Recently Mentioned Books

Interesting throughout, and best experienced as a whole.  And here is Rick’s new book The Creative Act: The Way of Being .

And just arrived in my pile is Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson, Campus Economics: How Economic Thinking Can Help Improve College and University Decisions .

4. Judith A. Green, The Normans: Power, Conquest and Culture in 11th Century Europe .  The best book on the Normans?  And what an opening set of sentences: “In the eleventh century the climate was improving, population was growing, and people were on the move, west from central Asia, and south from north-western Europe.  In 1054 the unity of Christianity between east and west was broken, a rift which lasted for centuries.  In 1096 the idea of recovering Jerusalem from Muslims was translated into...

3. Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, The Overlooked Americans: The Resilience of Our Rural Towns and What it Means for Our Country is a good look at what it promises.  Most of all, I like how it stresses that these individuals are more apolitical than often is realized.

2. Anna Grzymala-Busse, Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State .  A good and original book about how European state-building grew out of earlier church traditions.  For instance, by the time of the Reformation about half the land in Germany was in the hands of the church.  “Church-building” often came first, and then state-building copied and improved on some of the methods.

1. Owen Hopkins, Lost Futures: The Disappearing Architecture of Post-War Britain .  Covers the “great” British brutalist buildings of the postwar era, the debates surrounding their demolition, and their eventual demolition.  Photos too, excellent to dip into.

Or Tiruvalluvar’s Tirukkural , translated with a preface by Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma, just published by Beacon Press .  This poem, a staple (the staple?) of Tamil literature, is believed to have been composed between the third and fifth centuries AD.  The poem covers issues of wisdom, ethics, virtue, wealth, and love.  I cannot compare this version to the Tamil original, but it reads nicely and is attractively placed on the page.

Definitely recommended.  And Katherine’s recent book Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne was perhaps my favorite book of last year.

COWEN: Now, you have two books, Rooftoppers and Skysteppers , about rooftop walking . Some might call them children’s books. I’m not sure that’s exactly the right description, but what is the greatest danger with rooftop walking?

COWEN: Now, you have two books, Rooftoppers and Skysteppers , about rooftop walking . Some might call them children’s books. I’m not sure that’s exactly the right description, but what is the greatest danger with rooftop walking?

And I am excited for his new book The Creative Act: A Way of Being .

9. Other stuff too, most of all what I buy spontaneously.  Just yesterday Deepti Kapoor’s Age of Vice arrived at the house.  There is some Eugene Volodazkin on the way.

9. Other stuff too, most of all what I buy spontaneously.  Just yesterday Deepti Kapoor’s Age of Vice arrived at the house.  There is some Eugene Volodazkin on the way.

8. Haldor Laxness and Jon Fosse are among the classic novels in my queue, neither would be a reread.  And I will start the new Javier Marías that comes out in English, it takes me too long in Spanish.  Twentieth century Polish poetry, and more on the Polish history of ideas and literature.  And I’ve vowed to read more museum catalogs (more picture books !).  In German I will try Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit , reread some Rilke, some Tuschel, and maybe some more Herta Müller.

And John T. Cunningham, This is New Jersey, from High Point to Cape May , dates from 1953 and thus is intrinsically interesting.  Hudson County really is remarkably densely populated, and back then it was a big deal that baseball was invented in Hoboken.

Philip Kitcher, On John Stuart Mill , is a nice short introduction.

4. Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution .  A big and neglected piece of the puzzle for the breakthrough of the West, focusing on Elizabethan times, skill in symbolic manipulation, and the origins of the scientific revolution.  Recommended.

3. Geoff Emerick, Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Spent Recording the Music of the Beatles .  If you want a book sympathizing with Paul McCartney as the guy who made the Beatles tick, and portraying George Harrison as a suspicious, less than grateful whiner, this is for you.  And so it is.  By the way, contrary to some very recent accounts, Emerick affirms that “Yellow Submarine” is basically a McCartney composition.  He even notes that Lennon cut some demos of it , which has led some recen...

2. Jerry Saltz, Art is Life: Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night .  Art reviews from the New York magazine guy.  Fun to read, mostly sane, and helps the reader understand the ascent of Wokeism in the art world.  It is not that so many art buyers or curators are racist.  Rather, art is super-hierarchical in the first place (try telling the market that a great textile should go for as much as a famous painting), and that, in unintended cross-cutting ...

1. Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox, Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Era .  A good book for sane centrists, and they claim to have been partly inspired by our subheading “Small Steps Toward a Much Better World.”  Did you know that putting in the “much” was Alex’s idea?  At first I resisted but clearly he was correct.

This argument is also a theme in my much earlier In Praise of Commercial Culture .

I wish such books would spend more time discussing whether dense urban areas are simply a fertility trap.  Nonetheless excellent work, and everyone interested in urban economics (or parking) should pick this one up.  Due out in May, you can pre-order here .

Dalibor Rohac, Governing the EU in an Age of Division is a classical liberal take on its topic.

And a new libertarian memoir, Murray Sabrin, From Immigrant to Public Intellectual: An American Story .

There is Owen Ullmann, Empathy Economics: Janet Yellen’s Remarkable Rise to Power and Her Drive to Spread Prosperity to All .