Results for “what I've been reading”
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What I’ve been reading

Christopher Phillips, Battle Ground: Ten Conflicts that Explain the New Middle East.  A good, “simple enough” introduction to the wars going on in Syria, Yemen, and other parts of the Middle East.  If you are worried you will hate, you can just skip the Palestine chapter.

Catherine Pakaluk, Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth.  About five percent of American women end up having five children or more — what do you learn by talking to them?  (“Which one should I give back?”)  The author herself has eight children.

Beth Linker, Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America.  For a long time I’ve been thinking there should be a good book on this topic, and now there is one.  Both fun and interesting.

Maxwell Stearns, Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing our Broken Democracy argues for proportional representation and accompanying reforms.  Putting aside whether this ever can happen, I am never quite sure how this is supposed to work when nuclear weapons use is such a live issue.

Ethan Mollick is the best and most thorough Twitter commentator on LLMs, he now has a forthcoming book Co-Intelligence.

Andrew Leigh, an Australian MP and also economist, has published The Shortest History of Economics, recommended by Claudia Goldin.

What I’ve been reading

1. Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up.  I agree with many of the anti-therapy arguments in this book, but still I feel that “bad therapy” is a second-order phenomenon, not the initial cause of the growing mental health problems of America’s young people.  Furthermore, the analysis (much like Jon Haidt’s recent work) should be more tightly framed in the context of the “most interventions really don’t matter that much” results in social science at the very general level.

2. Adam Shatz, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Life of Frantz Fanon.  Well-written and well-organized, this checks all the boxes for what I would want from a Fanon biography.  Here is an Adam Shatz NYT Op-Ed on Fanon.

3. Nabila Ramdani, Fixing France: How to Repair a Broken Republic.  What is wrong with France, from a French-Algerian point of view.  The book is full of substance, and there aren’t enough “stand alone books on countries,” so this is a good one whether or not you agree with all of the observations.

4. Michael Bliss, The Discovery of Insulin.  “Tassting the urine was the doctors’ original test for diabetes.”  An excellent biomedical history, noting that the key breakthrough came in Toronto in the 1920s.

And the AEI Press has reprinted the 1951 Edward Banfield classic Government Project.

Rainer Zitelmann has a new book out How Nations Escape Poverty: Vietnam, Poland, and the Origins of Prosperity.

Lewis E. Lehrman has published his autobiography The Sum of It All.  He was one of the important figures behind the Reagan Revolution, in addition to his longstanding presence amongst New York elites.

What I’ve been reading

1. Hannah Ritchie, Not the End of the World: How We Can be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet.  An excellent book with sound conclusions, think of it as moderate Julian Simon-like optimism on environmental issues, but with left-coded rhetoric.

2. Colin Elliott, Pox Romana: The Plague that Shook the Roman World.  Think of this as a sequel to Kyle Harper’s tract on Roman plagues and their political import, this look at the Antonine plague and its impact has both good history and good economics.  It is also highly readable.

3. Carrie Sheffield, Motorhome Prophecies: A Journey of Healing and Forgiveness.  A highly effective and harrowing tale of a lifetime journey from abuse to Christianity: “Carrie attended 17 public schools and homeschool, all while performing classical music on the streets and passing out fire-and-insurance religious pamphlets — at times while child custody workers loomed.”  The author is well known in finance, ex-LDS circles, public policy, and right-leaning media, and she has a Master’s from Harvard.  This story isn’t over.

4. Charles Freeman, The Children of Athena: Greek Intellectuals in the Age of Rome: 150 BC0-400 AD.  Avery good guide to the intellectual life surround the period of the Pompeii library scrolls that will be deciphered by AI.  If you want background on the import of what is to come, this book is a good place to start.  And it is a good and useful work more generally.

