Recently Mentioned Books

That is from Josh P .  And here is the Amazon link .

Jacob Goldstein, Money: The True Story of a Made-up Thing is a good introduction to its chosen topic.

I found David Broder’s First They Took Rome: How the Populist Right Conquered Italy to be a useful explainer of a complex situation.

Thomas A. Schwartz, Henry Kissinger and American Power: A Political Biography is consistently good and readable.

4. Despina Strategakos, Hitler’s Northern Utopia: Building the New Order in Occupied Norway .  What did the Nazis have planned for Norway after a supposedly successful conclusion of the Second World War?  Lots of reformed urban townscapes, and with plenty of detail to boot.  Sometimes it is books like this, rather than the recounting of atrocities, that make WWII seem like the truly bizarre event it was.  I am still not sure if restructuring Norway is something fascinating to do, or still super-...

3. Charles Freeman, The Awakening: A History of the Western Mind AD 500-1700 .  A gargantuan work at over 800 big pp., the size and the breadth and title all might seem to herald trouble.  Yet it is really good.  It has chapters on whether England really had a scientific revolution, what was actually published with the new printing press, and how medieval universities really worked.  There were fewer tired summaries of “the usual” than I was expecting.  The author is a specialist on the ancient ...

2. Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet .  Perhaps my favorite novel of the year so far, noting this is from Northern Ireland and my #2 pick by Anne Enright is from Ireland proper.  Usually I dislike stories with a “gimmick” — this one recounts part of the life of Shakespeare’s family during plague times — but this one was tasteful, subtle, and suspenseful.

2. Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet .  Perhaps my favorite novel of the year so far, noting this is from Northern Ireland and my #2 pick by Anne Enright is from Ireland proper.  Usually I dislike stories with a “gimmick” — this one recounts part of the life of Shakespeare’s family during plague times — but this one was tasteful, subtle, and suspenseful.

1. Christopher Tugendhat, A History of Britain Through Books, 1900-1964 .  Most of all a look at the “well-known in their time, and reflecting their age, but not read any more” books from the stated period, using short, capsule portraits of each work.  It induced me to order some more Elizabeth Bowen, C.P. Snow, and other works.  There should be more books like this.

That is all from Jonathan Carr’s excellent book The Wagner Clan .

Forthcoming from Marc Levinson, the author of The Box, is a new book Outside the Box: How Globalization Changed from Moving Stuff to Spreading Ideas , a more general history of globalization.

4. Michael Hunter, The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment .  “Though it is often thought that the scientists of the early Royal Society tested magic and found it wanting, this is a misconception.  In fact, the society avoided the issue because its members’ views on the subject were so divided, and it was only in retrospect that this silence was interpreted as judgmental.”

3. Callum Williams, The Classical School: The Turbulent Birth of Economics in Twenty Extraordinary Lives .  A clear, well-written, and useful introduction to the lives and thought of some of the leading classical economists.  The “unusual picks,” by the way, are Harriet Martineau, Rosa Luxemburg, and Dadabhai Naoroji .  The author is a senior economics writer for The Economist .

2. John Dickie, The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World .  Although it has a stereotypically bad subtitle, this is an excellent book.  It clarifies exactly where the Freemasons came from (dissident thought connected to James II), its connection to actual masons, how the movement got routed through Scotland, its prominence to the Enlightenment, its African-American component (Martin Delany), how it influenced Joseph Smith and Mormonism, why Castro tolerated it and the Shah of Iran enc...

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.