Recently Mentioned Books

As for the students themselves, recent research indicates that sports performance makes former student athletes more valuable in the workplace. Former college athletes are much more likely to enter the high-earning fields of business and finance, relative to their non-athlete classmates. That can benefit the former students, their alma mater and the overall economy.

John has a new book coming out The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism .  So what should I ask him?

The author is Robert Boyers and the subtitle is Days & Nights with Susan Sontag & George Steiner , and the book appears to be an account of their friendship, and also rivalry.  Here is one early passage:

Shuchen Xiang, Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea .  Chinese cosmopolitanism, there was more of it than you might have thought.  Should we be asking “Where did it go?”  Or is it there more than ever?

Richard Campanella, Bienville’s Dilemma: A Historical Geography of New Orleans is one mighty fine book.

Gary S. Becker, The Economic Approach: Unpublished Writings of Gary S. Becker .  I am honored to have blurbed this book.

J.M. Coetzee, The Pole .  Short, compelling, self-contained, again deals with older men who have not resolved their issues concerning sex.   Good but not great Coetzee.

Benjamin Labutut, The Maniac .  Chilean author, he has penned the story of von Neumann but in the latter part of the book switches to contemporary AI and AlphaGO, semi-fictionalized.  Feels vital and not tired, mostly pretty good, thoiiugh for some MR readers the material may be excessively familiar.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World .  Have you ever been confused by Naomi Klein vs. Naomi Wolf?  Intellectually they are both pretty crazy.  And they are both named Naomi.  Some might think they bear some resemblance to each other.  Well, here is a whole book on that confusion!  And it is written by Naomi Klein.  How much insight and self-awareness can one intellectually crazy person have about being confused for another intellectually crazy person?  Quite a bit, it turns o...

I do not go to Israel enough to have a strong opinion on this, but their thesis is consistent with my casual observation, and also with my intuition about negative bias in media.  The book comes out November 7 .

I thought Jonny Steinberg’s Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage was one of the very best books of the year, and most of all this is a book about South Africa.  Here is one excerpt:

1. Presale link for the new Coleman Hughes book .

The author is Brian Rosenberg and here is the Amazon listing .

That is the new book by Costin Alamariu , who also has self-identified as the very famous BAP .  It is a published version of his Yale doctoral dissertation on political theory.  It has been selling very well.

There is Shane Parrish, Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results .

Geoffrey M. Hodgson, The Wealth of a Nation: Institutional Foundations of English Capitalism , is a useful neo-institutionalist survey of some of the different factors behind the rise of England.

David Leonhardt is soon publishing Ours Was the Shining Future: The Rise and Fall of the American Dream .

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 .