Recently Mentioned Books

5. John Steinbeck, East of Eden .  At first I enjoyed this one, but after a while I grew bored.  If it came out today, by John Anonymous, how many people would think it was a great book?  (“Most of those who wrote the Amazon reviews” you might reply.  Maybe, but what other current books do they like?  Barbara Kingsolver?)  If Sally Rooney’s Normal People , or some time-synched version thereof, came out in the 1920s or 30s, how many today would claim it is an absolute masterpiece?  I am happy to ...

4. Chester Himes, If He Hollers, Let Him Go .  Pretty brutal actually, a kind of pre-integration African-American noir, dating from 1945.  People should still read this one.

3. James Walvin, Freedom: The Overthrow of the Slave Empires .  Perhaps not original, but a highly readable and very much conceptual overview of how the slave trade developed and was then overthrown.  Recommended.

2. Alev Scott, Ottoman Odyssey: Travels Through a Lost Empire .  Imagine setting off to write a book about Turkey, finding your access shut down, and then coming up with what is probably an even better travelogue about the former fringes of the Ottoman Empire.  I will buy the author’s next book.

1. Michael H. Kater, Culture in Nazi Germany .  The best general introduction to this still-important topic.

There is much more at the link, hearkening back to my earlier book Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Cultures .

That is from Kwame Anthony Appiah, Lines of Descent: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity .

Every page of this book is interesting, and so I am going to recommend it.  Here is a Kirkus Review , otherwise MSM doesn’t seem to be touching this one at all.  Here is the Amazon link , 79 reviews and an average of five stars.  The reviews themselves are not entirely reassuring.

That is the new and very interesting forthcoming book by Janek Wasserman , focusing on the history of the Austrian school of economics and due out in September.  A few comments:

That is the new book by David Epstein , the author of the excellent The Sports Gene.  I sometimes say that generalists are the most specialized people of them all, so specialized they can’t in fact do anything.  Except make observations of that nature.  Excerpt:

Obviously the law can deter potential illegal migrants from entering the U.S. But so can the high cost of living. Even though there are much higher wages in the U.S. than in its neighbors to the South, a lot of those higher wages are eaten up by much higher rents — especially if the immigrant moves to a major city, as is often the case. I once wrote a book based on fieldwork in rural Mexico, and I found that, for those who had migrated temporarily to the U.S., high rent was typically their bigge...

Those are all from Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie’s Rebellious Passage: The Creole Revolt and America’s Coastal Slave Trade .

I am doing a Conversation with him, no associated public event.  I am a big fan of his book WhiteShift (perhaps the best book of the year so far?), here is my review .  Here is Wikipedia on Eric :

John Quiggin, Economics in Two Lessons: Why Markets Work So Well, and Why They Can Fail So Badly .  The third lesson, however, is government failure, and you won’t find much about that here.  Still, I found this to be a well-done book rather than a polemic.  Here is the introduction on-line .

Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite .  Remember how I used to say “The only thing worse than the Very Serious People are the Not Very Serious People?”  Well, you should have listened.  I have the same fear with the current critiques of meritocracy.  That said, this is the book that does the most to pile on, against meritocracy, noting that much less space is devoted to possible solutions.  Th...

I enjoyed Eric Foner, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution .

Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century , covers Boas, Mead, Benedict, and others.  Not enough of the material was new to me, though I expect for many readers this is quite a useful book.

6. Paul Rabinow, Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology .  PCR is the polymerase chain reaction, and this is a genuinely good anthropological study of how scientific progress comes about, noting there is plenty of lunacy in this story, including love, LSD, and much more.  There should be more books like this, this one dates from the 1990s but I am still hoping more people copy it.  Via Ray Lopez.

5. Kirk Goldsberry, Sprawlball: A Visual Tour of the New Era of the NBA .  A highly analytical but also entertaining look at the rise of the three point shot, the history of Steph Curry, how LeBron James turned into such a good player, and much more, with wonderful visuals and graphics.

4. Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness, Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education .  Hard-hitting and courageous, and I can attest that much of it is absolutely on the mark.  Still, I did wish for a bit more of a comparative perspective.  Are universities more hypocritical than other institutions?  Might the non-signaling, learning rate of return on higher education still be positive and indeed considerable?  I am not nearly as negative as the authors are, while nonetheless fee...

3. Ethan Mordden, On Streisand: An Opinionated Guide .  Should there not be a fanboy book like this about every person of some renown?  Insightful and witty throughout, for instance: “…we comprehend Streisand from what she does — yet a few personal bits have jumped out at us through her wall of privacy.  One is the “Streisand Effect”…which we can restate as “When famous people complain about something, they tend to make it famous, too.”

2. Aysha Akhtar, Our Symphony with Animals: On Health, Empathy, and Our Shared Destinies .  An unusual mix of memoir, animal compassion, and childhood horrors, I found this very moving.

1. Robert W. Poole, Jr. Rethinking America’s Highways: A 21st Vision for Better Infrastructure .  Highways can and will get much better, largely through greater private sector involvement.  He is probably right, and there is much substance in this book.

Here is a Washington Post obituary .  Yes, he did write a bestselling tribute to Churchill, but more importantly he was one of the last representatives of a particular central European notion of history and culture.  I much prefer the Times of Israel obituary .  Here is Wikipedia . The Last European War and Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a City and its Culture are two of my favorite books by him.

That is my recent essay , adapted in Foreign Policy , from my new book Big Business: Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero .  Here is the opening: