Recently Mentioned Books

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.

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.