Recently Mentioned Books

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 .

William Magnuson, For Profit: A History of Corporations is not a book for me, but it is a good and sane introduction for those seeking that.

5. Anthony Kaldellis, The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium . So far I’ve read only 22 pp. of this one, and it clocks in at 900 pp. plus.  It is obviously excellent and I wanted to tell you about it right away.  I expect it to make the top few picks of the best non-fiction of 2024.  The author’s main theme is that Byzantium built a “New Roman Empire,” and he details how that happened.  The writing is also clear and transparent, for a time period that is not always easy to understand.

4. Richard Whatmore, The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis .  One of my favorite books on the British Enlightenment.  For instance, the author captures the tenor of 18th century British debates about liberty very well.  Very good chapters on Hume, Shelburne, and Macaulay.  Whatmore somehow writes as if he is actually trying to explain things to you!  If you read a lot of history books, you will know that is oddly rare.  Recommended, for all those who care.

3. Peter Cowie, God and the Devil: The Life and Work of Ingmar Bergman .  The author knew Bergman, and early on, so this is a useful biography in several regards, most of all for some background information and TV and theatre projects that never came to fruition.  But it is not useful for converting the unconverted, nor does it have much more interpretative meat for the in-the-know obsessives.

2. Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art , edited by Susan Owens and Nicholas Tromans.  Excellent text and also color plates, including paintings and sketches of her, a very good introduction to her work.  Here is a good bit: “Rarely, if ever, has a major poet grown up so deeply embedded in an avant-garde visual culture.  Yet she seems actively to have resisted the lure of the world of images, preferring to live and write, as Bell liked to think she did spontaneously, out of her own mind.”  A wonder...

1. Steve Kaczynski and Scott Duke Kominers, The Everything Token: How NFTs and Web3 Will Transform the Way We Buy, Sell, and Create .  Could the be the best book on NFTs?  I think we should be genuinely uncertain as to whether NFTs have a future.  In the meantime, I consider NFTs a good Rorschach test for whether an individual’s mind is capable of moving out of “the dismissive mode.”  Do you pass or fail this test?  The “snide, sniping” mode is so hard for many commentators to resist…

Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma! , the complete score (for the first time recorded), John Wilson and Sinfonia of London.

Monteverdi, Vespro Della Beata Vergine , conducted by Raphaël Pichon, covered here by the NYT .  Monteverdi’s greatest work, and this recording has been receiving special praise from many quarters.