Recently Mentioned Books

Here is the full Brendan Borrell piece in The Atlantic , excellent throughout.  And don’t forget Brendan’s new and exciting book The First Shots: The Epic Rivalries and Heroic Science Behind the Race to the Coronavirus Vaccine .

Due out May 17, you can pre-order here for Amazon , here for Barnes & Noble .

The book just came out in France, here is more information .  Is Houllebecq best at 736 pp.?  I guess we’ll find out.  In French, on Kindle .  And in German .  When in English?  I have ordered it in German, though I am not sure when I will get to start much less finish it.

Modern Ireland 1600-1972 would be the place to start, and it is a book you can read more than once.  Here is an excellent Guardian profile of Foster , worth reading in its own right.  So what should I ask him?

From the excellent John List, the subtitle is How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale .

Also new is David Autor, David A. Mindell, and Elisabeth B. Reynolds, The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines .

Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger’s Maria Theresa: The Habsburg Empress in Her Time is a comprehensive study of its chosen topic.  It doesn’t focus on the conceptual issues of liberalism that I care most about, but it is nonetheless by far the most detailed study out there.  Translated from the German.

Edmond Smith, Merchants: The Community That Shaped England’s Trade and Empire .  There are some good recent books on the East India Company, this useful work looks at the phenomenon more generally.  The Muscovy Company was chartered in 1555, and survived until 1917, at which point it was turned into a “charity.”  Also of relevance for recent charter city discussions.

3. John Markoff, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand .  An excellent book, I have more to say about it and also Stewart’s life, but you’ll have to wait for my CWT with Stewart himself.  Stewart himself seems to like it, and he praised how the author’s archival research corrected many of his own faulty memories.

2. Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 .  I fear this book will become increasingly relevant, as it is a good introduction to what appear to be a number of growing hotspots.  The 1569 Lublin Union created a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.  How did that matter, how was it the ethnic issues in that region never were settled, and have we recreated a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth today?  This book is good on all those questions and more.

1. Michael S. Nieberg, When France Fell: the Vichy Crisis and the Fate of the Anglo-American Alliance .  It is difficult to find WWII material that is both interesting and fresh, but this book qualifies.  It is a look at how America processed the fall of France in 1940, and suddenly realized the whole thing was for real and that dangers to the homeland were not trivial.

That is from Clare Jackson’s new and noteworthy Devil-Land: England Under Siege 1588-1688 .  Note that it’s much cheaper to order this book through the UK .

In the Douglass North tradition is Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili and Ilia Murtazashvili, Land, the State, and War: Property Institutions and Political Order in Afghanistan .

Gregory Zuckerman, A Shot to Save the World: The Inside Story of The Life-or-Death Race for a Covid-19 Vaccine is a good account of what it promises.

Hannah Farber’s Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding is a good and economically literate treatment of the importance of maritime insurance during the time of America’s founding.

4. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Persians: The Age of Great Kings .  The Persian empire had the best infrastructure of any of the great ancient civilizations.  The Royal Road for instance stretched 2,400 kilometers.  Read more about the whole thing here.

3. Justin Gest, Majority Minority .  The book considers racial transitions and how majorities may lose their ethnic or racial majority status.  To see where America might be headed, the author considers histories from Bahrain, Hawaii, Mauritius, Singapore, trinidad and Tobago, and New York City.

2. Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is one of the best written pieces of literary fiction this year.  Very Irish, and it helps to have a one paragraph knowledge of Ireland’s earlier “ Magdalen laundries ” problem.  It is not exciting for the action-oriented reader, but a perfect work within the terms of the world it creates.

1. Richard Hanania, Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy: How Generals, Weapons Manufacturers, and Foreign Governments Shape American Foreign Policy.  Could this be the best public choice treatment of U.S. foreign policy?  Gordon Tullock always was wishing for a book like this, and now it exists.  I see Hanania’s views as more skeptical than my own (in East Asia in particular I think the American approach has brought huge benefits, Europe too), but nonetheless I am impressed b...

His forthcoming book is about the 90s, namely The Nineties: A Book .  So what should I ask him?  Including about the 90s of course.

His Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge is not his best or most important book, but it has influenced me a good deal.

Teodor Currentzis, Mozart’s Don Giovanni .

Tanguy De Williencourt, Beethoven Bagatelles L’Integrale .

Jean-Paul Gasparian, Chopin .

van Baerle Trio, Beethoven complete works for piano trio .