Recently Mentioned Books

Nicholas Walton, Orange Sky, Rising Water: The Remarkable Past and Uncertain Future of the Netherlands .

Dwarkesh Patel, and others, The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025 .

Keach Hagey, The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future .

Dan Wang, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future .

Benjamin E. Park, American Zion: A New History of Mormonism

Daniel Dain, A History of Boston. Short review here .

Philip Freeman, In the Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music of Cecil Taylor .

David Eltis, Rethinking the Atlantic Slave Trades .

Agnes Callard, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life .

Tirthankar Roy and K. Ravi Raman, Kerala: 1956 to the Present .

Caroline Burt and Richard Partington, Arise, England: Six Kings and the Making of the English State .

The Poems of Seamus Heaney .  Not yet received, but obviously this is a winner.

Eça de Queiros , Adam and Eve in Paradise .  Originally from the 19th century, but translated into English only this year. A 60 pp. novella about exactly what the title indicates, noting that matters are not as simple as the first telling of that story might have suggested.

Alain Mabanckou, Dealing with the Dead .  Most African fiction does not connect with me, and there is a tendency for the reviews to be untrustworthy.  This “cemetery memoir,” from the Congo (via UCLA), held my interest throughout.

Emmanuel Carrere, V13: Chronicle of a Trial .  Non-fiction but it is more likely reading fiction, it just happens to be true (supposedly).

Suat Dervis, The Prisoner of Ankara .  A Turkish novel from mid-century, in English for the first time.

Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I, Volume II .  Volume III is due out in English late this year I have read it already in German.  A very strong series, reading ahead in German is a good demonstration of how much I like them.

Incentives matter.  An excellent book, recommended, due out next year .

The author is Robert J, Sampson, and the subtitle is How Social Change has Transformed Crime and the Life Trajectories of Young Americans , from Harvard University Press.  Excerpt:

That is the new William Easterly book, and the subtitle is The West’s Conquest of the Rest .  I liked this book very much, but found the title and also book jacket and descriptions misleading.  I think of this work as a full-throated examination and study of the classical liberal anti-imperialist tradition.  We have been needing such a thing for a long time.  It is not that I expected Easterly to be poorly informed, but it amazes me how well he knows this material from a historical point of view...

The second is Mahmood Mamdani, Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State .  I ordered this one before I knew who wrote it, namely Papa Mamdani.  Again, there is plenty you can object to here, but it is an actual (partial) history of Uganda, interwoven with autobiography.  The author actually tries to explain to you what was going on, rather than writing to “fill a gap in the literature,” or whatever.  Too bad his actual views are so objectionable — Papa Mamdani,...

The firtst is Laura K. Field, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right .

3. Paul McCartney, Wings: A Story of a Band on the Run .  Not really written by McCartney, but excerpts from interviews with parties involved with Wings, Paul included.  Presented as if it were an oral history, which in part it is.  Very well done, not for everyone obviously but it is for me.  Macca and music aside, it is a good study of how to reinvent oneself, and how weird you need to be to actually succeed with that.  Here is a good Ian Leslie review .

2. Meryle Secrest, Shoot the Widow: Adventures of a Biographer in Search of Her Subject .  A highly entertaining quasi-autobiography, focusing on her work on the nine different biographies she wrote of some very different people.  As far as I can tell, Secrest is 95 years old and living in the Washington, D.C. area — hope I run into her at Mama Chang some day.  Though I suspect she lives in Bethesda.

1. Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier .  There are a variety of books on these figures and this topic, but after buying and perusing a whole bunch of them, this is the one I found useful.