Recently Mentioned Books

1. New book by Natasha Lance Rogoff, Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia .

And he has a new book coming, namely An American Martyr in Persia: The Epic Life and Tragic Death of Howard Baskerville . So what should I ask him?

The author is the excellent Andrea Wulf and the subtitle is The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self .  The focus is on the German group of thinkers who worked together in or near Jena, including the Schlegels, Novalis, Schiller, Goethe and Schelling, with a later cameo from Hegel.  This is one of my favorite books of the year, but note it focuses mostly on their personal stories and not so much on their ideas.  Perfect for me, but not the ideal introduction for every reader.  And their...

Strongly recommended to all those who care about such things, you can order here .

You can pre-order it here , due out November 8.  And currently former Thiel fellow Vitalik Buterin is attempting to pull off The Merge, congratulations and let us hope this works out!

Field is one of the world’s greatest economic historians, and the title is The Economic Consequences of U.S. Mobilization for The Second World War .  I am just starting to read it, here is some of the early material:

That is the new forthcoming book by Garett Jones (and his wisdom), I am very much looking forward to reading/rereading the final version of this one!  (See the link for my blurb based on a pre-pub reading.)  Here is the Amazon summary:

The title has attracted a lot of attention and controversy, it is Don’t be a Feminist: Essays on Genuine Justice , description here .  Bryan writes a letter to his daughter, telling her not to be a feminist.

Now on Amazon for pre-order , due out April 18, 2023.

Annie Duke, Quit .  A defense of quitting, which is often necessary to reallocate resources properly.

Daniel B. Klein and Jason Briggeman, Hume, Smith, Burke, Geijer, Menger, d’Argenson .

Kevin Erdmann, Building from the Ground Up: Reclaiming the American Housing Boom , and

W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change .  A very good book outlining status and signaling arguments for explaining how culture works and changes.  My main gripe is that it doesn’t seem at all aware of Simler and Hanson, and Robin Hanson more generally and for that matter my own What Price Fame? (among other writings).  So while I like the content, on the grounds of both scholarships and originality I have to gi...

S Encel, Equality and Authority: a Study of Class, Status and Power in Australia .  Might this be the best explanatory book on Australia ever?  Explains the odd mix of egalitarianism, individualism, plus bureaucratic authoritarianism that characterizes the Aussies.  There should of course be many more books like this, books attempting to explain countries to us.  From 1970 but still highly relevant.

Ronald H. Spector, A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945-1955 .  This book is an excellent way to pick up knowledge on a critical period that most Westerners do not know enough about.  Most interesting to me were the sections on how many people thought the Indonesians would gladly return to Dutch colonial rule. Narrator : They didn’t.

Johan Fourie, Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom: Lessons from 100,000 Years of Human History .  An unusual narrative take on the broad sweep of economic history, Africa-centered, original, unusual, broken up into different stories.  The author is professor of economics and history at Stellenbosch, here is his home page .

Michael Strachan, The Life and Adventures of Thomas Coryate . Coryate was an intrepid traveler from 17th century England.  He walked along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, through Persia and Afghanistan, and into the heart of the Moghul empire.  He was the first Englishman to visit India “for the heck of it,” and he walked.  Quite possibly he introduced the table fork to England, and the word “umbrella” to the English language.  Non-complacent from top to bottom, he died at age forty, of ...

I am happy to recommend my earlier book Average is Over on these and other developments.

Later in the 1990s I read Frederick Turner write that Indian classical music was one of humanity’s greatest spiritual and aesthetic achievements, and around the same time I chatted a bit with Turner too.  I had never quite heard anyone claim that before, but instinctively I realized I very much agreed with him.  I decided that I believed that too.

I consider The Mare , Veronica , and Lost Cat (among others) to be some of the best and most insightful American fiction of recent times.  She is um… frank , and has held a series of actual jobs in her lifetime, including stripper and sex worker.  She was also a teenage runaway.

I consider The Mare , Veronica , and Lost Cat (among others) to be some of the best and most insightful American fiction of recent times.  She is um… frank , and has held a series of actual jobs in her lifetime, including stripper and sex worker.  She was also a teenage runaway.

I consider The Mare , Veronica , and Lost Cat (among others) to be some of the best and most insightful American fiction of recent times.  She is um… frank , and has held a series of actual jobs in her lifetime, including stripper and sex worker.  She was also a teenage runaway.

Christopher Marquis and Kunyuan Qiao, Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise .  A good look at the essential continuity in Chinese history between the Maoist period and the “capitalist” period.  Of course the main thesis no longer seems so crazy as it might have ten years ago.

Celia Paul, Letters to Gwen John I found a moving set of (imaginary) letters from one living female painter to another first-rate deceased female painter, both having lived through some similar situations.  Excellent color plates too.

Samuel Gregg, The Next American Economy: Nation, State, and Markets in an Uncertain World is a useful corrective to some recent attempts to overrate the import of industrial policy, especially in an American context.