What I’ve been reading

Michael Wachtel, Viacheslav Ivanov: A Symbolist Life.  615 pp. of what Russian/Soviet cultural life was like in the early 20th century.  Focuses on broader strands, rather than just the most famous names.  Ivanov today is largely forgotten, but he was at the time arguably the most influential figure of that period.  “They were mostly a bunch of nuts” is one of my takeaways.

Herbert Breslin and Anne Midgette, The King and I: The Uncensored Tale of Luciano Pavarotti’s Rise to Fame by his Manager, Friend, and Sometime Adversary.  Usually people tell me books like this are “delightful,” and then they bore me to tears.  This one actually is fantastically fun.  “To tell the truth, though, Luciano didn’t care about the money at the beginning.  In the early years, he never asked me how much he was going to get paid for a recital.  He had only one condition: it had to be sold out.”

Alan Manning, Why Immigration Policy is Hard and How to Make it Better is a thoughtful and balanced look at its topic, recommended.

Alex Mayyasi, Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces that Shape Your Life is a useful introduction to economic concepts.

Nicolas Niarchos, The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth is a good treatment of minerals issues as they relate to the Congo today.  It will not make you more bullish on Rwanda, or for that matter the Congo.

Eve MacDonald, Carthage: A New History covers what we do know about those people.  That isn’t much at the conceptual level, and I wonder why archaeology has not taught us more there.

I expect I will very much agree with Brink Lindsey, The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transition from Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing.