Recently Mentioned Books

Marcel Proust, The Mysterious Correspondent: New Stories .  Not the very best Proust, but even so-so Proust is pretty superb.  These are fragments to be welcomed.

Bruce J. Dickson, The Party and the People: Chinese Politics in the 21st Century is a good treatment of exactly what the title promises.

Useful is Paul Lockhart, Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare .

Tao Jiang, Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China: Contestation of Humaneness, Justice, and Personal Freedom .  Too detailed for me to have time to read right now, but very likely an excellent book (I have browsed it), full of careful study and insight.

Michael S. Weisbach, The Economist’s Craft: An Introduction to Research, Publishing, and Professional Development .  A straight-up rather than cynical take.

4. Michael Cholbi, Grief: A Philosophical Guide .  I like the book when it veers in this direction: “Antipathy toward grief is a common theme among ancient Mediterranean philosophers.  Greek and Roman philosophers were far more hostile toward grief than we moderns, tending to view grief as, at best, a state to be tolerated or minimized.  For these philosophers, grieving others’ deaths is an unruly condition, a sign that one had become overly dependent on others and lacked the rational self-contr...

3. Scottie Pippen, Unguarded , with Michael Arkush. “Michael Jordan was 1-9 in the playoffs before I joined the team.  In the postseason he missed, the Bulls went 6-4. The Last Dance was Michael’s chance to tell his story.  This is mine.”  Get the picture?

2. Bobby Duffy, The Generation Myth: Why When You’re Born Matters Less Than You Think .  Millennials, Gen X, Gen Z, and so on.  The generations just don’t differ that much from each other, at least not in ways that show up as strong effects in the data, adjusting for other demographic features.  This book is a useful corrective to numerous media discussions of these topics.  And yet…I am not entirely convinced.  That I grew up without an internet, for instance, really does seem to shape a lot of...

1. John Markoff, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand .  He went from Ayn Rand to Buckminster Fuller, was deeply involved in Native American issues, saw the San Francisco scene arrive, did his share of LSD, and heralded the birth of Bay Area tech culture and also open source software, among other achievements.  Sometimes reads Marginal Revolution.  I enjoyed this book, but of course would defer to Stewart’s own judgment.

5. New Doc Watson box set , and WSJ review here .  In fact, in today’s links, 4 out of the 5 are self-recommending.

3. New edition of Ilya Somin’s Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom .

Markus K. Brunnermeier, The Resilient Society .

Richard A. Williams, Fixing Food: An FDA Insider Unravels the Myths and Their Solutions , covers the food regulatory side of the FDA, and:

And Mary Roach, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law .

There is Howard Husock, The Poor Side of Town, And Why We Need It .

5. Patrick McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light .  The best book on Hitchcock, John Nye recommended it to me eight years ago.

4. Gordon Teskey, Spenserian Moments .  No one seems to care about poor old Edmund Spenser, yet there seem to be quite a few good books about him.

3. Elisabeth Anderson (not the philosopher), Agents of Reform: Child Labor and the Origins of the Welfare State .  Considers the political economy of child labor reform Germany, France, the United States, and the failed case of Belgium.  Pathbreaking, a major advance on the extant literature.  The explanations are messy rather than monocausal, but often focus on the success or failure of individual policy entrepreneurs.

2. Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah .  #2 in the Dune series, I disliked this one as a tot, but currently am marveling at its political sophistication.  Somewhat uneven, but better than its reputation. The Wikipedia page for the book also indicates that Villeneuve is likely to do a Dune 3 based on this story.

1. Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage .  I read this as a kid, and was surprised how well my reread held up.  To the point, subtle, and with an economy of means.  I hope the new Paul Auster biography of Crane (which I will read soon) will revive interest in this classic.

An excellent book, the author is Robert Kanigel and the subtitle is The Making of a Scientific Dynasty .  It is strongest on the role of mentors and lineages in scientific excellence, the radically inegalitarian and “unfair” nature of scientific achievement and also credit, and it offers an interesting look at the early days of the NIH.  Here is one excerpt:

Author : Jerry Kramer , who grew up in Idaho and later played football for the Green Bay Packers.  I loved Instant Replay as a kid.  But is there a “real author” from Idaho?  Is it better or worse to be a “real author”?  Marilynne Robinson has never clicked with me.

3. Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism .  One of the best books on autism, perhaps the best book on female autistics, and the best book on intersectionality I have read (out of few, to be clear).  Pithy and direct: “Eager to discover other women who had been misunderstood in their time, she writes a series of wide-ranging letters to four ‘weird sisters’ from history, addressing topics including autistic parenting, social isolation, feminism, the movement for disab...

2. Sophocles, Oedipus Trilogy , translated by Bryan Doerries.  I cannot judge the fidelity of the rendering into English, but it is the most readable translation of these works I have encountered and they are always worth a reread.

1. Catherine Nicholson, Reading and Not Reading the Faerie Queene .  A splendid book, take the title literally, and I very much liked these two sentences: “Others, however, pick it [Faerie Queene] up on impulse and find themselves helplessly enthralled, spurred by a devotion at once unsustainable and impossible to shake.  As C.S. Lewis put it, “I never meet a man who says that he used to like the Faerie Queene .”  Could it be the most underrated book of the Western canon?