Recently Mentioned Books

There is Alan S. Kahan, Freedom from Fear: An Incomplete History of Liberalism .

Simon Shorvon, The Idea of Epilepsy: A Medical and Social History of Epilepsy in the Modern Era (1860-2020) .  A remarkably thorough and intelligent treatment of a topic that now has a near-perfect stand-alone book.

Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women .  Do you judge books by their degree of insight, or based on whether you agree with where they end up?  This volume is a litmus test for that question, and I give it either an A or an F minus, depending on your standard.  In my view, Dworkin remains an underrated and intellectually honest (if overly consistent) feminist thinker.  This one is from 1978, still interesting albeit repulsive if you try to apply any moral judgment to it.  But don’t!  If you are lookin...

David O’Brien, Exiled in Modernity: Delacroix, Civilization, and Barbarism .  A very good book planting Eugene Delacroix — both his paintings and writings — squarely in a “progress studies” tradition.  Like so much other 19th (and also 18th) century art.  Good color plates too.

Maria Blanco and Alberto Mingardi have produced a very useful volume, Show and Biz: The Market Economy in TV Series and Popular Culture (2000-2020) , providing an updated look at the (somewhat) rising popularity of business and capitalism in U.S. popular culture.

Here is Jennifer Burns on Twitter .  Here is her home page .  Here is her soon to be released Milton Friedman biography .  Here is her 2009 Ayn Rand biography .  She is currently associate professor of history at Stanford.

Here is Jennifer Burns on Twitter .  Here is her home page .  Here is her soon to be released Milton Friedman biography .  Here is her 2009 Ayn Rand biography .  She is currently associate professor of history at Stanford.

From the Amazon summary of the forthcoming book Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend by Elizabeth King and W. David Todd:

That is from Major Thomas Skinner, Fifty Years in Ceylon , published in 1891, largely compiled in 1868.  Overall an interesting and forthright book, mostly about Ceylon of course.

The subtitle is A practical guide for highly-skilled immigrants to thrive in the United States , and the authors are Soundarya Balasubramani and Sameer Khedekar, just published.  Covers all of the main immigration options into the United States in clear, understandable language.  Even if you do not wish to come, this is perhaps the best and clearest attempt to explain a very muddled immigration system.  You can buy it here .  Here is the book’s website , with many resources, including on-line ma...

I have been reading two good books about Sri Lanka, namely K.M. de Silva’s Sri Lanka and the Defeat of the LTTE and also his A History of Sri Lanka .  Both would be very difficult to follow if I didn’t already have a decent sense of the place names, how the country “fits together,” and many other features of life here .  If I read about a 12th century Buddhist kingdom, in fact I absorb and retain much more of that knowledge if I have visited the ruins of said kingdom.  It is more intellectually ...

I am away from my review copy, so I am pleased that Matt Yglesias has offered ($) a good “standing on one foot” summary of the plan, as outlined in the new book We’ve Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care , by Amy Finkelstein and Liran Einav:

I will not right now have time to read Wang Hui, The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought , but it appears to be a major work of importance.

Soon to appear is Yasheng Huang’s The Rise and Fall of the East: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline .  Here is my earlier CWT with Yasheng Huang .

Anupam B. Jena and Christopher Worsham, Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces that Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health , is a Freakonomics-style look at what we can learn from controlled and also natural experiments in medicine.

Tara Isabella Burton, Self Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians is an interesting look at the earlier history of self-made celebrity images.

I can recommend Maurizio Isabella, Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions , mostly about the 1820s.

Matthew Barrett, The Reformation as Renewal: Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church .  A lengthy and highly detailed polemic arguing that Protestantism is the true universal church, rather than a dissent per se.  These are not my issues, but some people will like this book a good deal.

Florian Illies, 1913:The Year Before the Storm , considers what the leading German and Austro-Hungarian cultural figures were doing in that year, right before disaster struck.

Rory Naismith, Making Money in the Early Middle Ages is a historically important work about the significant of coined money in dragging the Western world out of the Dark Ages.

Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 .  The new go-to book on this topic, magisterial on the lead-up causes and later on the international influences and contagions.  Will make the year’s best non-fiction list.

That is the new Patrick J. Deneen book, with the subtitle Toward a Postliberal Future .  I would say that reading and trying to review this book most of all raises the question of what a review is for.  As you might expect from Deneen, the book is well-written and comes across as highly intelligent.  The question is what one should make of the actual claims and content.

The author is David Blackbourn, and the subtitle is A Global History 1500-2000 .  The focus is on Germany’s global influence abroad and no I don’t mean the Battle of Stalingrad, though that era is covered.  Here is one excerpt:

Due out in November .  Here is my first CWT with Fuchsia , here is my second , there will be a third.

That Richter is excerpt is from Sonenscher’s new and interesting book After Kant: The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought .  One unique feature of Richter’s account is that Christ is the one bearing the news that God is dead.  There are so many complainers about the Enlightenment these days, but how many go to the now-grossly underrated source of Richter?