Recently Mentioned Books

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 .

That is from the new and interesting The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia , by Sheila Miyoshi Jager.

6. New Knausgaard novel is coming .

That is from a new paper by Rainer Zitelman .  And here is Rainer’s recent book In Defense Of Capitalism: Debunking the Myths .

I am a big fan of her latest book Yellowface , which I read straight through (and it’s much more double-edged and subversive than you might be expecting).  Here is a partial bio :

That is all from Victor Sebestyen’s interesting new book, Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West .

The author is Kevin Vallier, and the subtitle is On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism .  This is an excellent and important book, starting with its defense of classical liberalism over Catholic integralism and indeed illiberalism more generally.  But do note that Kevin, although a professional philosopher is also a Christian (Eastern Orthodox), and he is writing from a Christian perspective.  This is also an excellent book simply for learning what integralism is .  Overall, perhaps th...