Recently Mentioned Books

2. Julian Hoppit, The Dreadful Monster and its Poor Relations: Taxation, Spending and the United Kingdom, 1707-2021 .  A highly useful fiscal history, the book also has plenty on Ireland and those are often the most interesting sections.  There had been a formal union in 1801, but during the Great Famine there was no fiscal risk-sharing with Ireland.  At the time, the national government in London also much preferred spending in England to spending to Scotland.  At 223 pp. of text it feels short...

1. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1805 edition .  Many people who read “the Great Books” never touch this one, because it is a poem, and a long one at that (about 200 pp. in my Oxford edition).  Nonetheless a) it is one of the best poems, and b) the experience of reading it is more like reading “a great book” than like reading a poem.  I am very happy to be rereading it.  Highly recommended, and it is also important for understanding John Stuart Mill, the decline and transformation of classica...

That is from the new and excellent An Illustrated Business History of the United States , by Richard Vague.  How many of you really know everything that is in here?  In that same year Buffalo was the tenth largest U.S. city.  And the most valuable import around that time (1891-1900) was sugar, with coffee #2 and “Hides and skins” #3.

Matt Grossman’s How Social Science Got Better: Overcoming Bias with More Evidence, Diversity, and Self Reflection is both substantive and honest.

Steven Johnson, Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer , is a very good history of exactly what its title promises.

3. Kara Walker, A Black Hole is Everything a Star Longs To Be .  Mostly images of her drawings, no text to speak of (though many of the drawings themselves have text).  These 600 or so drawings will be on exhibit in a show in Basel that I hope to visit this summer, Covid conditions permitting.  I find her work a better introduction to “current race issues” than most of the recent well-known books on race issues.  Smarter and more powerful.

2. Andrew Steele, Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old .  I haven’t read all of the popular “anti-aging” books, but perhaps this is the best one?  It presents the diversity of problems involved, and the difficulty of solving them, while remaining ultimately hopeful about the possibility of progress.  Most of the meat of the book is in the middle chapters, which are also good for explaining how aging research relates to broader biological and disease-linked issues.

1. Marc Morris, The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England 400-1066 .  A pretty good book.  It has been criticized for focusing on “dead white males,” but isn’t this a history of dead white males in large part?  The photos are quite good.  My main problem is simply that I find the whole era inscrutable.  Still, if you wish to learn whether Aethelred the Unready was in fact…unready…this is one good place to go.

That is all from Egill Bjarnason, How Iceland Changed the World: The Big History of a Small Island .  I’ll say it again: single country books are underrated .  Maybe there are no great revelations in this one, but if you have been to Iceland, or are planning a trip, it is probably the first book you would want to pick up to cover the country.

You will note that Niall has a new book out Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe .

Again, here is Mark’s new book Value(s): Building a Better World For All .

Highly recommended, you can pre-order here , and yes the author does speak Guarani and he does also know the Solow growth model and why Singapore is interesting.

That is from Roderick Matthews’s excellent Peace, Poverty and Betrayal: A New History of British India .  Here is my previous post on the book .

Via Kevin Vallier , who has recently published Trust in a Polarized Age , a book of interest to anyone considering this topic.

6. Fabrice Midal, Trungpa and Vision , a biography of Chögyam Trungpa , the Tibetan Buddhist leader.  I enjoyed this passage: “He never hesitated to tell the truth, even if this meant provoking the audience.  At a talk in San Francisco in the fall of 1970, he began by saying: “It’s a pity you came here.  You’re so aggressive.””

5. Kenneth Whyte, The Sack of Detroit: General Motors and the End of American Enterprise .  How the consumer and auto safety movement helped to bring down GM.

4. Martha C. Nussbaum, Citadels of Pride: Sexual Assault, Accountability, and Reconciliation .  There are so many recent books on these topics, you might feel a bit weary of them all, but this is one of the best.  It is rationally and reasonably argued, from first principles, and focuses on the better arguments for its conclusions.  It nicely situates the legal within the philosophical, it is wise on power vs. sex, rooted in the idea of objectification, and it has at least one page on alcohol.

3. Blake Bailey, Philip Roth: The Biography .  I only read slivers and won’t finish it, because I just don’t need 800 pp. on Philip Roth.  But…it’s really good.  I like Picasso too, and Caravaggio (a murderer).  I’ve heard, by the way, that this book will be picked up by Simon and Schuster and put back into print.

2. Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life .  This book is the best introduction to this key Girardian concept.

That is an excerpt from William Deresiewicz, The Death of the Artist: How Creators are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech , an excellent book (ignore the subtitle).

Applied Divinity Studies has written an excellent and thought-provoking 34-pp. review of my book Stubborn Attachments .  Excerpt:

Here is the Amazon link , the company came through after San Francisco failed me .

I had not known that Sarah Ruden was a Quaker, and perhaps that is why she is willing to veer away from the “chatty” approach and delve into the strangeness of these texts.  You should pair this with David Bentley Hart and other translations (do read the first Amazon review), but for now I am willing to call this one “an event.”  Heartily recommended.

The author is Colin G. Calloway, the subtitle is Indians and the Urban Frontier in Early America , and the main theme is Native American interactions with the major urban areas of the British colonies.

Arrived in my pile there is William D. Nordhaus, The Spirit of Green: The Economics of Collisions and Contagions in a Crowded World , and in September Adam Tooze is publishing Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy , and also for September there is Gregg Easterbrook’s Blue Age: How the US Navy Created Global Prosperity — And Why We’re in Danger of Losing It .