What I’ve been reading

Benjamin Nathans, To The Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement.  The definitive book on its topic, consisting largely of profiles of dissidents.  The title is taken from a longstanding dissident toast, and yet they won eventually, sort of.  So your cause isn’t hopeless either.

Scott Hodge, Taxocracy: What You Don’t Know About Taxes & How They Rule Your Daily Life.  An excellent short book on the power of tax incentives, written by the former head of the National Tax Foundation.  Incentives matter!

Alex Christofi has written Cypria: A Journey to the Heart of the Mediterranean, which is the book I will take to Cyprus when I go there.

Randy Barnett, A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist, is a 616 pp. well-written memoir of a prominent libertarian legal theorist.

Gregory Makoff, Default: The Landmark Court Battle over Argentina’s $100 Billion Debt Restructuring.  This is both a good book on how the law handles sovereign defaults and useful background to what Milei is trying to undo in Argentina.

I’ve also been reading a cluster of books on the history of the transgender movement.  I don’t have a single go-to book to recommend, but you could start with Weininger and Magnus Hirschfeld, who are also interesting representatives of Austro-Hungarian and Germanic culture in the early twentieth century.  Overall, I am surprised how many of the key books are out of print, selling used for high prices on Amazon.