Recently Mentioned Books

There is also Devon Cox, Beyond Beauty: A Portrait of John Singer Sargent .

Thomas Asbridge, The Black Death: A Global History of Humanity’s Most Devastating Pandemic is a good overview.

If you wish to think about the Roman Empire more, there is Pliny & Co., How to Make Money: An Ancient Guide to Wealth Management .

3. Jim Windolf, Where the Music Had To Go: How Bob Dylan and the Beatles Changed Each Other — and the World .  An excellent and engaging book, which even serious fans can learn from.  The first time Paul McCartney heard the music of Bob Dylan he called it “folk crap,” to his brother Mike.  Dylan and McCartney grew closest in 1971, when Paul was making the Ram album in NYC. Music from Big Pink is one of Paul’s favorite albums of all time. Thingumybob , first composed by Paul in 1968, later receiv...

2. Boyd van Dijk, Preparing for War: The Making of the Geneva Conventions .  A very good look at the negotiations behind the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and just how driven by national self-interest they were, including colonial motives from the major colonial powers, who wished to retain stronger rights to put down uprisings.  The Soviets wanted strong protections against torture (!), as they thought this might limit the power of the United States to bomb their population into submission.  Yet n...

1. David Narrett, The Cherokees in War & at Peace 1670-1840 .  An excellent book, one of the two best books on a single Native American tribe I have read.  The book actually aims at explaining the Cherokees and enlightening the reader – how rare.  In 1700, there were no more than 20,000 Cherokees, mostly in the southeast, so it is amazing what the author was able to come up with.  Will make the year’s best of non-fiction list.

Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her.  Most of all focusing on her recent book The Republic of Love: Opera and Political Freedom .

The author is Juan Marsé , this novel is set in 1956, first published in Spain in 1966, and only now appearing in English.  Here is the Amazon link .  Marsé is one of the handful of great authors who has no real presence in the Anglo world, Bioy Casares would be another.  You can think of the story as covering class conflict, romance, and their intersection in the Barcelona of the 1950s.  Definitely recommended, I am excited to see this finally out and am reading it avidly (in Spanish it is too ...

All of the blessings of modernity, Ryan Avent argues in a fascinating new book, rest on faith. It is our faith in others, our ability to trust strangers we will never meet, that makes possible the large-scale cooperation that has given us science, modern economic growth, and liberal democracy. But if everything depends on our ability to weave and maintain particular webs of complex meaning, what happens when we allow those webs to weaken and fray? In his book In Good Faith , Ryan contends that t...

The subtitle is How the Nature of Belief Shapes the Fate of Societies .  Here is Ryan doing a podcast with Brink Lindsey .  As Brink writes:

That is from Allen James Fromherz, The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age to the Present .  From this same book I learned that Milton refers to the Straits in Paradise Lost , but under the name of Ormus:

He is on the business faculty at Catholic University and has a background on both Wall Street and in the startup world, where he founded several companies. His first book, Wanting (2021), has been translated into 20+ languages and is selling more than copies than ever five years in. He is an expert on Rene Girard.  His new book, The One and the Ninety-Nine , is out from St. Martin’s June 16 — a theory of how identity gets formed or deformed under conditions of technological social contagion. He ...

5. Lázár , by Nelio Biedermann.  An excellent novel of ideas, in the style of earlier Continental literature, by a 23-year-old Swiss phenom.  It is very good in German, I have not sampled the translation.

4. Iain Pears, Parallel Lives: A Love Story from a Lost Continent .  A delightful story/indirect memoir, telling the tale of the lives and marriage of Frances Haskell, the British art historian, and Larissa Salmina Haskell, a Russian woman who survived the siege of Leningrad as a girl.  Pears had the full cooperation of Larissa, at an age where she doesn’t give a damn any more.  This story truly comes to life, and that is helped by Pears’s background as a writer of very good fiction.

3. Lena Dunham, Famesick: A Memoir .  Not exactly my thing, so I did not finish it.  But it is pretty good, so if you are tempted give it a try.

2. Mangol Bayat, Mysticism and Dissent: Socioreligious Dissent in Qajar Iran .  A very good, clear, and useful book on different dissident religiouis developments in Iran, leading up to the Bahai faith.  Recommended, one of the best books I have found for grappling with the history of current Iran.

1. Mason Currey, Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life .  The best overall book I know on the different methods top artists have used to keep themselves going financially.  It is perhaps more anecdotal and less theoretical than I would prefer, still a nice work.

That is from the very useful The Origins of the Arab-Iranian Conflict: Nationalism and Sovereignty in the Gulf between the World Wars , by Chelsi Mueller.

That is from Ervand Abrahamian’s A History of Modern Iran .

That is from John Ghazvinian America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present , a very good book.

Interesting and engaging throughout, definitely recommended.  You can buy Kim’s excellent book here .

That is all from the new and noteworthy Venice and the Mongols: The Eurasian Exchange that Transformed the Medieval World , by Nicola di Cosmo and Lorenzo Pubblici.

That is from Michael Axworthy’s A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind , a good general introduction to the history of the country.

That is from the new and interesting book The World in Flames: A Global History of the Seven Years’ War by Marian Füssel.

3. New book coming on Carlsen vs. Niemann .