Recently Mentioned Books

Margaret C. Jacob, The Secular Enlightenment , again delivers good coverage of what the title promises.

Sophus A. Reinert, The Academy of Fisticuffs: Political Economy and Commercial Society in Enlightenment Italy , is the best English-language book I know of on the Italian Enlightenment.  Everything you wanted to know about Pietro Verri but were afraid to ask.

David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming .  The title aside, a very good and very well-written book on the basics of climate change.

Alexandra Popoff, Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century covers what the title promises.

Much Christian doctrine, and especially Catholicism, emphasizes the value of confession, forgiveness and redemption. Thus it is not hard to convince many Americans that sinners should be given a second chance. This impulse occasionally finds its way into policy; just last month, a prison-reform bill became law , reflecting notions that criminals can indeed be rehabilitated. In her book “ The Up Side of Down ,” Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle stresses how many features of American life, i...

They are my colleagues, and both are economic historians, and they have an important forthcoming book Persecution and Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom .  I will be doing a Conversation with them.

That is all from Walter Licht, Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century .

That is all from Walter A. McDougall, Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877 , p.60.

Noteworthy is Kieran Healy, Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction .  I have not read it, but had positive impressions from my paw-through.

4. Colin M. Waugh, Paul Kagame and Rwanda: Genocide and the Rwandan Patriotic Front .  This is perhaps the most conceptual book I know on the Rwandan genocide, most of all because it ties the killings to both prior and posterior events very well.  Recommended, but (for better or worse) note the author is relatively sympathetic to Kagame in the post-conflict period.  I did just buy Waugh’s book on Charles Taylor and Liberia , which you can take as a credible endorsement of this one.

3. Timothy Larsen, The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith .  On the surface this is an account of various famous British anthropologists and their views toward Christianity.  At a deeper level it contrasts the anthropological and religious approaches to understanding society.  Why do so many anthropologists have more tolerant attitudes toward the religions they study than to Christianity?  Do the Christian beliefs of an anthropologist help or hurt that individual’s understanding ...

2. Amina M. Derbi, The Storyteller and the Terrorist in Our Newsfeeds .  In this novella a Muslim girl in Northern Virginia posts stories of murders on-line and those murders start coming true.  I finished this one too.  Unusual in its approach.

1. Elaine Dundy, Life Itself . She as a teen taught Mondrian how to jitterbug, married Kenneth Tynan and moved into London high society, became an important writer in her own right, and got tired of him wanting to whip her.  I was never inclined to stop reading.

3. Blockchain for Babies, new book .

Joel Waldfogel, Digital Renaissance: What Data and Economics Tell Us about the Future of Popular Culture .  My blurb is: “Digital Renaissance makes a real contribution to the economics of the Internet and the economics of art and culture.”

Vernon Smith, The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Reflections on Faith, Science, and Economics .  Published by the Acton Institute, this is Vernon on his conversion to Christianity, Kahlil Gibran, and why science and religion are compatible.  Short, of interest to those looking to understand the man.

Marixa Lasso, Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal , stresses just how interesting a place was pre-canal Panama, contrary to what I had thought.

James Simpson, Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism , feels throughout as if it is an important book.  And anyone interested in religion and development should read this one.  Yet I had trouble following the actual arguments.  It is probably good.

Andrew Arsan, Lebanon: A Country in Fragments .  At first this book feels like a kind of running splat, but with a bit of patience it becomes a remarkably compelling portrait of a society on the brink, most of all a desperate love letter to Beirut.  If you can get through the squirrelly early political material, this is one of the best “country books” and also “city books” of the last few years.

Leo Damrosch, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends who Shaped an Age .  The same 18th century British club had as members Samuel Johnson, Boswell, Burke, Gibbon, Adam Smith, Joshua Reynolds, Sheridan, Goldsmith, and David Garrick (often considered the greatest actor of the time).  I never tire of reading about them.

3. The new Robert Caro book out in April .

That is from the forthcoming book — quite interesting — by Christopher J. Phillips. Not surprisingly, this book also discusses “scouting the scout.”

You can buy the book here , vol.II is good too .

I learned a great deal from this stimulating and highly unorthodox biography .  Here are a few points from the book:

That is from his November 1866 letter to Hippolyte Taine, reproduced in the Francis Steegmuller collection .  Here is my recent post on why most travel books are not good enough.  Here is a 2006 MR post on which are the best travel books .