Recently Mentioned Books

That is the new Alan Taylor book and the subtitle is A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850 .  Excerpt:

I will be doing a Conversation with him, if you are unaware here is his Wikipedia page .  Here is his new book Values(s): Building a Better World For All .  So what should I ask?

She is a Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago, and recently published a translation of Virgil’s Aeneid .  Here is the audio, visual, and transcript .  Here is part of the summary:

That is from the new book on this topic by Serhii Plokhy .  An excellent book, with much more on the Soviet side than any other source I am aware of.

By Ivan Gibbons, why can’t all non-fiction books be this good?  At 148 pp. brief and to the point, perfectly clear, full of substance, and a model presentation. You can buy it here , headed for this year’s “best of” list.

Here is the full Wired story , and here you can buy Julia’s new book .  I wonder if he is more rational in the Star Trek movies than in the TV shows, or how about in the fan fiction?  Exactly where is the demand for dramatic irrationality highest, and why?

Let me first say that if you are libertarian, and would like a libertarian response to the pandemic, and you find Alex and me not libertarian enough, read the Ryan Bourne book from the Cato Institute .  You may not agree with everything in there, but it has no “gross errors” and no “biomedical weirdness.”  And people, the Cato Institute really is libertarian.  They once hired David Henderson as chief economist.

The pdf of Your World Better is available to download in my blog for free.  Or you can buy a kindle version for 99 cents or a hard copy for $8.10.  Any author royalties from those sales will be donated to UNICEF.

Your World, Better is written for the smart and engaged middle school student.  It looks at how America and the World has changed since the reader’s parents and grandparents were young: what has happened to health and wealth, homes, school and work, rights and democracy, war and the environment, happiness and depression.   It talks about the things that have gotten better, the sometimes-intensifying challenges that remain, and what readers can do about them.  (Some of you might hear echoes of my...

Cameron Blevis, Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West , is a good book and on a more important topic than you might think.

How should you feel if you attentively finish Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey, Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment ?

5. Ryan Bourne, Economics in One Virus: An Introduction to Economic Reasoning through Covid-19 .  This book came out yesterday, I read it earlier, and here is my blurb: “A truly excellent book that explains where our pandemic response went wrong, and how we can understand those failings using the tools of economics.”  It is published by Cato, a libertarian think tank, and it is a much better and more integrated and science-based account than what you might find from other groups, whether liberta...

4. Tom Jones, George Berkeley: A Philosophical Life .  A thorough biography of an 18th century Irish philosopher who is still worth reading.  Berkeley also wrote on monetary theory and pioneered the idea of an abstract unit of account.

3. Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Amazon .  A truly good and very substantive management book (I hear your jaw hitting the floor).  Just that statement makes it one of the best management books ever.  Really.

2. Andy Grundberg, How Photography Became Contemporary Art .  How does a whole genre rise from also-ran status to a major (the major?) form of contemporary art?  This is an excellent history with nice color plates and it is also a causal account.  I liked this sentence, among others: “Surprisingly, the acceptance of color photography had happened earlier in the art world than in the so-called art photography world.”  Polaroid had a significant role as well.

1. Susan Bernofsky, Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser .  I believe you need to have read Walser first, but if so this is a far better biography than what you might have expected the English-speaking world to have produced.  It is also an implicit portrait of where pre-WWI Europe went wrong, the history of micro-writing, and a paean to general weirdness, noting that Walser in both his life and writing is inexplicable to this day.

Definitely recommended.  And I am very happy to recommend Dana’s latest book (and indeed all of his books) Studying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs from a Young Writer’s Life .

It is called Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad , and so far it is very good.  Here is one bit:

A good book, recent winner of the National Book Award for non-fiction, the author is Tom Zoellner and the subtitle is The Revolt that Ended Slavery in the British Empire .  Here is one excerpt about Jamaica, the central theater for the book:

The new Peter Boettke book is The Struggle for a Better World , which is his best statement of classical liberalism to date.

5. Matthew E. Kahn, Adapting to Climate Change: Markets and the Management of an Uncertain Future .  I read this some time ago, it is just published, here is my blurb: “Are you looking for an approach that recognizes the costs of climate change, and approaches the entire question with an economic and political sanity?  Matthew E. Kahn’s new book is then essential reading.”

4. Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX .  A fun and informative treatment of what the title promises.  I hadn’t know that Musk met personally with the first three thousand employees of SpaceX, to make sure the company was hiring the right kind of people.  He thought he could detect a good hire within fifteen minutes of conversation.

3. S.M. Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician .  Memoir involving many of the 20th century’s top mathematicians and physics types, including von Neumann, Gamow, Banach, Edward Teller, and Ulam himself, among others.  Scintillating on every page, as a historical chronicle, as biography, and as a look into how a brilliant mathematician thinks.

2. Walter Isaacson, The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race .  This excellent book is exactly as you think it is going to be.

1. Devaki Jain, The Brass Notebook .  What is it like to grow up in a Tamil Brahmin family, be molested by relatives and Nobel Prize winners, and go on to be an economist?  Short and extremely readable.  The personal tale is very charming, the politics (Nyerere and Castro, never repudiated) are not.