5. Erin Accampo Hern, Explaining Successes in Africa: Things Don’t Always Fall Apart.  I found this book highly readable and instructive, but I find it more convincing if you reverse the central conclusion.  There is too much talk of the Seychelles and Mauritius, and is Gabon the big success story on the Continent?  Population is 2.3 million, the country ranks 112th in the Human Development Index, and almost half the government budget is oil revenue.  Still, this book “tells you how things actually are,” and that is more important than any objections one might lodge.

Recent and noteworthy is Peter Jackson, From Genghis Khan to Tamerlane: The Reawakening of Mongol Asia.  You may recall that the Mongol empire at its peak was much larger than the Roman empire at its peak, but how many young men think about it every day?

Then there is Jian Chen’s Zhou Enlai: A Life, which seems like a major achievement.  I’ve only had time to read small amounts of it…is it “too soon to tell”?  I say no!

What I’ve been reading

1. Steve Kaczynski and Scott Duke Kominers, The Everything Token: How NFTs and Web3 Will Transform the Way We Buy, Sell, and Create.  Could the be the best book on NFTs?  I think we should be genuinely uncertain as to whether NFTs have a future.  In the meantime, I consider NFTs a good Rorschach test for whether an individual’s mind is capable of moving out of “the dismissive mode.”  Do you pass or fail this test?  The “snide, sniping” mode is so hard for many commentators to resist…

2. Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art, edited by Susan Owens and Nicholas Tromans.  Excellent text and also color plates, including paintings and sketches of her, a very good introduction to her work.  Here is a good bit: “Rarely, if ever, has a major poet grown up so deeply embedded in an avant-garde visual culture.  Yet she seems actively to have resisted the lure of the world of images, preferring to live and write, as Bell liked to think she did spontaneously, out of her own mind.”  A wonderful chronicle of a very particular time, artistic and otherwise.

3. Peter Cowie, God and the Devil: The Life and Work of Ingmar Bergman.  The author knew Bergman, and early on, so this is a useful biography in several regards, most of all for some background information and TV and theatre projects that never came to fruition.  But it is not useful for converting the unconverted, nor does it have much more interpretative meat for the in-the-know obsessives.

4. Richard Whatmore, The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis.  One of my favorite books on the British Enlightenment.  For instance, the author captures the tenor of 18th century British debates about liberty very well.  Very good chapters on Hume, Shelburne, and Macaulay.  Whatmore somehow writes as if he is actually trying to explain things to you!  If you read a lot of history books, you will know that is oddly rare.  Recommended, for all those who care.

5. Anthony Kaldellis, The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium. So far I’ve read only 22 pp. of this one, and it clocks in at 900 pp. plus.  It is obviously excellent and I wanted to tell you about it right away.  I expect it to make the top few picks of the best non-fiction of 2024.  The author’s main theme is that Byzantium built a “New Roman Empire,” and he details how that happened.  The writing is also clear and transparent, for a time period that is not always easy to understand.

William Magnuson, For Profit: A History of Corporations is not a book for me, but it is a good and sane introduction for those seeking that.

What I’ve been reading

Rob Henderson, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.  Yes, that is the Rob Henderson of Twitter and Substack.  He was raised by foster parents and joined the Air Force at the age of seventeen.  He ended up with a Ph.D. from Cambridge.  This is his story, it covers class in America, and it is a paean to family stability.

There Were Giants in the Land: Episodes in the Life of W. Cleon Skousen.  Compiled and edited by Jo Ann and Mark Skousen.  If you are interested in LDS, one approach is to read The Book of Mormon.  Another option is to read a book like this one.  It is also, coming from a very different direction, a paean to family stability.

Thomas Bell, Kathmandu.  There should be more books about individual cities, and this is one of them, one of the best in fact.  Excerpt: “At its most local levels, of the neighbourhood, or the individual house, Kathmandu is ordered by religious concepts, either around holy stones, or divinely sanctioned carpentry and bricklaying techniques.  The same is true of the city as a whole.”  And how do they still have so many Maoists?

Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala & English Poetry from Sri Lanka and its Diasporas, edited by Vidyan Ravinthiran, Seni Seneviratne, and Shash Trevett.  A truly excellent collection, worthy of making the best non-fiction of 2023 list.  Or does this count as fiction?  It’s mostly about things that happened.

Eric H. Cline, After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations.  A good sequel to the very good 1177 B.C.

Allison Pugh, The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World accurately diagnosing networking as a skill that will rise significantly in value in a tech-laden world.

Dorian Bandy, Mozart The Performer: Variations on the Showman’s Art shows how Mozart, first and foremost, was a showman and that background shaped his subsequent output and career.

What I’ve been reading

1. Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel’s Battle for its Inner Soul.  An interesting look at Israeli society on the eve of the current war.

2. Robert Darnton, The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789.  Perhaps my expectations were too high with this one.  I don’t see anything wrong with it, and it is beautifully written.  But somehow it didn’t add much to my picture of those events, given I have read many other Darnton books.

3. Hawon Jung, Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea’s Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women’s Rights Worldwide.  A good and sobering look at one side of Korean culture.  This is also (I hope) an especially effective book to hand to anti-feminist types, since the examples are not coded to standard left-wing vs. right wing American disputes.

4. Evan Thomas, Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II.  The real topic of this book is the decision to use the atomic bomb twice against Japan.  Riveting, and provides plenty of detail on the Japanese side, even if some of the interpretative choices are controversial.  The author also makes a good point about ending the war sooner, namely it saved a large number of Southeast Asian lives, arguably about 250,000 a month, due to the tyrannical Japanese occupation.

5. Paul Vallely, Philanthropy: from Aristotle to Zuckerberg.  Too much of this book is interior to my knowledge set, but for many people this is an excellent overview.  743 pp. of text, and it is pretty comprehensive.

6. Henrik Berggren and Lars Trägårdh, The Swedish Theory of Love: Individualism and Social Trust in Modern Sweden.  A fascinating book about how the Swedes pursue a kind of “statist individualism,” namely that they value personal independence very highly, and are happy to use state action to pursue that kind of freedom.  They don’t like being so obligated to help each other, thus enter a large welfare state.

As for a useful, and well-written text, there is Karol J. Borowiecki, Charles M. Gray, and James Heilbrun, The Economics of Art and Culture, now in its third edition.

What I’ve been reading

1. Dan Sinykin, Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature.  An excellent history of U.S. trade publishing, and not the sort of anti-capitalist mentality snark you might be expecting from the title.  Recommended, for those who care.

2. Richard Cockett, Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World.  It’s not the same kind of deep explanation as Toulmin or Schorske, nonetheless an excellent survey and introduction to the miracles of Viennese science, philosophy, and culture, earlier in the 20th century.  I enjoyed this very much.

3. Peter Kemp, Retroland: A Reader’s Guide to the Dazzling Diversity of Modern Fiction.  Is this an actual book, or just some smart guy running off at the mouth and writing what he really thinks?  Would I prefer the former?  No!

4. Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.  It is getting harder and harder to find good popular science books, due to exhaustion of the major topics, but this is one of them.  I kept on seeing reviews of this book, and not buying it due to fears of pandering.  But most of this book is genuinely illuminating and on a wide range of biological topics, most of all how the female body is different.  Ovaries, menopause, differences in brains — you’ll find it all here.  Furthermore, the book does not drown in political correctness.  Recommended.

5. Larry Rohter, Into the Amazon: The Life of Cândido Rondon, Trailblazing Explorer, Scientist, Statesman, and Conservationist.  I loved this book, in part because I like Brazil so much but not only.  Rondon, arguably the greatest tropical explorer of all time, played a central role in the development of northern Brazil.  He laid down a 1,200 mile telegraph line in the Amazon, at the time considered one of the world’s greatest achievements (radio telegraphy made this obsolete, however).  He was Teddie Roosevelt’s guide for two years, published over one hundred papers, and advocated rationalism, tolerance, and a Comtean version of progress.  Rondon’s indigenous background has made him a hero of another sort as well.  Recommended.

