Recently Mentioned Books

That is from the excellent and highly substantive book by David Carpenter, The Struggle for Mastery: The Penguin History of Britain, 1066-1284 .  Wasn’t there also a JLE piece about this kind of warfare?

Still not good enough.  I don’t feel I can make a real case by giving you more images, maybe you would do better to just view a bunch en masse .  A visit to the National Gallery in Dublin is better yet.  Barring that, this excellent catalog has fine images.  Here is a good short piece on Clarke’s weirdness (“the Irish artist welded Christian, Celtic and pagan imagery with the decadence of Klimt and Beardsley into an exotic futuristic fantasy”), also with quality images.

All via Nir Eyal .  And do note that I write for Facebook at marginalrevolution.bulletin.com .  Not afraid to tell you, though, that this post is what I really think.  I argued similar points years earlier in my book Big Business: Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero .

That is all from the excellent book Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism , Belknap Press 2019, again by James Simpson.

I will be doing a Conversation with him, and he also has a new book coming out Risk: A User’s Guide .  Here is his Wikipedia page .

You can learn the policy views of Thomas Piketty if you read his Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016-2021 .  Oddly, or perhaps not, his socialism doesn’t seem to involve government spending any more than fifty percent of gdp, which would be a comedown for many European nations.

Anna Della Subin, Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine , starts with the question of how Emperor Haile Selassie became a god to Rastafarians in Jamaica, and then broadens the question accordingly, moving on to General Douglas MacArthur, Annie Besant, and much more.  I expect we will be hearing more from this author.  At the very least she knows stuff that other people do not.

Eswar S. Prasad, The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution is Transforming Currencies and Finance is a useful overview of its source material.

4. Andrew G. Farrand, The Algerian Dream: Youth and the Quest for Dignity .  There should be more books like this!  Imagine a whole book directed at…not getting someone tenure, but rather helping you understand what it is actually like to be in Algeria .  Sadly I have never been, but this is the next best thing.  As I say repeatedly, there should be more country-specific books, simply flat out “about that country” in an explanatory sense.  As for Algeria, talk about a nation in decline…

3. Nadia Durbach, Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907 .  Back then vaccines were quite often dangerous: “Victorian public vaccinators used a lancet (a surgical instrument) to cut lines into the flesh in a scored pattern.  This was usually done in at least four different places on the arm.  Vaccine matter, also called lymph, would then be smeared into the cuts…[often] vaccinators required infants to return eight days after the procedure to allow lymph to be harvest...

2. Patrick Leigh Fermor, The Traveller’s Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands .  My favorite Fermor book, the best sections were on Trinidad and Haiti, but you might have known I would think that.

1. Anne Enright, The Green Road .  Could Enright be the least heralded, English-language novelist in the United States today?  I also was a big fan of her last book Actress .  Her short pieces are wonderful as well.  Having won a Booker, she is hardly obscure, and yet I have never had anyone tell me that I absolutely must read Anne Enright?  Even after the very recent burst of interest in Irish writers…I will read more of her!

1. Anne Enright, The Green Road .  Could Enright be the least heralded, English-language novelist in the United States today?  I also was a big fan of her last book Actress .  Her short pieces are wonderful as well.  Having won a Booker, she is hardly obscure, and yet I have never had anyone tell me that I absolutely must read Anne Enright?  Even after the very recent burst of interest in Irish writers…I will read more of her!

7. New (free Kindle) book: The Essential UCLA School of Economics .

Recommended, engaging throughout.  And again, here is Amia Srinivasan’s new and (in the UK, just published yesterday in the U.S.) bestselling book The Right to Sex: Feminism in the 21st Century .

That is all from E.S.L. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine .  This book is difficult to read for two reasons.  First, the print is too small.  Second, the author wastes no time regurgitating “the usual” from all the others book on Irish history.  On a given page, most of what is on that page one learns, and thus the book is slow to read.  Which is a sign of a very good book, though do note it is quite the time commitment.  One of the more essential books on Irish history.

That is all from The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000 , a quite good book by Diarmaid Ferriter.

David also has a new book out The American Experiment: Dialogues on a Dream .  So what should I ask him?

3. Fintan O’Toole, Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks .  Most educated outsiders approach Ireland through the lens of its rather prominent literary history (Joyce, Yeats, etc.).  That’s fine, but also somewhat misleading.  This book gives you an alternate tour — focused on modernism and the 20th century — through the visual arts, design, television, theatre, and more.  It should prove eyeopening to many people, and is also a wonderful book for browsing or as a guide to further study.  Harry Clarke’s...

2. David Dickson, The First Irish Cities: An Eighteenth-Century Transformation .  One of the best books on cities in recent years, and more general than the title might indicate.  I had not known that Waterford was once a rival for Dublin, or fully realized that Ireland has no significant city which is not right next to the coast.  Readable throughout, and gives you an excellent sense of how the Irish pecking order for cities evolved.  Recommended.

1. Susan McKay, Northern Protestants on Shifting Ground , and also Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People .  These two books straddle a journalistic and anthropological approach to what the titles indicate.  As one Protestant in the text remarked, Irish reunification would work just fine, it is the ten years getting there that everyone is afraid of.  It seems increasingly muddled what actually the Northern Irish Unionist is supposed to stand for — passionate attachment to union with an unwill...

1. Susan McKay, Northern Protestants on Shifting Ground , and also Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People .  These two books straddle a journalistic and anthropological approach to what the titles indicate.  As one Protestant in the text remarked, Irish reunification would work just fine, it is the ten years getting there that everyone is afraid of.  It seems increasingly muddled what actually the Northern Irish Unionist is supposed to stand for — passionate attachment to union with an unwill...

I did David Cutler and Ed sequentially, based on their new co-authored book , here is the joint episode but there is also a separate link concerning Cutler.  Here is one excerpt from the general summary:

I did Cutler and Ed Glaeser sequentially, based on their new co-authored book , here is the joint episode but I will create another link concerning Glazer.  Here is one excerpt from the general summary:

There is also Robert Wuthnow’s Why Religion is Good for American Democracy (true), and Michael Taylor’s The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery , which dashed my hopes when I learnt that Alexander McDonnell, the Belfast-born 19th century chess player who famously sparred with Louis de la Bourdonnais, also was a strongly pro-slavery and pro-imperialism economist in his time.