Recently Mentioned Books

There is also Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner, How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors that Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration, and Everything in Between .

Bill Hammack, The Things We Make: The Unknown History of Invention from Cathedrals to Soda Cans .  From an engineering perspective.

There is Daniel Akst, War by Other Means: The Pacifists of the Greatest Generation Who Revolutionized Resistance .

4. Philip Bowring, The Making of the Modern Philippines: Pieces of a Jigsaw State is a good overview and in general I favor explanatory, country-specific books.  Once again, low productivity in agriculture is a big problem.

3. Philip K. Howard, Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions .  I am not sure about the “unconstitutionality” point, but the rest of this critique is right on target.  Is this the next frontier for supply-side progressives?

2. Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe .  On the thinkers who have influenced him, including Adam Smith, Hayek, Berlin, Popper, and Ortega y Gasset, among others.  All of the chapters I quite liked.  The story of the meeting of Berlin and Akhmatova I had not known.  Not consummated, but intensely erotic and unforgettable for both of them.

1. Trevor Latimer, Small Isn’t Beautiful: The Case Against Localism .  I say the correct answer here is culturally specific.  Nonetheless this is a good and useful book marshaling arguments against localism and in favor of centralization, including with respect to the value of liberty.

The author is Charlie Robertson, and the subtitle is Why Education, Electricity and Fertility are Key to Escaping Poverty .

Born in the Scottish Highlands, and yes she is also the daughter of historian John Keay.  I am a fan of her books , many on British architectural history  or for that matter the crown jewels, but most recently The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown (or this link ) about the 17th century interregnum.  Here is her home page .  Here is Anna on Twitter .  And this :

Born in the Scottish Highlands, and yes she is also the daughter of historian John Keay.  I am a fan of her books , many on British architectural history  or for that matter the crown jewels, but most recently The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown (or this link ) about the 17th century interregnum.  Here is her home page .  Here is Anna on Twitter .  And this :

I had not known that the Falklands Island Company still controls so much in the Falklands.  Recommended, due out in May .

Bryan Caplan asked me to read this book, and Alex Epstein was kind enough to provide me with a copy of it.  The subtitle is Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas — Not Less .

The author is Jerry Z. Muller, and I am sorry I did not have the chance to read this book last year when it came out.  Taubes is one of the most underrated deep thinkers, and this is the definitive biography of him.  Think of Taubes as a mid-twentieth century Germanic-Jewish but also partly Christian thinker who tried to integrate philosophy, theology, and science, yet without ever committing to a serious enough level of written investigation to have a chance of pulling that off.  He nonetheless...

That is by Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Tho Pham, and Oleksandr Talavera, and it is a new piece in the American Economic Review .  This game of course has just started, and countermeasures will at some point arrive.  You may recall I discussed exactly these possibilities in my 2013 book Average is Over .

The subtitle is A Journey Across the Himalaya Through Pakistan, India, Bhutan, Nepal, and China .  This is the first great book of 2023, at least that I have seen.  Bravo!  Travel books are hard to summarize, but I will note that most of them are bad or at best mediocre .  They assume you care about the author’s adjectives, or that the interesting nature of experienced events will translate automatically to the page.  This work, in contrast, is a wonderful blend of fact, history, political obser...

You can buy the book here , note the American title is slightly different.

Due out in May, you can pre-order here .

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.