Note also that Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence is coming out in April, likely to be very good.  I haven’t seen it yet.

What I’ve been reading

1. Eric Ambler, The Night-Comers.  (U.S. editions are sometimes titled State of Siege.)  Think of Ambler as a precursor of Le Carré.  I used to think he had one or two excellent works, now I am realizing his ouevre is much deeper than I had imagined.  Just long enough at 158 pp., this novel uses the Sundanese setting very well.  He was a favorite of Graham Greene’s, and I will read yet more by him.

2. Lydia Davis, Our Strangers, not on Amazon try these sources.  Very very short fiction, sometimes as short as a single paragraph.  With some periodic non-fiction (or is it?) thrown in.  The best pieces are excellent, and many of the others are at least interesting.  Here is my earlier CWT with Lydia Davis, I am a fan.

3. Alexandra Hudson, The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves.  Highly intelligent, and today much needed.  Her opening sentence is: “Did you know there are at least four women named Judith who are internationally renowned experts on manners?”  I would say that Alexandra is one of my “dark horse” picks to become a leading classical liberal influencer, except maybe she isn’t a dark horse any more.

4. Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories.  An extremely well-written, and also useful history of the opium trade, albeit with more than its fair share of left-wing jargon.  And yes that is the novelist Ghosh.  Due out in February.

The other books I’ve been reading I haven’t so much liked.

What I’ve been reading

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.  Have you ever been confused by Naomi Klein vs. Naomi Wolf?  Intellectually they are both pretty crazy.  And they are both named Naomi.  Some might think they bear some resemblance to each other.  Well, here is a whole book on that confusion!  And it is written by Naomi Klein.  How much insight and self-awareness can one intellectually crazy person have about being confused for another intellectually crazy person?  Quite a bit, it turns out.  Recommended, though with the provision that I understand you never felt you needed to read a whole book about such a topic.

Benjamin Labutut, The Maniac.  Chilean author, he has penned the story of von Neumann but in the latter part of the book switches to contemporary AI and AlphaGO, semi-fictionalized.  Feels vital and not tired, mostly pretty good, thoiiugh for some MR readers the material may be excessively familiar.

J.M. Coetzee, The Pole.  Short, compelling, self-contained, again deals with older men who have not resolved their issues concerning sex.   Good but not great Coetzee.

Gary S. Becker, The Economic Approach: Unpublished Writings of Gary S. Becker.  I am honored to have blurbed this book.

Richard Campanella, Bienville’s Dilemma: A Historical Geography of New Orleans is one mighty fine book.

Shuchen Xiang, Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea.  Chinese cosmopolitanism, there was more of it than you might have thought.  Should we be asking “Where did it go?”  Or is it there more than ever?

What I’ve been reading, new books sent my way

Cara Fitzpatrick, The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America, is quite a good and also objective book.

Florian Illies, Love in a Time of Hate: Art and Passion in the Shadow of War.  Take the top Continental artists and thinkers of the 1920s, and write a book about their affairs, and this is what you get.

Paul Lendvai, Austria Behind the Mask: Politics of a Nation since 1945 is quite good.

Colleen P. Eren, Reform Nation: The First Step Act and the Movement to End Mass Incarceration, is a good and useful history of the recent criminal justice reform movement.

There is Angus Deaton, Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality.

David Leonhardt is soon publishing Ours Was the Shining Future: The Rise and Fall of the American Dream.

Geoffrey M. Hodgson, The Wealth of a Nation: Institutional Foundations of English Capitalism, is a useful neo-institutionalist survey of some of the different factors behind the rise of England.

There is Shane Parrish, Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results.

