Recently Mentioned Books

6. New (expensive) book on the economics of Michael Polanyi .

I am sure to read the whole thing through, you can pre-order here .

There is also Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism .

5. Edmund Morris, Edison .  Lots of impressive research, but this book didn’t have the emphasis on innovation and institutions that I was looking for.

4. Norman Lebrecht, Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World 1847-1947 .  An informative and engaging account of what the title promises (you can learn more about Heine and Alkan and Moholy-Nagy).  Nonetheless the author never really addresses the question of why that period was quite so remarkable for Jewish achievement, relative to the rest of world history.

3. Thomas O. McGarity, Pollution, Politics, and Power: The Struggle for Sustainable Electricity .  A very useful of the last four decades of transformation in the electricity industry.

2. Daniel M. Russell, The Joy of Search: A Google Insider’s Guide to Going Beyond the Basics .  I don’t need this, but I suspect useful for many.

1. Camilla Townsend, Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs .  I read this one straight through, it does more to bring the Aztecs (a misnomer, by the way, as it is technically the name of the military alliance…a bit like referring to “NATO people”) to life than any other book I know.

Here is the audio and transcript , the chat centered around music, including Ted’s new and fascinating book Music: A Subversive History .  We talk about music and tech, the Beatles, which songs and performers we are embarrassed to like, whether jazz still can be cool, Ted’s family background, why restaurants are noisier, why the blues are disappearing, Elton John, which countries are underrated for their musics, whether anyone loves the opera, whether musical innovation is still possible, and mu...

I am a big fan of Yuval Levin, and now he has a new forthcoming book A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream .

I do not have time to read David Abulafia’s The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans , but based on a browse it is 918 pp. of substance on everything from the Polynesians to the monsoon to sailing across the Atlantic, and then some.

Eric Schwitzgebel, A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures .  Collected essays, interesting throughout, and among other points Schwitzgebel shows that ethicists do not in fact behave better than other human beings, higher rates of vegetarianism aside.

Also noteworthy is Richard Brookhiser, Give Me Liberty: A History of America’s Exceptional Essays , a kind of companion volume.  Can you beat the title, especially given world trends today?

C. Bradley Thompson’s America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It , is a beautifully written history of exactly what the title and subtitle claim.

4. The Jamaican diet and a number of good public health programs, contributing to the strength of potential Jamaican runners ( James C. Riley : “Between 1920 and 1950, Jamaicans added life expectancy at one of the most rapid paces attained in any country.”)

That is one chapter in Orlando Patterson’s new and excellent The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the Postcolonial Predicament .  One thing I like so much about this book is that it tries to answer actual questions you might have about Jamaica (astonishingly, hardly any other books have that aim, whether for Jamaica or for other countries).  So what about this question and this puzzle?

5. Ross Douthat on Watership Down (NYT).  And you can pre-order the new forthcoming Ross Douthat book The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success .

Millions of people stay in Airbnb homes every night. It’s not trust which makes this possible. My pup is fearless when he sleeps with the door wide open, in a cottage in the woods. There are leopards around. Dogs here don’t live very long. He doesn’t trust leopards, but he knows they are afraid of humans. My pup sleeps on my bed, and so is well-protected from the vicissitudes of life. But I’m not the living proof that dogs can trust leopards. Dogs wouldn’t need humans to guard them if they could...

That is the highly controversial book by Frederick Martel, subtitled Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy .  For some time I had been resisting reading the book, as usually I find tales of corruption and scandal boring.  But I misunderstood the fundamental nature of the account.  It is not quite a homage, but Martel seems to admire the evolved culture of homosexuality (not my preferred word, but appropriate in this context) in the Vatican.  See this review : “The tone falters because Martel seems uns...

This is one of the very best books to read if you wish to think about writing more deeply.  You can pre-order it here .

7. The new Charles Murray book .

Paul Blustein, Schism: China, America and the Fracturing of the Global Trading System .  Given the import and timing on the topic, I am surprised this book has not received more attention .  It is “more boring” than Blustein’s earlier works, such as on Argentina, but full of facts and substance on every page.  For now it is the go-to book on this topic.

Jason Lyall, Divided Armies: Inequality and Battlefield Performance in Modern War .  Perhaps the most thorough look at how cohesion has made some armies and fighting forces stronger than others.  For instance there is a chapter “African World Wars: Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo on the Modern Battlefield.”  I view this more as a cohesion story than an “inequality” story (current U.S. forces seem pretty sharp), in any case a good integration of military history with modern social s...

Cristiano Bianchi and Kristina Drapić, Model City Pyongyang .  An excellent picture book, mostly of architecture, presenting Pyongyang as yet another installment in the 20th century series of deeply weird cities.

Peter Gatrell, The Unsettling of Europe: How Migration Reshaped a Continent .  A very nice history of earlier post-war European migration, such as Turks and Greeks moving to West Germany, Cape Verdeans settling in Portugal, and so on.  Excellent background for the current debates.