Recently Mentioned Books

That is from the very good book by William J. Cooper, The Lost Founding Father: John Quincy Adams and the Transformation of American Politics .

This was two and a half hours (!), and it is a special bonus episode in Conversations in Tyler, here is the text and audio .  The starting base of the discussion was my new, just today published book Stubborn Attachments: A Vision of a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals , but of course we ranged far and wide.  Here are a few excerpts:

Tomorrow is publication date for the book, you can order here , and here is some background on Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals .

From Maxim Gorky’s My Universities :

By Martin Gurri, due out November 13 .  I am reading this splendid book for the first time.  It basically explains why Brexit and Trump won, and what will happen next.  Due to social media, we are disillusioned with our elites, and that will prove hard to reverse.

That is all from the new book by Jay Sexton, A Nation Forged by Crisis: A New American History .

Possibly the shorter news cycles are also a result of greater general disillusionment with politics and especially with elites, a theme outlined in Martin Gurri’s forthcoming book “The Revolt of the Public.” The really fun stuff might instead be watching mixed martial arts, debating social norms about gender and browsing the Instagram feeds of your friends.

2. Next week: Ben Sasse has a new book out: Them: Why We Hate Each Other — And How to Heal .

3. My Spellbound podcast with Julian Smith .  Partly about Stubborn Attachments .

2. New volume of Camille Paglia collected essays to appear .

Overall I view bad pieces in the humanities as a potential profit opportunity, rather than something to just whine about.  You don’t like those troll-published pieces? Get to work !

4. Thomas J. Bollyky, Plagues and the Paradox of Progress: Why the World is Getting Healthier in Worrisome Ways is a good history of public health advances, but also how they have led to what are now plague-prone poor megacities.  Here is the author’s piece in Foreign Affairs .

3. Can Xue, Love in the New Millennium .  Is she the Chinese writer most likely to next win a Nobel Prize?  “In this darkly comic novel, a group of women inhabits a world of constant surveillance, where informants lurk in the flowerbeds and false reports fly.”  Much of the story is set in a brothel, with a rotating cast of characters.  Parts remind me of The Dream of the Red Chamber, in any case this is definitely a new fictional work of note.  Here is an atypical excerpt: “He and Xiao Yuan had ...

2. James Mustich, 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die: A Life-Changing List .  Paging through this book, from beginning to end, or just browsing it, and buying the attractive-sounding titles is in fact a good (but expensive) way to find new reading.  I see no reason why such volumes should be regarded as absurd.  Right now I am on “Bradley,” and while I don’t agree with all of the selections, they are unfailingly intelligent and at least plausible.

1. Nate Chinen, Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century .  Chinen mounts a persuasive argument that the “golden age of jazz” is in fact today, and fills in the background knowledge you might need to grasp such a claim.  I’ve long suggested that if you enjoy live performance, the access/price/talent gradient is truly remarkable.  You can see virtually any world class performer, from an A+ quality seat, for a mere pittance. Except in London .  The bottom line is that I will keep this book, hardl...

That is from the new and highly useful and still under-discussed book The Wealth of a Nation: A History of Trade Politics in America , by C. Donald Johnson, Oxford University Press.  I am happy to second Doug Irwin’s blurb: “This splendid book covers the politics of American trade policy from the country’s beginnings through Trump.  Johnson provides a great overview of a fascinating subject.”

That is from Peter Doggett’s excellent You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup .

TC again : For further detail, I refer you to Glen’s book with Eric Posner .  For background, here are my earlier posts on their work .

By M. Mitchell Waldrop .  Not only is the content essential, but it is one of the most beautiful books, as a physical object, I have seen in years.  From Stripe Press .

You can buy the work here , and I’ve since ordered one of Sebastian’s novels .  Here is a NYT review .

Notable is Stephen L. Carter’s new biography of his grandmother, Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster .

Dean Keith Simonton, The Genius Checklist: Nine Paradoxical Tips on How You! Can Become a Creative Genius , is a popularization of some of his earlier research on genius and creative achievement.

Helene Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century , presents liberals as moralists and debunks the notion of liberalism as so exclusively an Anglo-American phenomenon.

5. Roger Scruton, Music as an Art .  The chapter on Schubert is the highlight, and perhaps the best explanation of that composer’s beauty and importance.  The book is otherwise high variance, with the remarks on morals and aesthetic philosophy much weaker.  At times he pops open an insight when it is least expected, such as on heavy metal music: “In the realm of pop they were the modernists, undergoing in their own way that revolution against kitsch and cliche that had set Schoenberg and Adorno ...

4. Jeffrey D. Sachs, A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism .  This book is somewhat less radical than I had been expecting, mostly concentrating on the potential gains from multilateralism, international cooperation, and international law.  Or is that the truly radical view?