What I’ve been reading

R.C. Zaehner, Concordant Discord: The Interdependence of Faiths Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at St. Andrews in 1967-1969.  Half of this volume is amazing, the other half meandering.  The best parts are on Hinduism and Buddhism, and how they can best be understood in relation to Western religions.  Zaehner has an amazing Wikipeda page, and I have ordered other books by him, the ultimate act of literary flattery.

James Stafford, The Case of Ireland: Commerce, Empire and the European Order, 1750-1848.  An excellent and well-researched books, most interesting on the Irish Union of 1800-1801 and how and why so many classical liberals favored it.  What did they get wrong?  Or did they?  Consistently instructive on earlier Irish thought on trade as well.

Victoria Houseman, American Classicist: The Life and Loves of Edith Hamilton.  A good and fun book.  I hadn’t known that she was very likely bisexual, or that she was good friends with Felix Morley and Robert Taft.  Interesting throughout, and drives home the point about just how early Hamilton did her most important work on mythology.  It remains widely read today.

Harvey Sachs, Schoenberg: Why He Matters.  A very good introduction to a composer who truly matters.  Also a good (short) portrait of Vienna at that time.  Maybe it won’t “sell you” on Schoenberg, but it will make his advocates (I am one of them) seem far less crazy.  It also admits that a lot of his work wasn’t that good, and helps you separate the better from the worse.

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.  This book in preprint form was well ahead of its time, and now it is coming out in a super-timely fashion.

Lorraine Byrne Bodley, Schubert: A Musical Wayfarer.  Super-thorough, everything about Schubert and most of all his music.

I have not read the new novel by Bradley Tusk, namely Obvious in Hindsight, about the attempted introduction of flying cars and the regulatory obstacles that arose (among other dramatic events).

Lunana, A Yak in the Classroom is the only and also the best Bhutanese movie I have seen, ever.  Recommended, gives you a real look at the country, both rural and urban [sic].

What I’ve been reading

Maria Blanco and Alberto Mingardi have produced a very useful volume, Show and Biz: The Market Economy in TV Series and Popular Culture (2000-2020), providing an updated look at the (somewhat) rising popularity of business and capitalism in U.S. popular culture.

David O’Brien, Exiled in Modernity: Delacroix, Civilization, and Barbarism.  A very good book planting Eugene Delacroix — both his paintings and writings — squarely in a “progress studies” tradition.  Like so much other 19th (and also 18th) century art.  Good color plates too.

Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women.  Do you judge books by their degree of insight, or based on whether you agree with where they end up?  This volume is a litmus test for that question, and I give it either an A or an F minus, depending on your standard.  In my view, Dworkin remains an underrated and intellectually honest (if overly consistent) feminist thinker.  This one is from 1978, still interesting albeit repulsive if you try to apply any moral judgment to it.  But don’t!  If you are looking for reductios in support of reactionary points of view, this is the best place to start.  Better yet is to drop all the consistency requirements and end up somewhere in between.

Simon Shorvon, The Idea of Epilepsy: A Medical and Social History of Epilepsy in the Modern Era (1860-2020).  A remarkably thorough and intelligent treatment of a topic that now has a near-perfect stand-alone book.

There is Alan S. Kahan, Freedom from Fear: An Incomplete History of Liberalism.

And Michael J. Bonner, In Defense of Civilization: How Our Past Can Renew Our Present.

Vikash Yadav, Liberalism’s Last Man: Hayek in the Age of Political Capitalism.

Seth D. Kaplan, Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time, forthcoming in October.

What I’ve been reading

Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849.  The new go-to book on this topic, magisterial on the lead-up causes and later on the international influences and contagions.  Will make the year’s best non-fiction list.

Fearghal Cochrane, Belfast: The Story of a City and its People.  A wonderful book on this most underrated city, the best overall general introduction to Belfast.

Rory Naismith, Making Money in the Early Middle Ages is a historically important work about the significant of coined money in dragging the Western world out of the Dark Ages.

