What I’ve been reading

Terry Eagleton, Modernism: A Literature in Crisis.  The book is short, its quality unevenly distributed, and the subtitle misleading (plenty of it is not about literature).  It remains the case that Eagleton is one of the people who knows enough that he is almost always worth reading.

Jonathan Healey, The Blood in Winter: England on the Brink of Civil War, 1642.  What I found so compelling about this book was the step-by-step narrative of how the whole thing collapsed into very direct conflict and then an execution.  Recommended.

Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity.  I’m not the sort of person to recommend these sorts of anti-tech books (they are a dime a dozen), but if you have to read one of them…this is maybe the most coherent, non-ridiculous, and philosophically oriented, in the good sense of course?

David Nasaw, The Wounded Generaton: Coming Home After World War II.  A good book showing just how much post-traumatic stress disorder there was during and after WWII.

Marc S. Ryan, The Healthcare Labyrinth: A Guide to Navigating Health Plans and Fixing American Health Insurance is a very good and balanced book on the economics of health care.

Benjamin Schneider, The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City-Building Revolution.  How do we make urban transformation succeed in America’s largest and most important cities?  What are the main obstacles to such success?  Schneider calls for resurrecting the “lost art of city-building” to achieve abundant housing, good public transit, and streets for people instead of cars.

Helen Vendler, Inhabit the Poem: Last Essays.  She wrote these for Leon Wieseltier’s magazine, and they are now collected after her passing.  Self-recommending.

And there is Cynthia Paces, Prague: The Heart of Europe.