Recently Mentioned Books

1. Orlando Figes, The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture .  The three lives are Turgenev, his mistress Pauline Viardot, and the husband of his mistress, Louis Viardot, a noted financier and activist.  Consistently interesting, even if you are not looking to read about those three particular figures.

That is the new book by Danny Dorling and Annika Koljonen , and I opened randomly to a page and saw a chart for Total Fertility Rate in Finland, 1900-2018.  The numbers keep on falling off a table, without even the promise of an asymptote toward the end of the series:

Most major questions in ethics are unsettled, though of course I have my own views , as do many other people.  I take that unsettledness as a fairly fundamental truth, I have been studying these matters for decades, and I even have several published articles in the top-ranked journal Ethics .

Recommended, you can order the book here .

We still do not understand how those behaviors are controlled.  And that is all from the new and excellent Merlin Sheldrake book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, & Shape Our Futures .

That is from the new and excellent book by Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, & Shape Our Futures .

That is from the new and excellent book by Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures .

That is from the recent and quite interesting book by David K. Johnson, Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs sparked a Movement .  Remind me again, this earlier media landscape was a) worse than the internet, or b) better than the internet.  Which one was it again…?  In any case, this book is an excellent reminder of just how much the early gay political movement was tied to markets and consumer capitalism.

I will be doing a Conversation with him.  If you don’t know he writes for The New Yorker as a music (and literary) critic, writes a wonderful music blog , has first-rate books on music and has a new book coming out titled Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music .

That is from Peter Zeihan’s quite interesting Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in a Disunited World .  The Escarpment, by the way, refers to the cliffs that run along Brazil’s coastal zones and have kept Brazil so long from integrating their cities and building a truly stable nation-state.  The lack of navigable rivers throughout most of the country does not help either — North America was blessed in this regard.

That is from Doug Saunders, Maximum Canada: Toward a Country of 100 Million , in addition to its positive programme this is also a useful book for understanding Canadian history.

4. Simone Weil: An Anthology , and Gravity and Grace . Gravity and Grace is the early work.  Its ten best pages are superb, but reading it is mostly a frustrating experience, due to the diffuse nature of the presentation (to be clear, overall I consider that a relatively high reward ratio).  The former collection is the best place to start, noting again there is a certain degree of diffuseness, but as with Žižek there are insights you just don’t get anywhere else.  A good question for any talent...

4. Simone Weil: An Anthology , and Gravity and Grace . Gravity and Grace is the early work.  Its ten best pages are superb, but reading it is mostly a frustrating experience, due to the diffuse nature of the presentation (to be clear, overall I consider that a relatively high reward ratio).  The former collection is the best place to start, noting again there is a certain degree of diffuseness, but as with Žižek there are insights you just don’t get anywhere else.  A good question for any talent...

3. Howard Brotz, editor, African-American Social & Political Thought 1850-1920 .  A fascinating selection from the debates of the time, reprinting Douglass, Booker T., Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Martin Delany, and others.  Douglass holds up best, including his critique of colonialism.  The weakest argument in the volume was “Haiti is working out fine, so Liberia will succeed as well.”  Of greatest interest to me was the extent to which the African-American debates of that time overlapped with opini...

2. Diary of Anne Frank .  It seems inappropriate to call this a “good” or even “great” book.  I had not read it since high school, I will just say it deserves its enduring status, and the reread was much more rewarding and interesting than what I was expecting.

1. Brent Tarter, Virginians and Their Histories .  The best book I have read on the history of Virginia, by an order of magnitude.  And in turn that makes it an excellent book on race as well, and also on broader American history.  If I have to spend the whole year in this state, I might as well read about it.  I learned also that 21,172 Virginians have identified themselves as American Indians, and that this movement is more active than I had realized.

I will be doing a Conversation with him, based in part on his new forthcoming book One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger .  While I have not yet read it, I strongly expect it will be excellent.

It used to be called The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution , but the later title was Return of the Primitive .  It was published in 1971, but sometimes drawn from slightly earlier essays.  I wondered if a revisit might shed light on the current day, and here is what I learned:

It used to be called The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution , but the later title was Return of the Primitive .  It was published in 1971, but sometimes drawn from slightly earlier essays.  I wondered if a revisit might shed light on the current day, and here is what I learned:

The subtitle is How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet .

Richard W. Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn is the latest Stripe Press blockbuster.  Here is more information about the book .

There is also Jim Tankersley, The Riches of This Land: The untold, true story of America’s middle class .

I have not yet read Steven Johnson, Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History’s First Global Manhunt , but in general I enjoy his works and find them smart.

4. R. James Breiding, Too Small to Fail: Why some small nations outperform larger ones and how they are reshaping the world .  A very useful book expanding on the theme that smaller nations have the potential to be much better governed and thus to have smarter policy and greater accountability.

3. Juan Williams, Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary .  A very good and readable biography of exactly what it promises, also manages to avoid hagiography.