Recently Mentioned Books

There is Angus Deaton, Economics in America : An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality.

Colleen P. Eren, Reform Nation: The First Step Act and the Movement to End Mass Incarceration , is a good and useful history of the recent criminal justice reform movement.

Paul Lendvai, Austria Behind the Mask: Politics of a Nation since 1945 is quite good.

Florian Illies, Love in a Time of Hate: Art and Passion in the Shadow of War .  Take the top Continental artists and thinkers of the 1920s, and write a book about their affairs, and this is what you get.

Cara Fitzpatrick, The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America , is quite a good and also objective book.

4. Anna Keay, The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown , now out in the U.S.  Here is my earlier CWT with her .

That is the new Richard Hanania book, with the subtitle Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics , and it is coming out next week.  There are complex “Pierre Menard-like” issues surrounding the work at this point, and at the moment I don’t have the time or energy to sort through them.  I can tell you however that I liked the book.

Due out October 24, you can pre-order here .

That is from the new and interesting The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia , by Sheila Miyoshi Jager.

6. New Knausgaard novel is coming .

That is from a new paper by Rainer Zitelman .  And here is Rainer’s recent book In Defense Of Capitalism: Debunking the Myths .

I am a big fan of her latest book Yellowface , which I read straight through (and it’s much more double-edged and subversive than you might be expecting).  Here is a partial bio :

That is all from Victor Sebestyen’s interesting new book, Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West .

The author is Kevin Vallier, and the subtitle is On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism .  This is an excellent and important book, starting with its defense of classical liberalism over Catholic integralism and indeed illiberalism more generally.  But do note that Kevin, although a professional philosopher is also a Christian (Eastern Orthodox), and he is writing from a Christian perspective.  This is also an excellent book simply for learning what integralism is .  Overall, perhaps th...

The author is James Pethokoukis, and the subtitle is How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised .

Lunana, A Yak in the Classroom is the only and also the best Bhutanese movie I have seen, ever.  Recommended, gives you a real look at the country, both rural and urban [sic].

I have not read the new novel by Bradley Tusk, namely Obvious in Hindsight , about the attempted introduction of flying cars and the regulatory obstacles that arose (among other dramatic events).

Lorraine Byrne Bodley, Schubert: A Musical Wayfarer .  Super-thorough, everything about Schubert and most of all his music.

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy .  This book in preprint form was well ahead of its time, and now it is coming out in a super-timely fashion.

Harvey Sachs, Schoenberg: Why He Matters .  A very good introduction to a composer who truly matters.  Also a good (short) portrait of Vienna at that time.  Maybe it won’t “sell you” on Schoenberg, but it will make his advocates (I am one of them) seem far less crazy.  It also admits that a lot of his work wasn’t that good, and helps you separate the better from the worse.

Victoria Houseman, American Classicist: The Life and Loves of Edith Hamilton .  A good and fun book.  I hadn’t known that she was very likely bisexual, or that she was good friends with Felix Morley and Robert Taft.  Interesting throughout, and drives home the point about just how early Hamilton did her most important work on mythology.  It remains widely read today.

James Stafford, The Case of Ireland: Commerce, Empire and the European Order, 1750-1848 .  An excellent and well-researched books, most interesting on the Irish Union of 1800-1801 and how and why so many classical liberals favored it.  What did they get wrong?  Or did they?  Consistently instructive on earlier Irish thought on trade as well.

R.C. Zaehner, Concordant Discord: The Interdependence of Faiths Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at St. Andrews in 1967-1969 .  Half of this volume is amazing, the other half meandering.  The best parts are on Hinduism and Buddhism, and how they can best be understood in relation to Western religions.  Zaehner has an amazing Wikipeda page , and I have ordered other books by him, the ultimate act of literary flattery.

I loved the book , and that led me to Jacob.  Here are some of his articles .  Here is Jacob on Twitter .  Here is a good WSJ review of Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land .

A lot happened in the 1770s as well.  That above paragraph is from Julian Havil’s quite good John Napier: Life, Logarithms, and Legacy .  Napier of course also was obsessed with the Book of Revelation, in addition to being one of the discoverers of logarithms.