What I’ve been reading

Adrian Goldsworthy, Augustus: First Emperor of Rome.  A very clear and readable treatment of one of the most important Romans.  Exactly what you would expect from the author.

Indranil Chakravarty, The Tree Within: The Mexican Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz’s Years in India.  Imagine a book that is interesting about both the cultures of Mexico and India.  In addition to the one by Octavio Paz, that is.  I lapped this one up eagerly, and I note it also has good coverage on the relationships between different Latin American writers and poets.  Paz by the way largely was at odds with the left-wingers.

Stewart Brand, Maintenance: Of Everything: Part One.  Capital depreciation, while it receives attention in economics, arguably is still underrated in import?  Institutions can deteriorate or depreciate as well.  The great Stewart Brand tackles this topic with the expected panache.  And here is my earlier CWT with Stewart.  A Stripe Press book.

Jack Weatherford, Emperor of the Seas: Kublai Khan and the Making of China.  A fun and good book, think of it as explaining how Kublai Khan beat Song China but subsequently lost to Japan.  The Ainu play a role in a wide-ranging and still historically relevant story.

Leon Fleisher and Anne Midgette, My Nine Lives: A Memoir of Many Careers in Music.  Classical music is a wonderful area to read books in, much like World War II.  Most of the books are written by very smart people, such as Fleisher, a top pianist in his time (try Fleisher-Szell for the Beethoven piano concerti).  And they are written for very smart people.  You can always, with profit, just keep on reading books about classical music.

Roland Lazenby, Michael Jordan: The Life.  I learned much more from this book than I was expecting, it is flat out an excellent biography.  Full of information and insight, and with a coherent narrative.

There is Richard Sandor and Paula DiPerna, Carbon Hunters: Reflections and Forecasts of Climate Markets in the 21st Century.  Much of this is simply interesting material about Sandor himself.

I am pleased to see the McKinsey version of Progress Studies in the new book A Century of Plenty: A Story of Progress for Generations to Come.