Recently Mentioned Books

I have not had time to read Rachel Holmes’s Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel , about the suffragette movement and one of its leaders, but its 840 pp. would appear to be a major achievement with no comparable competitor.

I have not had time to read Sean McMeekin’s Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II , but it is of possible interest.

I have read the first one hundred pages of Louis Menand, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War , a lengthy book due out in April, and my physical review copy just arrived.

4. Ritchie Robertson, The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness 1680-1790 .  This tome offers 780 pp. about the Enlightenment, how unhappy can you be?  This book is a well-done introduction, yet perhaps for my knowledge level it spends too much time regurgitating general truths.  I am happy to recommend it to people less interested than I am in reading the primary sources.

3. Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science .  A better book than it subtitle indicates, it has very good treatments of the role of Humphry Davy in British chemistry, William and Caroline Herschel, and the overall import of Joseph Banks for many decades, among other related topics.

2. Abigail Tucker, Mom Genes: Inside the New Science of Our Ancient Maternal Instinct .  These days this science has an inevitably politically incorrect feel, in any case this is a good book for anyone contemplating or experiencing motherhood, or otherwise tied up in that whole set of issues.  That includes social scientists, too.

1. Tim Lee, Jamie Lee, and Kevin Coldiron, The Rise of Carry: The Dangerous Consequences of Volatility Suppression and the New Financial Order of Decaying Growth and Recurring Crisis .  If you are looking for the most current version of Austrian Business Cycle theory, this is it.  Doesn’t mean it is right.

That is from Sameer Arshad Khatlani’s recent and really quite good The Other Side of the Divide: A Journey into the Heart of Pakistan .

I have been reading the galleys, I will blurb it, it will be one of the best non-fiction books of 2021, more in due time you can pre-order here .

And she has a new book coming out on Isaac Newton .  So what should I ask her?

That is from Jonathan Zimmerman’s quite interesting The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America .

Those are my top three books of the year.  I think you can make a good case for Joe Henrich’s WEIRD book having the most important ideas of the year in it, but, perhaps because I already had read much of the material in article form, I didn’t love it as a book the way I do these.

Jan Swafford, Mozart: the Reign of Love .  Self-recommending.  A wonderful biographer covers one of the most important humans, to produce the best Mozart biography of all time.  You may recall I also had high praise for Swafford’s Beethoven biography from 2014.

Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath .  This is like the Lincoln biography — I was convinced I didn’t want to read a thousand pages about her (though I am a fan).  And yet I keep on reading, now at about the halfway mark and I will finish with joy.  This is one of the best and most gripping biographies I have read, covering growing up as a brilliant young woman in the 1950s, poetry back then, dating and gender relations amongst the elite at that time, how ment...

Definitely recommended, fascinating throughout.  And here is John’s new book Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies, At Home and Abroad .

That is the new book by Paul Morley , with the parenthetical subtitle “(And Decided to Rewrite its Entire History)”.

That is from Alan Cook’s Edmond Halley: Charting the Heavens and the Seas .  Halley was a contemporary of Newton, Wren, Pepys, Hooke, Purcell, Locke, and Dryden, among others.

Michael Kulikowski, The Tragedy of Empire: From Constantinople to the Destruction of Roman Italy .

Anthony A. Barrett, Rome is Burning: Nero and the Fire that Ended a Dynasty .

And Simon Baron-Cohen, The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention .  OK enough, but underargued relative to what I was expecting.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Think, Write, Speak:Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor is an entertaining read.  It is good to see him call out Pasternak’s Zhivago for being a crashing bore. And to call Lolita a poem, repeatedly.

There is Deirdre Nansen McCloskey and Alberto Mingardi, The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State , a book-length reply to Mariana Mazzucato.  For me it was too polemical, though I agree many of Mazzucato’s claims are overstated.

6. Charles Koch, with Brian Hooks. Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World .  The best of the three Charles Koch books, interesting throughout, and much more personal and revealing than the generic title would imply.  I read the whole thing.

4. Diana Darke, Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe .  Among its other virtues, this book makes it clear just how much valuable architectural the world lost in Syria.  I had not known that the Strasbourg Münster was the tallest medieval structure still standing in the world.  Good photos too.

3. Stephen Baxter, Ages in Chaos: James Hutton and the Discovery of Deep Time .  Yes that is Baxter the excellent science fiction author and here is his excellent book on both the history of geology and the Scottish Enlightenment.  What more could you ask for?