through, originally, Hill Street were able to go on and start this revolution.
5. Larry Rohter, Into the Amazon: The Life of Cândido Rondon, Trailblazing Explorer, Scientist, Statesman, and Conservationist . I loved this book, in part because I like Brazil so much but not only. Rondon, arguably the greatest tropical explorer of all time, played a central role in the development of northern Brazil. He laid down a 1,200 mile telegraph line in the Amazon, at the time considered one of the world’s greatest achievements (radio telegraphy made this obsolete, however). He was...
4. Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution . It is getting harder and harder to find good popular science books, due to exhaustion of the major topics, but this is one of them. I kept on seeing reviews of this book, and not buying it due to fears of pandering. But most of this book is genuinely illuminating and on a wide range of biological topics, most of all how the female body is different. Ovaries, menopause, differences in brains — you’ll find i...
3. Peter Kemp, Retroland: A Reader’s Guide to the Dazzling Diversity of Modern Fiction . Is this an actual book, or just some smart guy running off at the mouth and writing what he really thinks? Would I prefer the former? No!
2. Richard Cockett, Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World . It’s not the same kind of deep explanation as Toulmin or Schorske, nonetheless an excellent survey and introduction to the miracles of Viennese science, philosophy, and culture, earlier in the 20th century. I enjoyed this very much.
1. Dan Sinykin, Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature . An excellent history of U.S. trade publishing, and not the sort of anti-capitalist mentality snark you might be expecting from the title. Recommended, for those who care.
4. Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories . An extremely well-written, and also useful history of the opium trade, albeit with more than its fair share of left-wing jargon. And yes that is the novelist Ghosh. Due out in February.