Recently Mentioned Books
Showing 25 of 6760 mentions, ordered by most recent.
He is one of the world’s leading art critics, all of his books are excellent, and he has a new and very good work coming out titled Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found . He also has a well-known book on Caravaggio, on Michelangelo, and I am especially fond of his book on British art.
Perhaps the exchange is a little slow to start, but otherwise fascinating throughout. I am also happy to recommend Harvey’s recent book The Rise and Fall of Rational Control: The History of Modern Political Philosophy .
The subtitle is The Real Reasons Economies Shrink and What To Do About It . Here is from the book’s summary:
That is from the very good book by Hermann Giliomee The Afrikaners: A Concise History .
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. He is one of the leading historians of ancient Egypt, and he has a recent book out on Ptolemaic Egypt, namely The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra .
Here is one obituary . My favorite book of his was The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society .
To this day, when I think about the economics of AI, and many other matters, Lachmann’s book Capital and its Structure is one of my go-to inspirations.
One of the things I like best about South Africa is how quickly one enters another and very different intellectual world. Walk into a good used book shop, such as Clarke’s in Cape Town , and you find a slew of quality history books and biographies you otherwise would not have heard of. Buy them and read them and be transported. So many of them exist apart from the usual dialogues. For instance, I recently bought Digging Deep – A History of Mining in South Africa by Jade Davenport. It looks ...
The Five Tastes: Delicious Recipes for Chinese Flavor , due out this fall. Via Joe Powers in the MR comments section. Hers are the very best Chinese cookbooks and they are also wonderful books more generally. She has been a CWT guest three times now . Let us hope a fourth episode is in order…
Murphy : People don’t like change, but also people are bad at long term planning. Yeah. You’ve spoken before about how faith is a key requirement in terms of being able to plan over the long term. How do you bring that idea to policymakers?
Vladimir Jurowski has recorded Maher 1, 2, 4, 8, and with 9 on the way and I read somewhere he will be doing the entire cycle. I expect these will end up as my set of choice.
The Marek Janowski box of Bruckner symphonies I find to be the best Bruckner overall. And yes I do know many other versions, even Hermann Abendroth, though I cannot hold a candle to one MR reader I met recently who may know seventy or more versions of Bruckner’s 8th.
José Donoso, The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History is a good lshort overview, noting that Donoso’s own The Obscene Bird of Night is one of the great underrated works of 20th century literature.
José Donoso, The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History is a good lshort overview, noting that Donoso’s own The Obscene Bird of Night is one of the great underrated works of 20th century literature.
Davd Epstein, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better . A good popular look at what the subtitle promises.
Partha Dasgupta, On Natural Capital: The Value of the World Around Us , is a popular summary of some of his thinking on valuing the environment and natural resources.
Muriel Spark, The Driver’s Seat . If you like her at all, you will be entranced by this one. With a radical ending, as you might expect.
Robert Polito, After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace . An informationally dense, rambling, and frequently insightful and obsessive book about the “late” career period of Bob Dylan. When does his “late” period start? 1990 perhaps? I remember thinking in 1990 that we were well into Dylan’s late career phase. But that was thirty-six years ago!
Sean Mathews, The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and Return of the Near East . Anexcellent and original book, somewhere between a history and travel book. Views Greece as part of “the Middle East.” I found every page interesting.
Frank McLynn, Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution . The best book on its topic, and one of the best books on Mexican history flat out. Everything is explained with remarkable clarity. By the way, the central government never really has controlled the entire country, or not for very long anyway.
The author is Sebastian Mallaby and the subtitle is Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence . A very good and enjoyable book.
3. Abbas Amanat, Iran: A Modern History is for me (by far) the best general history of the country. I like the cover too.
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with her. She is the author of a forthcoming book on Weimar, namely Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe . Note that much of the book considers the city of Weimar, mostly in Nazi times, and not just the Weimar era. She also has published Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany , and Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire 1871-1918 . She is active in journalism, podcasting, and is a visiting research fellow at King’s College London. Sh...
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with her. She is the author of a forthcoming book on Weimar, namely Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe . Note that much of the book considers the city of Weimar, mostly in Nazi times, and not just the Weimar era. She also has published Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany , and Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire 1871-1918 . She is active in journalism, podcasting, and is a visiting research fellow at King’s College London. Sh...
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with her. She is the author of a forthcoming book on Weimar, namely Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe . Note that much of the book considers the city of Weimar, mostly in Nazi times, and not just the Weimar era. She also has published Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany , and Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire 1871-1918 . She is active in journalism, podcasting, and is a visiting research fellow at King’s College London. Sh...