Recently Mentioned Books

4. Good Klein-Douthat dialogue .  By the way, here is Ross’s forthcoming book The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery .

Recommended, interesting throughout.  And again, here is Niall’s new book Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe .

I will be doing a Conversation with her, her forthcoming book The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century is already making a big splash.  Here is an excerpt from her Wikipedia page :

Do note Andrew has a new book coming out, namely Out on a Limb: Selected Writing, 1989-2021 .

I fear that by ceding this unique authority status to doctors we are making it easier for them to oversell us medical care, a major problem in the U.S. If your doctor suggests that you need a procedure done, it can be hard to say no, especially if you have been deferring to that person for years through the use of an honorific title. On the upside, perhaps all that deference has encouraged many people to get their vaccinations.

From the new memoir of Kaushik Basu :

That is all from John Aubrey’s Brief Lives , the autobiographical section, an excellent book more generally.  Progress Studies!

That is from Adeeb Khalid’s excellent Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present .

That is from Love’s Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, Letters and Diaries, Their obsessional, thirty-year love affair .

Seth David Radwell, American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secrets to Healing Our Nation .  This is not a book written for me, but it is nonetheless good to see someone putting forward Enlightenment ideals as a solution to our problems.

Michael S. Malone, The Big Score: The billion dollar story of Silicon Valley is the new Stripe Press reprint.

Loyd Grossman, The Artist and the Eternal City: Bernini, Pope Alexander VII, and the Making of Rome .  Has all the virtues of a picture book, but the price of a regular book.  With the common educated public, Bernini is still probably underrated.

Edward J. Watts, The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea .  How has the decline of Rome been discussed and analyzed throughout the ages, including by the Romans themselves?

4. Paul Greenhalgh, Ceramic: Art and Civilisation .  Picture book!  Need I say more?  And a big one.

3. Adeeb Khalid, Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present .  Could this be the best history of Central Asia?  The author takes special care to tie the region to the histories of Russia and China, the author seeming to have a specialization in Russian history, and for me that makes the entire enterprise far more intelligible.  Useful for Xinjiang history as well, here is one useful review of the book .

2. Dan Levy, Maxims for Thinking Analytically: The wisdom of legendary Harvard professor Richard Zeckhauser .  How many of us will end up getting books such as this in our honor?  If you are curious, Zeckhauser’s three maxims for personal life are: “There are some things you just don’t want to know,” “If you focus on people’s shortcomings, you’ll always be disappointed,” and “Practice asynchronous reciprocity.”  Zeckhauser, by the way, was on my dissertation committee.

1. Russ Banham, The Fight for Fairfax: Private Citizens and Public Policymaking .  A well-informed story of the great men and women who built up Fairfax County, Virginia, including Til Hazel, Sid Dewberry, Earle Williams, Jack Herrity, George Johnson, Dwight Schar, and others.  WWNN: “We were never NIMBY!”  It is striking how much the key builders were not born as elites.

And the editor is a woman, Alison Cole .  She even wrote a book Italian Renaissance Courts: Art, Pleasure and Power — do you think she can be totally against those things?  22 Amazon ratings, five star average.

And also on my Stubborn Attachments , here is part of his discussion :

By Edward Glaeser and David Cutler, forthcoming in September (with a CWT with them on the way I might add).

There is also Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism , controversial.

Alex Millmow’s The Gypsy Economist: The Life and Times of Colin Clark covers the now-neglected Australian pioneer of development economics and relative historical optimist.

4. Andras Schiff, Music Comes Out of Silence: A Memoir . A well-written and in fact gripping treatment of what makes classical music so wonderful, life as a touring concert pianist, and defecting from Hungary and later being disillusioned by a resurgent European populism.  Zoltan Kocsis was at first the more brilliant pianist, but Schiff was more persistent and ended up with a more successful career.

3. Cass Sunstein, Sludge: What Stops Us from Getting Things Done and What to Do about It .  More people should write books about the most important topics.  Have you and your institution done a “sludge audit” lately?

2. Paul Atkinson, A Design History of the Electric Guitar . “Why is it that so many guitars produced today, not only by Gibson and Fender, but by competing companies, still hark back to the classic designs of the 1950s?  Why do so many manufacturers produce designs that are very clearly derivative forms of the Les Paul, the Telecaster, the Stratocaster, the Flying V and the Explorer?”  There is now a book on this question, and quite a good one.