Recently Mentioned Books

A very fun book, it is hard to review without giving spoilers, which would indeed spoil.  I would put it this way: if you enjoyed David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, this is a good next book to read.  Not of the very highest depth, but smart enough to be more than mere entertainment.  Here is the Amazon link .  It was a runaway bestseller and Goncourt Prize winner in France, here is NYT coverage .  It is the best “fun” book I have read in some time.

The second is Bola Sete, Samba in Seattle: Live at the Penthouse 1966-1968 .  Sete has remained a largely obscure figure, with his reputation kept alive by a few cryptic John Fahey comments over the years.  His LPs have been hard to find, and they did not always reflect the full quality of his playing.  His best YouTube clips would come and go.  This boxed set shows Sete to be one of the best acoustic guitarists of the 20th century.  He is rooted in Brazilian bossa nova, but can play everything ...

Two new boxed sets are not only among the best releases of the year, they are some of the best guitar recordings of all time.  The first is Doc Watson: Life’s Work A Retrospective , four CDs of wonder and much better than any other Watson collection.

Here is one notice .  As a teenager I spent a great deal of time with his book Some Controversies in the Cambridge Theory of Capital .  It was difficult, and seemed to contain so many secrets…and it was so elegantly presented with a lovely cover.

I won’t have time to do more than browse Naomi Oreskes’s Science on a Mission: How Military Funding Shaped What We Do and Don’t Know About the Ocean .  But it appears to be an entirely serious book about the government funding of science, a drmatically understudied topic area.

4. Joe Posnanski, The Baseball 100 .  A very long (827 pp.) and thorough look at who might be the best baseball players of all time.  Entertaining, and I have relatively few gripes.  Given that Babe Ruth was a first-rate pitcher, should he really be #2 to Willie Mays at #1? Oscar Charleston is at #5, but I might have put Satchel Paige there.  I can’t bring myself to put Tris Speaker ahead of Mike Schmidt, and Cy Young doesn’t do as well as you might think.  Pete Rose and Barry Bonds and Roger Cl...

2. T.R. Fehrenbach, Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans .  Almost certainly the very best book on the history of Texas, and also one of the very best books on the USA and the history of the southwest, especially pre-1870.  The writing is dramatic, many segments are vivid, and the book (1980) precedes the cult of political correctness.  If you wish to read a semi-libertarian defense of how the United States obtained Texas (or do I have that backwards?), this is the place to go.  725 pp. ...

1. Jenny Erpenbeck, Aller Tage Abend [ The End of Days ].  The first quarter of this book I thought it was amazing, a candidate for one of the better novels of the last thirty years.  But as the pages passed, it slipped ever more into various sentimental cliches about the tragedies of German 20th century history.  Frustrating, and I fear the author’s success will make it harder to get back on the right track?

Engineer J. Storrs Hall is the author of this new Stripe Press book .  Let’s be honest: you might think this is just the usual blah blah blah, heard it a thousand times since 2011 kind of treatment.  But no, it is a detailed and nuanced and original treatment — at times obsessively so — of why various pending new physical technologies, such as nuclear power and nanotech, never really came to pass and transform our world as they might have.

Definitely recommended.  And I am again happy to recommend Ruth’s new book Napoleon: A Life Told in Gardens and Shadows .

That is from the new and fascinating book by Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust .  This is one of the better books for explaining how the Holocaust was possible, in this case not focusing on Germany of course.

That is from Ludwig Hohl, The Notes, or On Non-premature Reconciliation .

gestalten, Beauty and the East: New Chinese Architecture .  Self-recommending…

Bob Spitz, Led Zeppelin: The Biography .  They always end up being better than you think they possibly could be, and this is the best and most serious book about them.

McCartney, Paul. The Lyrics .  A remarkably high quality production, again showing McCartney’s skill as manager and entrepreneur.  Perhaps the biggest revelation is when Paul insists that if not for the Beatles he would have been an English teacher.  He also claims that he and not John was the big reader in The Beatles.  It is also striking, but not surprising, when explaining his lyrics how many times he mentions his mother, who passed away when Paul was fourteen.  There is a good David Hajdu N...

Scott Sumner, The Money Illusion: Market Monetarism, the Great Recession, and the Future of Monetary Policy .

Alejandro Ruiz, Carla Altesor, et.al., The Food of Oaxaca: Recipes and Stories from Mexico’s Culinary Capital .

William Deresiewicz, The Death of the Artist: How Creators are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech , brief discussion of it here .

Also noteworthy is Reviel Netz, Scale, Space and Canon in Ancient Literary Culture , which I hope to write more about.

As for retranslations of classics, I very much like the new Oedipus Rex trilogy and the new translation of the Kalevala .  I hope they are fiction!  And kudos to Sarah Ruden’s work on the Gospels , I am not sure where to put them…

As for retranslations of classics, I very much like the new Oedipus Rex trilogy and the new translation of the Kalevala .  I hope they are fiction!  And kudos to Sarah Ruden’s work on the Gospels , I am not sure where to put them…

As for retranslations of classics, I very much like the new Oedipus Rex trilogy and the new translation of the Kalevala .  I hope they are fiction!  And kudos to Sarah Ruden’s work on the Gospels , I am not sure where to put them…

Domenico Starnone, Trust .  The better of the two “Elena Ferrante” novels released in English this year?

Mario Levrero, The Luminous Novel .  The best Uruguayan novel of all time?

Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary .  At least as good as The Martian , and arguably more conceptual.