Recently Mentioned Books

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?

2. Martin J. Sherwin, Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis .  a very well-done book about mankind’s biggest problem and risk — what more could you want?  I didn’t find much shocking new in here, but a very good overview for most readers.

1. Darmon Richter, Chernobyl: A Stalker’s Guide .  This year’s best travel book?  And do you get the joke in the subtitle?  It has an unusual flair, excellent photos, and will make the updated “best of the year” list.

4. New Proust stories appearing in English for the first time order them here .

COWEN: I don’t think he wants to sterilize people, but he has those essays on population , which are not put into the collected works. They’re not mentioned by Roy Harrod . He is greatly worried that the people from some countries — I think including India — will outbreed the people from Britain, and this will wreak havoc on prices and wages, and it’s a big crisis. He even says, “We need to worry not only about the quantity of people, but the quality of people in the world.”

Zach is author of the recent book The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes , which has been on many year-end “best of” lists.  Here is the audio, transcript, and video .  Here is part of the CWT summary:

Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy .  I think you need to have a preexisting connection to Mexico and Mexican food to enjoy it.  I do.

The Wedding Plan , a few years older, a Rama Burshtein movie, imagine an Israeli woman setting out to get married by a particular date no matter what.

2. Worthwhile Canadian moose car-licking warnings .  And new Jordan Peterson book coming in March .

As noted, Ben has a new and very interesting book coming out Religion and the Rise of Capitalism .  He is also the author of the superb The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth , and the earlier Day of Reckoning , about the economic policies of the Reagan administration.  Ben has been a leading macroeconomist since the 1970s, and he taught me Ph.D. macro at Harvard in 1984, one of my favorite professors I might add.  Here is Ben on scholar.google.com .

As noted, Ben has a new and very interesting book coming out Religion and the Rise of Capitalism .  He is also the author of the superb The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth , and the earlier Day of Reckoning , about the economic policies of the Reagan administration.  Ben has been a leading macroeconomist since the 1970s, and he taught me Ph.D. macro at Harvard in 1984, one of my favorite professors I might add.  Here is Ben on scholar.google.com .

Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) was of course the grandfather of Charles Darwin and also of Francis Galton.  And that passage is from the truly excellent biography Charles Darwin Voyaging , by Janet Browne.