Recently Mentioned Books

Here is Mokyr in scholar.google.com .  Read The Lever of Riches and The Gifts of Athena and A Culture of Growth .  I have benefited most from The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 .  You can ask Joel just about anything concerning the Industrial Revolution and he will have an amazingly well-thought answer.  He has a new book coming out in November , with Tabellini and Greif.  It is correct to consider him as an “Enlightenment thinker.”  Brian Albrecht has a good threa...

Here is Mokyr in scholar.google.com .  Read The Lever of Riches and The Gifts of Athena and A Culture of Growth .  I have benefited most from The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 .  You can ask Joel just about anything concerning the Industrial Revolution and he will have an amazingly well-thought answer.  He has a new book coming out in November , with Tabellini and Greif.  It is correct to consider him as an “Enlightenment thinker.”  Brian Albrecht has a good threa...

Here is Mokyr in scholar.google.com .  Read The Lever of Riches and The Gifts of Athena and A Culture of Growth .  I have benefited most from The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 .  You can ask Joel just about anything concerning the Industrial Revolution and he will have an amazingly well-thought answer.  He has a new book coming out in November , with Tabellini and Greif.  It is correct to consider him as an “Enlightenment thinker.”  Brian Albrecht has a good threa...

Here is Mokyr in scholar.google.com .  Read The Lever of Riches and The Gifts of Athena and A Culture of Growth .  I have benefited most from The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 .  You can ask Joel just about anything concerning the Industrial Revolution and he will have an amazingly well-thought answer.  He has a new book coming out in November , with Tabellini and Greif.  It is correct to consider him as an “Enlightenment thinker.”  Brian Albrecht has a good threa...

Here is Mokyr in scholar.google.com .  Read The Lever of Riches and The Gifts of Athena and A Culture of Growth .  I have benefited most from The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 .  You can ask Joel just about anything concerning the Industrial Revolution and he will have an amazingly well-thought answer.  He has a new book coming out in November , with Tabellini and Greif.  It is correct to consider him as an “Enlightenment thinker.”  Brian Albrecht has a good threa...

Yes he used to run Rhodesia, and yes it is costly to buy this book because no one wants to reprint it, for obvious reasons.  Nonetheless it is a fascinating look into an era and its dissolution.

Gulliver claims he is a good Christian. We doubt him, as we doubt Bacon’s chaplain. Gulliver’s first name, Lemuel, translates from Hebrew as “devoted to God.” But “Gulliver” sounds like “gullible.” Swift quotes Lucretius on the title page of the 1735 edition: “ vulgus abhorret ab his .” In its original context, Lucretius’s quote describes the horrors of a godless cosmos, horrors to which Swift will expose us. The words “ splendide mendax ” appear below Gulliver’s frontispiece portrait—“nobly unt...

Jonathan Swift tried to exorcise ­Baconian Antichrist-worship from England. Gulliver’s Travels agreed with New Atlantis on one point: The ancient hunger for knowledge of God had competition from the modern thirst for knowledge of science. In this quarrel between ancients and moderns, Swift sided with the former.

I enjoyed Maxim Samson, Earth Shapers: How We Mapped and Mastered the World, From the Panama Canal to the Baltic Way .

Luka Ivan Jukic, Central Europe: The Death of a Civilization and the Life of an Idea .  I took this sentence to encapsulate the main lesson of the book, namely that this does not usually work: “Central Europeans were, as ever, masterfully adept at rearranging polities into new configurations.”

Peter Baxter, Rhodesia: A Complete History 1890-1980 .  The most complete history of the country I have been able to find.  Many of the other books contain a few dominant, non-false narratives, but one gets tired of that?  I say LLMs come especially in handy for learning this history.

Very well researched is The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China , by Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li, with Claire Cousineau.

Benjamin Wilson, Strange Stability: How Cold War Scientists Set Out to Control the Arms Race and Ended up Serving the Military-Industrial Complex is both interesting and has plenty of information on early Thomas Schelling and his precursors.

Matthew Bell, Goethe: A Life in Ideas .  A beautiful book, now in English we have Nicholas Boyle’s work and also this.  Bell is wise enough to understand and value Iphigenia auf Tauris , a good test for Goethe appeciation.  Although I had a library copy out to read, I went ahead and bought a copy of this one to own.

Marcus Willaschek, Kant: A Revolution in Thinking .  A very good book, perhaps the best introduction to Kant?  Though for me it is mostly interior to my current knowledge set.

By Avner Greif, Joel Mokyr, and Guido Tabellini. Due out in November , likely to be excellent.

Recommended, you can pre-order here .

That is the forthcoming book by Andrew Burstein, who is also author of the excellent Madison and Jefferson (with Nancy Isenberg).  I am sent many books on the founding and Founding Fathers, and while I find their average quality to be high, usually they do not grab my attention.  I have already read plenty in that area.  I also have consumed many books on Jefferson in particular,s Dumas Malone boring or magisterial?  But this one I read straight through, as it is simply…compelling.  Excerpt:

That is the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie, inspired by Pynchon’s Vineland .  I do not usually like Anderson’s films (apart from Magnolia ), but this so far is the best movie of the year?  It takes the “ Days of Rage ” themes and connects them to our current predicament, weaving them into a unified whole, where the world has some characteristics of the 1970s and some of today.  Some scenes are flawed, but overall the cast, soundtrack, and cinematography are the best I have seen in some while.  W...

I was very pleased to have read Steven’s new book When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life .

How Africa Works: Success and Failure on the World’s Last Development Frontier .

That is from Janet Radcliffe Richard, the widow of Derek Parfit.  Her fascinating spousal memoir is from the new and fascinating edited collection Derek Parfit: His Life and Thought , edited by Jeff McMahan.  Worth the triple digit price.  Derek would exercise on a stationery bike only, because that was the only form of exercise compatible with reading.  And he was a big fan of Uchida playing Mozart, as all people should be.

6. Michael Lentz, Schattenfroh .  About one thousand pages, it is receiving buzz as a new novel to master, some are calling it “the new Solenoid” (not a positive for everyone, I do understand).  I have tried parts in English and parts in German, but still I do not get it.  Does it have a plot?  Any humor?  For purposes of norming, I am a big fan of James Joyce’s Ulysses .  I will try it again, however.  At least the author was not complacent.

5. Jordana Pomeroy, Daring: The Life and Art of Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun .  Both a book and a picture book rolled into one.  This new release is a very good introduction to her life, her art, and her role as semi-official court painter for Marie de Antoinette.  She remains an underrated artist.

4. Chuck Klosterman, Football .  An excellent and highly conceptual book about America’s favorite sport.  Could this be the best book on (American) football ever?