Recently Mentioned Books

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.

1. Barnaby Phillips, Loot: Britain and the Benin Bronzes .  Among its other virtues, this book is an excellent “in passing” way to learn about British imperialism and also West African economic collapse.  One thing I learned from this book is that Nigeria already has one of the very best collection of these bronzes in the world.  It does not seem they are being stolen or ruined, but they are not deployed very effectively either.  Recommended.

Recommended .

That is a new and very useful book by Benjamin T. Smith , oddly it came out first in the UK .  Here is one excerpt:

That is from the new and noteworthy Anthony Fontenot, Non-Design: Architecture, Liberalism & the Market .

Paul Strathern’s The Florentines: From Dante to Galileo: The Transformation of Western Civilization is probably the best current, general interest book on its (very important) topic.

There is Emily J. Levine, Allies and Rivals: German-American Exchange and the Rise of the Modern Research University , on yet another understudied topic.

4. Mircea Raianu, Tata: The Global Corporation that Built Indian Capitalism .  No, this book does not “read like a novel,” and it could use more economics rather than plain history, but it is an entire book of full of content, meeting mainstream standards, on the still understudied topic of Indian business, one very major Indian business in particular.

3. Cynthia Saltzman, Plunder: Napoleon’s Theft of Veronese’s Feast .  Among other things, this book shows how clearly Napoleon understood the role of art in both reflecting and cementing power.  Nor had I known that Canova, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Napoleon all had a single intersecting story, revolving around the theft and return of art.

2. Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September .  A wonderfully subtle Irish novel about the Anglo-Irish elite in south Ireland right after WWI, how they self-deceive about the impending doom of their rule and way of life, and the diverse forms those self-deceptions take.  An underrated modernist classic.

1. Ivo Maes, Robert Triffin: A Life .  There should be more biographies of economists, and while this one does not succeed in making Triffin exciting, it is thorough and informative and shows there was more to the man than his famous dilemma .  I hadn’t even known Triffin was from Belgium.

Seven volumes, $200 in paperback, multiple editors, due out in July.  I just pre-ordered .  Much better than wasting your time reading about the debates du jour.