Recently Mentioned Books

The author is Aileen Teague, and the subtitle is The United States, Mexico, and the Origins of the Modern Drug War, 1969-2000 .  I had been wanting to read a book on this topic, and this manuscript covered exactly the ground I was hoping for.  Excerpt:

There is also Keija Wu’s A Modern History of China’s Art Market .

6. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas .  Why do so few people talk about this piece?  It is Woolf writing on feminization and the prevention of war.  The argument is dense, and I will give it a reread.  She seems to attributing some of the worst aspects of militarized society to the approbational propensities of educated women?  She also considers — well ahead of her time — how male and female philanthropy are likely to differ.  In any case, there is more here than at first meets the eye.

5. Joel J. Miller, The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Out Future .  A paean to reading and its importance, comprised of many historical anecdotes.  I wish each part went into more detail, nonetheless this is an important book about a cultural transmission method that is in some unfortunate ways diminishing in its cultural centrality.

4. Somerset Maugham, Up at the Villa .  Great fun at first, and very short.  It ends up “overinvesting” in plot, but still for me a worthwhile read.  It is best when at its most psychological.

3. Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath .  Usually journals bore me after the first fifty pages.  But this lengthy volume is fascinating throughout, and arguably her greatest achievement?  At the very least worth a try.  She maintained an impossibly high level of writing across these years, plus you see (close up) the shifts in how her life was going, electroshock therapy and all.  Recommended.

2. Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney .  A late 18th English fictional memoir, still underrated and fairly short to boot.  Very interesting on Enlightenment culture, what it meant to grow up in a reading culture, and the power of early feminism.

1. Thomas Meyer-Wieser, Cairo: Architectural Guide .  A picture book, sort of.  Reading a book on the architectural history of a place, while intrinsically interesting, is also usually the best way to learn the non-architectural history of that same place.  Recommended.

Definitely recommended, I could have pulled out many other parts as well.  Again, I am happy to recommend Cass’s new book Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom .

Here is Luke’s Cluny Institute , which sponsored the event.  And here is Luke’s book on Rene Girard .

That is from an excellent W.H. Auden essay “Notes on Music and Opera.”

Tom MacTague, Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016 .

Ken Belson, Every Day is Sunday: How Jerry Jones, Robert Kraft, and Roger Goodell Turned the NFL into a Cultural & Economic Juggernaut.

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.