Recently Mentioned Books

I have my pick: Nancy Scheper Hughes’s 1992 study Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil .

A very interesting book, recommended, due out in February .

Definitely recommended, and Jennifer’s new book Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative is one of my favorite books of the year.  It will likely stand as the definitive biography of Friedman.

That is from Shlomo Avineri’s Herzl’s Vision: Theodor Herzl and the Foundation of the Jewish State .  Here is a new bulletin from MIT .

There’s a wonderful book by Brett Martin, called Difficult Men , that’s about showrunners. It starts, in a way, with Bochco and Milch in that time period. It’s a great look into how this idea of showrunners created modern television. HBO needing something, all these business reasons underneath it, but how people who came up through, originally, Hill Street were able to go on and start this revolution.

5. Larry Rohter, Into the Amazon: The Life of Cândido Rondon, Trailblazing Explorer, Scientist, Statesman, and Conservationist .  I loved this book, in part because I like Brazil so much but not only.  Rondon, arguably the greatest tropical explorer of all time, played a central role in the development of northern Brazil.  He laid down a 1,200 mile telegraph line in the Amazon, at the time considered one of the world’s greatest achievements (radio telegraphy made this obsolete, however).  He was...

4. Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution .  It is getting harder and harder to find good popular science books, due to exhaustion of the major topics, but this is one of them.  I kept on seeing reviews of this book, and not buying it due to fears of pandering.  But most of this book is genuinely illuminating and on a wide range of biological topics, most of all how the female body is different.  Ovaries, menopause, differences in brains — you’ll find i...

3. Peter Kemp, Retroland: A Reader’s Guide to the Dazzling Diversity of Modern Fiction .  Is this an actual book, or just some smart guy running off at the mouth and writing what he really thinks?  Would I prefer the former?  No!

2. Richard Cockett, Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World .  It’s not the same kind of deep explanation as Toulmin or Schorske, nonetheless an excellent survey and introduction to the miracles of Viennese science, philosophy, and culture, earlier in the 20th century.  I enjoyed this very much.

1. Dan Sinykin, Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature .  An excellent history of U.S. trade publishing, and not the sort of anti-capitalist mentality snark you might be expecting from the title.  Recommended, for those who care.

4. Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories .  An extremely well-written, and also useful history of the opium trade, albeit with more than its fair share of left-wing jargon.  And yes that is the novelist Ghosh.  Due out in February.

3. Alexandra Hudson, The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves .  Highly intelligent, and today much needed.  Her opening sentence is: “Did you know there are at least four women named Judith who are internationally renowned experts on manners?”  I would say that Alexandra is one of my “dark horse” picks to become a leading classical liberal influencer, except maybe she isn’t a dark horse any more.

1. Eric Ambler, The Night-Comers .  (U.S. editions are sometimes titled State of Siege .)  Think of Ambler as a precursor of Le Carré.  I used to think he had one or two excellent works, now I am realizing his ouevre is much deeper than I had imagined.  Just long enough at 158 pp., this novel uses the Sundanese setting very well.  He was a favorite of Graham Greene’s, and I will read yet more by him.

That is from the new and quite interesting Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins , by Jacob L. Wright.  From the jacket copy: “…the Bible began as a trailblazing blueprint for a new form of political community.”

Recommended, I will read every page.  You can order here , Norman’s other bios are great too.  And if you are wondering, a few of the most underrated George songs are the early instrumental “ Cry for a Shadow ,” “ Don’t Bother Me ,” and the much later “ You .”

By Rachel Reeves.  Here is the U.S. Amazon listing , but even the Kindle version is not actually available.  Here is the UK Amazon listing .  Here is a Times of London review of the book : “They [the book’s subjects] range from Beatrice Webb, who, as a founder of the LSE, is a natural choice, to Rosa Luxemburg, the revolutionary Marxist, and Dambisa Moyo, the international aid theorist elevated to the Lords by Boris Johnson.”  Note that Reeves is also Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, and thus...

That is the new and excellent book by Uri Kaufman, and the subtitle is The Yom Kippur War and How It Created the Modern Middle East .  Here is one excerpt:

Recommended, interesting throughout.  Again, here is Jacob’s new and excellent book Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land .

That is a forthcoming book by David Daokiu Li .  Perhaps it is the very best book explaining “how China works today?”

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.