Florian Illies, 1913:The Year Before the Storm, considers what the leading German and Austro-Hungarian cultural figures were doing in that year, right before disaster struck.

Matthew Barrett, The Reformation as Renewal: Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.  A lengthy and highly detailed polemic arguing that Protestantism is the true universal church, rather than a dissent per se.  These are not my issues, but some people will like this book a good deal.

I can recommend Maurizio Isabella, Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions, mostly about the 1820s.

Tara Isabella Burton, Self Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians is an interesting look at the earlier history of self-made celebrity images.

Anupam B. Jena and Christopher Worsham, Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces that Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health, is a Freakonomics-style look at what we can learn from controlled and also natural experiments in medicine.

Soon to appear is Yasheng Huang’s The Rise and Fall of the East: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline.  Here is my earlier CWT with Yasheng Huang.

I will not right now have time to read Wang Hui, The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, but it appears to be a major work of importance.

What I’ve been reading

Bjorn Lomborg’s Best Things First delivers the expected dose of correct common sense.

Charles Horsnby, Kenya, A History since Independence is a very good long treatment of everything up to about 2010, conceptual too.

David Schleicher, In a Bad State: Responding to State and Local Budget Crises.  An important, unfortunately timely, and very intelligent book on how the federal government has responded to state and local insolvency in the past.  My main complaint is that at 171 pp. of text it is far too short.

Norman Lebrecht, Why Beethoven: A Phenomenon in One Hundred Pieces.  A good introduction to Ludwig van, even if some parts do rush by too quickly.  Also a good introduction for how to think about different recorded versions of the same piece.

There is Markus K. Brunnermeier and Ricardo Reis, A Crash Course on Crises: Macroeconomic Concepts for Run-ups, Collapses, and Recoveries.

And also Angus Deaton, Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality.

Kelly Smith offers his account of Prenda micro-schools in his A Fire to Be Kindled: How a Generation of Empowered Learners Can Lead Meaningful Lives and Move Humanity Forward.

Patrick Mackie, Mozart in Motion: His Work and his World in Pieces is a good introduction to what the title promises.

What I’ve been reading and not having time to read

Marcel Proust, The Seventy-Five Folios & Other Unpublished Manuscripts.  Early drafts of In Search of Lost Time, fragments, but still of interest to Proust lovers.

Claire Hughes Johnson, Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building is that rare thing — a good and also useful management book.  She was COO at Stripe, this is a Stripe Press title, and I was happy to see it make the WSJ bestseller list.

Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?  The authors are skeptical on the actual settlement of space, and so am I, so I am glad this book exists.  I hope somebody proves them wrong, but that is not my bet.

Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas, Welfare for Markets: A Global History of Basic Income, is a good history of ideas on the basic concept.

Geoff Johns and Gary Frank, Superman Brainiac, Superman wins, but is that plausible?  Yes.  The writers note there is too much that Brainiac cannot control, most of all on Earth.

Peter Attia, with Bill Gifford, has now published Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity.

I have only browsed Philip J. Stern, Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations that Built British Colonialism, but it seems to be a very good and serious treatment of its chosen topics.

Lionel Page, Optimally Irrational: The Good Reasons We Behave the Way We Do, argues that many behavioral “imperfections” in economics are in fact rational in a broader perspective.

Simone and Malcolm Collins, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion, the authors lay out what their version of a pro-natalist world and philosophy would have to look like.

There is Shanker A. Singham and Alden F. Abbott, Trade, Competition and Domestic Regulatory Policy: Trade Liberalisation, Competitive Markets and Property Rights Protection.

I will not have time to read Chris Wickham’s massive tome The Donkey & the Boat: Reinterpreting the Mediterranean Economy, 950-1180, but surely it is worthy of note and it appears to be a major achievement.

And Is Social Justice Just?, edited by Robert M. Whaples, Michael C. Munger, and Christopher J. Coyne.