Recently Mentioned Books

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 .

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 .

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 .

Don’t forget Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Bettering Humanomics: A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science .

Julian Baggini’s The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well is not written for me, but it is a lively and useful introduction to one of humanity’s greatest minds.

Mathilde Fasting has edited After the End of History: Conversations with Frank Fukuyama .

Joanne Meyerowitz, A War on Global Poverty: The Lost Promise of Redistribution and the Rise of Microcredit . A history of antipoverty efforts, with an emphasis on the shift toward “enterprise” in the 1980s, with the microcredit treatment being mostly pre-Yunus.

Dorothy Sue Cobble, For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality is a serious and thorough yet readable account of what the title promises, with a minimum of mood affiliation.

I very much enjoyed Richard Thompson (with Scott Timberg), Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice, 1967-1975 , still smarter than the competition and you don’t even have to know much about Thompson.

3. William Deresiewicz, The Death of the Artist: How Creators are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech .  Ignore the subtitle (which itself illustrates a theme of the book), this is the best book on the economics of the arts — circa 2021 — in a long time.  “The good news is, you can do it yourself.  The bad news is, you have to.”  Every aspiring internet creator, whether “artist” or not, should read this book.  If you don’t think of your career itself as a creative produ...

2. Wenfei Tong, Bird Love: The Family Life of Birds .  Now this is a great book, wonderful photos, superb analytics and bottom-line approach throughout.  By the way, “Superb fairywrens are particularly adept at avoiding incest.”

1. David Thomson, A Light in the Dark: A History of Movie Directors .  One of the best attempts to make the auteur notion intelligible to the modern viewer, he surveys major directors such as Welles, Kubrick, Hitchcock, Godard and others. Stephen Frears is the dark horse pick, and he recommends the Netflix show Ozark .  I always find Thomson worth reading.