Recently Mentioned Books

Here is the Amazon link , you can pre-order for October 16.  Here is the Kindle link .  I will get you the Barnes and Noble link as soon as it is available.  The Stripe Press people have done a fantastic job with the cover and also with the production more generally, my commendations to them!

That is from Nancy Isenberg’s excellent Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr .  I also learned that Burr was the grandson of Jonathan Edwards, and that late in his life Burr spent time with Bentham, was intrigued by the Panopticon idea, and he may have influenced Bentham on suffrage

Charles Silver and David A. Hyman, Overcharged: Why Americans Pay Too Much for Health Care .  I find most books on this topic too painful to read, including this one, but it does appear to be comprehensive and the new go-to coverage on this topic.

5. Paula Fredriksen, When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation .  Yet another good social and intellectual history of the early, formative period of Christianity.

4. François Cusset , How the World Swung to the Right:Fifty Years of Counterrevolutions .  Full of generalizations and unsupported claims, but still a better guide to reality than most of what you will find from the other big think books.  An attempt at fresh thought, in pocket-sized form.

3. Devin Fergus, Land of the Fee: Hidden Costs and the Decline of the American Middle Class .  Not a balanced treatment, but a fact-rich and handy starting point for reading about this topic.  You won’t learn how many of those fees are efficiency-based, but you will go around asking the question more.

2. George Magnus, Red Flags: Why Xi’s China Is In Jeopardy .  The case for pessimism, based on all possible reasons.  Worth reading, but who knows?

1. Annie Lowrey, Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World .  A very good book, one of the hot books of the year, and much deeper and broader and balanced than the subtitle might imply.

That is from the quite good Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources, and Experts in the Second World War , by David Edgerton.

By the way, I have been enjoying my read of Robert L. Luddy’s Entrepreneurial Life: The Path from Startup to Market Leader .  Luddy is founder of Thales Academy, and the final chapter of his memoir covers his thoughts and praxis on education.

That is from Laura Seay at The Washington Post , drawing on work from the new Envy in Politics , by Gwyneth H. McClendon.  I have just ordered that book.

This is all from the very useful and readable book Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy , by James C. Mohr.

That is from David Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth Century .  Here are my previous posts on the book and on other work by Edgerton.

And that does not even get us to the main argument.  In the meantime, I would stress what a wonderful and splendid book is Francesca Lidia Viano’s Sentinel: The Unlikely Origins of the Statue of Liberty .  It is entirely gripping, and one of the must-read non-fiction books of this year.

Yes, I am continuing to read David Edgerton’s The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth Century History , and it is one of the must-read non-fiction books of this year.  Here are a few points I gleaned from my time spent with the book on the plane last evening:

All these points are from Jeremy J. Baumberg’s new and interesting The Secret Life of Science: How It Really Works and Why It Matters .

Joy Lisi Rankin, A People’s History of Computing in the United States appears to be interesting.  It tries to liberate the history of American computing from the usual emphasis on Silicon Valley, and offers greater focus on Dartmouth, Minnesota, and other less studied locales.

Cass R. Sunstein, The Cost-Benefit Revolution .  Not since the 1970s has cost-benefit analysis been as underrated as it is right now.

Laurence M. Ball, The Fed and Lehman Brothers: Setting the Record Straight on a Financial Disaster is a very serious and useful book.  The Fed could have saved Lehman Brothers and didn’t, partly because of political pressures, and partly because they underestimated the damage it would cause to the economy.  Ball documents what I have supposed from the time of the event.

3. Karl Ove Knausgaard, Inadvertent (Why I Write) .  92 short pp. on how he thinks about writing, consistently high in quality, the contrast between Kundera and Hamsun was my favorite part.

2. David Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth Century History .  I’m only on p.34, but this one is spectacular and I expect to read it closely all the way through.  You’ll probably hear about it more in future blog posts.  He takes on many myths about British postwar decline, for instance, arguing that British business actually did pretty well in the 1950s and 60s.  Right now it is out only in the UK, but the above link still will get you a copy.  Here is a good Colin K...

1. Gaël Faye, Small Country .  Short, readable, and emotionally complex, one of my favorite novels so far this year.  Think Burundi, spillover from genocide, descent into madness, and “the eyes of a child caught in the maelstrom of history.”  Toss in a bit of romance as well.

An earlier version of the work , with a different translation and less complete, was published in 1995.  By the way, here is the author’s Wikipedia page .

That is not blurb inflation.  Note that the book is long (734 pp. of stories), and the reading is slow, mostly because the narratives lack redundant information, not because they are clumsy or awkwardly written.  It also takes perhaps a few stories to get into the swing of things and figure out how the fictional yet not fictional universe works here.  But the content is entirely gripping, and full of social science.  You can buy it here .   A second volume from this translator will appear in 201...

That is all from p.1 of Christoph Mick’s study of L’viv .