Recently Mentioned Books

Stewart Brand, Maintenance: Of Everything: Part One .  Capital depreciation, while it receives attention in economics, arguably is still underrated in import?  Institutions can deteriorate or depreciate as well.  The great Stewart Brand tackles this topic with the expected panache.  And here is my earlier CWT with Stewart .  A Stripe Press book.

Indranil Chakravarty, The Tree Within: The Mexican Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz’s Years in India .  Imagine a book that is interesting about both the cultures of Mexico and India.  In addition to the one by Octavio Paz, that is.  I lapped this one up eagerly, and I note it also has good coverage on the relationships between different Latin American writers and poets.  Paz by the way largely was at odds with the left-wingers.

Adrian Goldsworthy, Augustus: First Emperor of Rome .  A very clear and readable treatment of one of the most important Romans.  Exactly what you would expect from the author.

By Bryan Caplan, now on sale .  From Bryan’s Substack:

Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her.  She has a new and very good book out, namely Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia .  I will focus on that topic, but she has done much else as well.  From Wikipedia :

That is from the new and excellent book by Alan Allport, Advance Britannia: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1942-1945 .

The book I was reading is titled Encounters and Reflections: Conversations with Seth Benardete , here is one excerpt:

He has a new and excellent book coming out, namely How Africa Works: Success and Failure on the World’s Last Developmental Frontier , which I consumed eagerly.  You probably know his earlier book How Asia Works .  So what should I ask him?

He has a new and excellent book coming out, namely How Africa Works: Success and Failure on the World’s Last Developmental Frontier , which I consumed eagerly.  You probably know his earlier book How Asia Works .  So what should I ask him?

I expect I will very much agree with Brink Lindsey, The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transition from Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing .

Eve MacDonald, Carthage: A New History covers what we do know about those people.  That isn’t much at the conceptual level, and I wonder why archaeology has not taught us more there.

Nicolas Niarchos, The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth is a good treatment of minerals issues as they relate to the Congo today.  It will not make you more bullish on Rwanda, or for that matter the Congo.

Alex Mayyasi, Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces that Shape Your Life is a useful introduction to economic concepts.

Alan Manning, Why Immigration Policy is Hard and How to Make it Better is a thoughtful and balanced look at its topic, recommended.

Herbert Breslin and Anne Midgette, The King and I: The Uncensored Tale of Luciano Pavarotti’s Rise to Fame by his Manager, Friend, and Sometime Adversary .  Usually people tell me books like this are “delightful,” and then they bore me to tears.  This one actually is fantastically fun.  “To tell the truth, though, Luciano didn’t care about the money at the beginning.  In the early years, he never asked me how much he was going to get paid for a recital.  He had only one condition: it had to be s...

Michael Wachtel, Viacheslav Ivanov: A Symbolist Life .  615 pp. of what Russian/Soviet cultural life was like in the early 20th century.  Focuses on broader strands, rather than just the most famous names.  Ivanov today is largely forgotten, but he was at the time arguably the most influential figure of that period.  “They were mostly a bunch of nuts” is one of my takeaways.

Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him.  We will focus on our mutual readings of Shakespearer’s Measure for Measure , with Henry taking the lead.  But I also will ask him about the value of literature, Jane Austen, Adam Smith, Bleak House, his book on late bloomers , and more.

Patrick : In 1925, Ortega y Gasset said “modern art, on the other hand, has the masses against it, and this will always be so since it is unpopular in essence; even more, it is antipopular.” Sagmeister and Walsh argue that we’ve stopped trying to produce beautiful work, and Nicholas Boys-Smith shows empirically that modern buildings are substantially less favored than designs that respect the specific character of the place. So, what are new directions forward? What is new and also beautiful?

The author is Philippe Sands and the subtitle is On Impunity, Pinochet in England, and a Nazi in Patagonia .  This book made many “best of the year” lists, but at first I resisted buying and reading it, fearing it was just more mood affiliation on Pinochet.  In reality it is highly substantive, not just deserving of a place on my best non-fiction of the year list , but likely in the top ten of that list.  It has the narrative sweep of a good novel, and is profound on the following topics: the na...

That is from Mansfield’s forthcoming book The Rise and Fall of Rational Control .

You will find a different intersection of topic areas in Dominic Roser, David Zhang, and J.D. Bauman, All the Lives You Can Change: Effective Altruism for Christians .

Alvaro Rivas, Marx in the Age of AI: How Artificial Intelligence Reshapes Value, Class, and Ideology is a short but serious look as to how Marxian concepts might apply to AI, for instance whether surplus value will be earned on the AIs, or for that matter on non-human animals.

There is Kevin Kelly, Colors of Asia: A Visual Journey, Photos and Design .

For those interested in the longer term, there is Hilary Greaves, Jacob Barrett, and David Thorstad, editors, Essays on Longtermism: Present Action for the Distant Future .

4. Richard H. Davis, Religions of Early India: A Cultural History .  A very useful background read for understanding later Indian history and religions, as well as the more general spread of religion throughout the southern regions of Asia.  Avoids the common mistake of becoming too obscure on these topics.