Recently Mentioned Books

There is also Harriet Pattison, Our Days are Like Full Years: A Memoir with Letters from Louis Kahn , a lovely romance with nice photos, sketches, and images as well, very nice integration of text and visuals.

I am closer to the economics than the politics of Casey B. Mulligan, You’re Hired! Untold Successes and Failures of a Populist President , but nonetheless it is an interesting and contrarian book, again here is the excellent John Cochrane review .

Robert Litan, Resolved: Debate Can Revolutionize Education and Help Save Our Democracy : “…incorporate debate or evidence-based argumentation in school as early as the late elementary grades, clearly in high school, and even in college.”

Jonathan E. Hillman, The Emperor’s New Road: China and the Project of the Century , is a good introduction to its chosen topic.

6. Sean Scully, The Shape of Ideas , edited and written by Timothy Rub and Amanda Sroka.  Is Scully Ireland’s greatest living artist?  He has been remarkably consistent over more than five decades of creation.  This is likely the best Scully picture book available, and the text is useful too.  Since it is abstract color and texture painting, he is harder than most to cancel — will we see the visual arts shift in that direction?

5. Laura Tunbridge, Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces .  Smart books on Beethoven are like potato chips, plus you can listen to his music while reading ( heard Op.33 Bagatelles lately ?).  In addition to some of the classics, this book covers some lesser known pieces such as the Septet, An die Ferne Geliebte, and the Choral Fantasy, and how they fit into Beethoven’s broader life and career.  Intelligent throughout.

4. History, Metaphor, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader , edited by Bajohr, Fuchs, and Kroll.  I love Blumenberg, but the selection here didn’t quite sell me.  Better to start with his The Legitimacy of the Modern Age , noting that book is a tough climb for just about anyone and it requires your full attention for some number of weeks.  Might Blumenberg be the best 20th thinker who isn’t discussed much in the Anglo-American world?  And yes it is Progress Studies too.

4. History, Metaphor, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader , edited by Bajohr, Fuchs, and Kroll.  I love Blumenberg, but the selection here didn’t quite sell me.  Better to start with his The Legitimacy of the Modern Age , noting that book is a tough climb for just about anyone and it requires your full attention for some number of weeks.  Might Blumenberg be the best 20th thinker who isn’t discussed much in the Anglo-American world?  And yes it is Progress Studies too.

3. Michael D. Gordin, The Pseudo-Science Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe .  A somewhat forgotten but still fascinating episode in the history of science, extra-interesting for those interested in Venus.  I had not known that Velikovsky pushed a weird version of a eugenicist theory stating that Israel was too hot for its own long-term good, and that its inhabitants needed to find ways of cooling it down.

2. Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeulen, Law & Leviathan: Redeeming the Administrative State .  Self-recommending from the pairing alone, there is a great deal of interesting content in the 145 pp. of text.  It is furthermore an interesting feature of this book that it was written at all on the chosen topic .  Perhaps the administrative state is under more fire than I realize.  And might you consider this book a centrist version of…maybe call it “state capacity not quite libertarianism”?

1. Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears) .  A fun look at the Free Town project as applied to Grafton, New Hampshire: “During a television interview, a Grafton resident accused the Free Towners of “trying to cram freedom down our throats.””

The author is David Edmonds, and the subtitle is The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle .  I very much enjoyed this book, and found its direct style refreshing, and I hope it will serve as a model for others.  The author actually tells you what you want to know!

That was about 236,000 people, and that is from Alan Taylor’s excellent Thomas Jefferson’s Education .  In 1785, by the way, the state legislature unanimously rejected a proposal from evangelicals to free the state’s slaves.

Here is the video, audio, and transcript .  Of course Alex has a new book out Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music , which explores the complicated legacy of Wagner and music more generally.  We learn Alex’s nomination for the greatest pop album ever made, but many of my questions focused on progress in music and musical performance, the nature of talent, the power of culture, and also cancel culture, Wagner of course having been a frequent target for a long time.  Here is one exce...

The author is Tim Harford, and the subtitle is Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers .  My copy just arrived and I am just about to leave town, but I thought I should give you notice.

And I have just received my copy of Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman, Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius .

5. George Prochnik, Heinrich Heine: Writing the Revolution .  Heine has aged very well, circa 2020, and he is an appropriate liberal but also satiric counterpart to the writers mentioned immediately above, plus he was more historically prescient, and for all the talk about culture from the Romantics, it was Heine who was the perceptive observer of other people’s cultures.  This is a good book for additional historical background once you already know Heine, though not at all an introduction to h...

4. The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics , edited by Frederick C. Beiser, but basically Novalis, Schlegel, and a bit of Schleiermacher.  In particular I was surprised how well the Novalis has held up: insightful, to the point, and laying out the aesthetic approach to politics (and more) with a stark and memorable clarity.  If you are looking for something to read that is non-liberal, but not the tiresome version of non-liberal being beat to death these days, maybe try this book.

3. Ed Douglas, Himalaya: A Human History .  Truly an excellent book covering the history, politics, and culture of…the Himalayan region.  Full of substance, lovely cover too. The USA link here has a worse cover, no surprise.  But you’ll get the British version quicker, with the preferred cover, and at a lower price.  Arbitrage!

2. Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity — and Why This Harms Everybody .  The authors serve up many on-target criticisms of current academic nonsense, but somehow it is not how I would proceed.  Given the ridiculousness of so much of what is going on, I say there are new intellectual profit opportunities to mine the best insights from critical theory, postmodernism, intersectionality and the like.  I would ...

1. Leonard Mlodinow, Stephen Hawking: A Memoir of Friendship and Physics .  One man’s version of “the real Stephen Hawking story,” including the marital arrangements and rearrangements, told by a former good friend.  I am not sure that books such as this should be written (or read), but…this one is pretty good.  It also gives Hawking’s account of why he did not win a Nobel prize (“radiation must be observed”), among other tidbits.

Substantive, interesting, and fun throughout, here is the audio, video, and transcript .  For more do buy Matt’s new book One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger .  Here is the CWT summary:

You can buy it here , Kindle only for $3.14, note it is a full-length book with all the proper trappings.  It’s one of the best and most interesting books on technology in some time, either ignore or enjoy the organizational infelicities, first published in 2018.

6. Elena Ferrante, The Lying Life of Adults .  The last quarter of the book closes strong, so my final assessment is enthusiastic, even if it isn’t in the exalted league of her Neapolitan quadrology.  It will probably be better upon a rereading, which I will do.

5. David Carpenter, Henry III: 1207-1258 .  “No King of England came to the throne in a more desperate situation than Henry III.”  The Magna Carta had just been instituted, Henry was just nine years old, and England was ruled by a triumvirate, with a very real chance that the French throne would swallow up England.  This is one of those “has a lot of unfamiliar names that are hard to keep track of” books, but don’t blame Carpenter for that.  In terms of scholarly contribution it stands amongst t...