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.