Recently Mentioned Books

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 .

Toke Møldrup and Yaron Kohlberg, Beethoven works for piano and cello .

Eugene Albulescu, Beethoven Piano Concerto #1 .

Daniil Trifonov, Bach: The Art of Life .  The Art of the Fugue, plus a batch of shorter pieces by Bach family members, two discs.

Vikingur Olafsson, Mozart & Contemporaries , two discs.

Igor Levit, Shostakovich, Preludes and Fugues Op.87, plus a disc of Ronald Stephenson [On DSCH], three discs.

2. My Bloomberg column on why America should have more people , and a hat tip here to Matt Yglesias and his book on one billion Americans .

That is the new biography of John von Neumann , by Ananyo Bhattacharya, highly recommended, probably the best book about him.  Here is one short bit:

I am also a big fan of his new and forthcoming book on venture capital, namely The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of a New Future .

Both passages by Marcel Theroux.  I still need to read more, but this stands a very good chance of being one of the must-read novels of the twenty-first century.  I ordered my copy pre-emptively from the UK and am very glad I did so, other Americans need to wait until February .

This biography of King George III is a new and excellent book by Andrew Roberts, who also wrote a great biography of Napoleon. The subtitle of this one is The Misunderstood Reign of George III , and here is one excerpt:

The author is Jimmy Soni, and the subtitle is The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley .

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.