Recently Mentioned Books

Jeanna Smialek, Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis , is a good, readable, non-technical introduction to the Fed, focusing on personalities and internal mechanics, rather than macroeconomic theories.

4. Lucy Wooding, Tudor England: A History .  A good book, but most of all a very good book to read with GPT-4 as your companion.

3. Carmela Ciuraru, Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages .  I hadn’t even known Patricia Neal was married to Roald Dahl.  Overall I enjoy intellectual/romance gossip books, and this is a good one.  Full of actual facts about the writings, not just the affairs and the marriages and divorces.  Moravia/Morante was my favorite chapter.  Here is a Guardian review , superficially you might think there is no real message in this book, but then again…

2. John A. Mackenzie, A Cultural History of the British Empire .  “A vital characteristic of polo was that since it lacked immediate physical contact it could be jointly played by British and Indians, which of course meant elite Indians, inevitably associated with the princely states.”  A very good book on both a) early globalization, and b) actually understanding the British empire.  I hadn’t known that during the 1930s and 40s, maximum years of resistance to the British empire, cricket tournam...

1. Judith A. Green, The Normans: Power, Conquest & Culture in 11th-Century Europe .  A very clear and to the point book on a complex topic.  This is a good one to read with GPT-4 accompaniment for your queries.  In Sicily, near Palermo, the Normans produced one of my favorite sites in all of Europe .

His Out of Control is a wonderful Hayekian book.  His three-volume Vanishing Asia is one of the greatest picture books of all time.  His new book (I haven’t read it yet) is Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier .  Here is Kevin on Twitter , here is his home page .

His Out of Control is a wonderful Hayekian book.  His three-volume Vanishing Asia is one of the greatest picture books of all time.  His new book (I haven’t read it yet) is Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier .  Here is Kevin on Twitter , here is his home page .

From Taylor C. Sherman’s useful Nehru’s India: A History in Seven Myths :

Ashoka Mody has published the quite pessimistic India is Broken: A People Betrayed, Independence to Today .

And Nicolas Spencer, Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science and Religion .

There is Peter Baldwin’s Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should be Free for All .

3. Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? How Hegelian should our understanding of Christ be?  The book is written as a confrontational dialogue, and to its benefit.  You do need to be able to stomach sentences such as: “Do the three main versions of Christianity not form a kind of Hegelian triad?” (SZ)  In any case, the smartness of the authors makes it worthwhile.  Once you move past their immediate (and extreme) fan bases, both are in fact considerably...

2. Jens Heycke, Out of the Melting Pot, Into the Fire: Multiculturalism and the World’s Past and America’s Future .  Argues that ethnic divisions should be made less rather than more focal: “When I visited Rwanda, I asked Rwandans of various backgrounds whether they thought distinguishing people by race or ethnicity ever helped anyone in their country.”  An effective presentation of facts, though only one side of the story and it does not take sufficiently seriously the question of how tolerant ...

1. Tezer Özlü, Cold Nights of Childhood .  A Turkish novella, originally published in 1980, newly translated into English and the first English-language book by her.  I give this one an A/A+, mostly emotional drama and narrative, I can’t tell you more without spoilers.  Here is more on the author .  Only 76 pp.  When will her suicide book be published in English?

It was not exactly the book I wanted, but I hope you read it.  You can pre-order it here , or as I did have it shipped from UK Amazon .

Pittock stresses the importance of good education for the Scottish story, here is one good Guardian review noting that point.  Here is a good Scotsman review .  You can buy the book here , definitely recommended and interesting on virtually every page.

I have been predicting this will be an amazing year for fiction, most of all fiction in translation, and so far it is off to a wonderful start.  You can buy the book here .

It is not an airtight view, but it is also not the least plausible view.  Imagine a “basic needs” argument that suggests, a’ la David Braybrooke , that individuals truly have positive rights to a certain degree of sustenance, health care, shelter, and so on.  Yet above that basic needs level, individuals don’t have positive rights to much of anything at all.  They are left to fend for themselves, though of course they will benefit from social cooperation.  After all, positive rights have to stop...

The author is Karl Schlögel, and the subtitle is Archaeology of a Lost World .  Who else could have a whole chapter on Soviet-era doorknobs?  This is a fascinating book about the material loose ends, the pamphlets, the clothes, the non-existent phone books, the shop signs, the chest medals, and the bric-a-brac — among many other items — of the Soviet Union.  Excerpt:

The authors are Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi, and the subtitle is Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism .  Due out April 4, pre-order now , here is my blurb:

He has an extensive publication record , including in political economy, economic history, and economic growth, he studied earlier Russian reforms , and he has books on science policy (with Jonathan Gruber) and the national debt (with Kwak).  Most notably his forthcoming book is with Daron Acemoglu and is titled Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity , due out in May.  He is a Brit of course.

He has an extensive publication record , including in political economy, economic history, and economic growth, he studied earlier Russian reforms , and he has books on science policy (with Jonathan Gruber) and the national debt (with Kwak).  Most notably his forthcoming book is with Daron Acemoglu and is titled Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity , due out in May.  He is a Brit of course.

He has an extensive publication record , including in political economy, economic history, and economic growth, he studied earlier Russian reforms , and he has books on science policy (with Jonathan Gruber) and the national debt (with Kwak).  Most notably his forthcoming book is with Daron Acemoglu and is titled Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity , due out in May.  He is a Brit of course.

There is a new and ambitious Philip Pettit book coming out, The State .

4. Adam Kuper, The Museum of Other People: From Colonial Acquisitions to Cosmopolitan Exhibitions .  An excellent history of ethnographic museums, including their original visions, how they evolved, and their continuing import.  Good coverage of Leipzig, Pitt-Rivers, Paris, the Smithsonian, Mexico, and more.  The author is pro-heritage while wary of mainstream identity politics, for instance skewering the Museum of the American Indian in DC.  I like the book’s opening quotation: “There is no doc...