Recently Mentioned Books

Jo Ann Cavallo, editor, Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism: Essays in Memory of Paul A. Cantor .  There is even an essay by David Gordon (!) in here.

Bill McGowan, and Juliana Silva, Speak, Memorably: The Art of Captivating an Audience , is a good and useful book.

5. Alexander Ivashkin, Alfred Schnittke .  “Schnittke really lies between two traditions, with German rationalism on one hand and Russian irrationalism on the other.”  Lately I have been listening to the Psalms of Remembrance and the violin sonata #2.  I had not known that Schnittke grew up speaking Volga German.

4. Ian Penman, Erik Satie Three Piece Suite (Semiotext(e)/ Native Agents .  A hard book to explain.  A kind of devil’s dictionary of terms related to Erik Satie, interesting and witty throughout, at least if you know something of early modernism and its culture.  Recommended, for those who care.

3. Barry Mazor, Blood Harmony: The Everly Brothers Story .  I’m not going to pass this one up, as Macca once said: “The biggest influence on John and me was the Everly Brothers.  To this day I just think they’re the greatest.”  In addition to the very famous songs, “Roots” is an incredible and now neglected album.  This book however is good not great, as it never quite brings them to life.  But it is now the main biography, and in that sense is self-recommending.

2. Neal Bascomb, The Perfect Mile: Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less than Four Minutes to Achieve It .  While the major focus is on Roger Bannister, there is plenty on the other runners of his time as well, most of all the Australian John Landy, who rapidly broke Bannister record after it was achieved.  Many smart people do not read enough books about the history of sports.  Yet the genre is very good, as often both the readers and the authors (!) actually really care about the content of the m...

1. Hamid Keshmirshekan, Contemporary Iranian Art: New Perspectives .  I get tired of reading through the same old histories of Persia/Iran, and how they tell the same old tales of the rise and fall of the Shah, etc.  So how else might you try to understand contemporary Iran better?  Books like this are a very good place to start, plus they are fun to page through.  If anything, the works seem to get better and more original post-1979?  And you can see continuing currents of the non-Islamic under...

Book clubs nationwide have been talking for months about whether you are “Abundance-pilled,” a reference to the recent book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that has made it into the lexicon of many public policy nerds.

By Charles Murray, now forthcoming, I expect it will be very interesting. Due out October 14 .

We will start with George’s new and excellent book False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery 1933-1947 .  But of course George has a long and distinguished record in monetary economics, free banking, macro, and ngdp ideas, as well as productivity norms for monetary policy.

A very good episode, definitely recommended.  I enjoyed all of Helen’s books, most notably the recent The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV , which was the orignial prompt for this episode.

By Sam Tanenhaus .  I held off reading this book at first, as I felt I already knew a lot about Buckley and his life.  But it is excellent.  Very well written and engaging throughout.  I learned a good deal, and it is one of the best books on the history of the American 20th century right wing.

An excellent book, Yale University Press, and currently priced below $15 in hardcover .

5. New Alex Rosenberg book on economic method and game theory .

7. Diana Darke, Islamesque: The Forgotten Craftsmen Who Built Europe’s Medieval Monuments .  Perhaps overargued in places, but an excellent book, with super-clear explanations and wonderful illustrations.  Excerpt: “No architectural style just ‘appears’ magically out of nowhere.  All the key innovations attributed to Romanesque — new vaulting techniques, the use of decorative frames, interlace and ornamental devices like blind arcades, Lombard bands, blind arches, lesenes, Venetian dentil and th...

6. Perry Anderson, Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War .  This strikes me as the kind of book where a very established author is seeking to work out issues that preoccupied him as a much younger man.  Such books tend to be interesting but also incomplete and unsatisfying?  Overall I am glad I read this one.

5. Sam Dalrymple, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia .  Are you excited by the prospect of learning more about why Burma split off from the rest of the Raj in 1937?  If so, this is the book for you.  It also has good coverage on the role of the Middle East in the history of the Raj.

2. Judith Scheele, Shifting Sands: A Human History of the Sahara .  A quite good, informative, and readable book on a very much undercovered topic.  Saharan civilization is something that runs deeper, and is more coherent, than any set of national boundaries in the region.  The author spent years living in the Saharan region of Chad.  Recommended, a good example of “you should read a book about a topic you are not thinking of reading about.”

1. Michael Kempe, The Best of all Possible Worlds: A Life of Leibniz in Seven Pivotal Days .  A good book, I had not realized the full import of Leibniz in the history of binary computation, his understanding of “novels as models,” his theory of social distancing during epidemics, or just how much attention he devoted to the historical episode of a woman as Pope.

The new Cercas book is El loco de Dios en el fin del mundo . That title translates roughly as “The crazy man of God at the end of the world,” noting there are ambiguities in who that man is (Cercas? The Pope?), and whether the end of the world refers to a trip to Mongolia or the apocalypse or perhaps death.

Here is the book’s home page .  Here is the Amazon link .

I am very sympathetic with Dean Spears and Michael Geruso, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People .

4. Rupert Gavin, Amorous or Loving?: The Highly Peculiar Tale of English and the English .  An excellent book that will make my best of the year list.  How did the English language come to be so diverse and also have so many words?  Along the way you get decent insights into economic history, the importance of London, and the Straussian readings of Macbeth.

3. Ned Palmer, A Cheesemonger’s Tour de France .  About half of this book is good and focused.  Think of it as one possible introduction to French regional history.  You can learn why Provence is so special for goat cheese, and why Dijon has kept so many original agricultural and cheese-making traditions.  Why cheese comes from Brittany only in recent times, and so on.

2. Christopher Clarey, The Warrior: Rafael Nadal and His Kingdom of Clay .  An intelligent and very good book, covering one of the greatest eras (Federer-Nadal-Djokovic) that any sport ever has had.