Results for “what i've been reading”

442 found

1. Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Brazilian Authoritarianism: Past and Present.  One of the best general books on where Brazil is right now, and yes it is sad that you can say that about a book on political authoritarianism.  Don’t forget that most of the slaves brought to the New World were brought to Brazil, and the country now has the second largest African population in the world.  The problem with this book is that while the first half on Brazil is quite good, too much of the second half is social science mumbo-jumbo.

2. Isaac Asimov, The End of Eternity.  This novel is not so famous, but it is one of his best and also most literary creations.  Like so many Asimov tales, it is fundamentally biblical in inspiration.  Of course Asimov wrote numerous books about the Bible, so he knew it well.  You can start with Adam and Eve, Abraham, and Samson, but it doesn’t end there.

Dan Slater and Joseph Wong, From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia is a good “state capacity” take on how democracies developed from strong states in Asia.

Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age.  Among its other virtues, including excellent research, this book does a good job of recharacterizing the “Mughal” era as one of massive Persian influence in India.

Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great.  I only read part of this book, as it had more detail than what I was looking to consume, but it is clearly a major and very useful source on its topic.  It focuses on the progress, science, and state-building sides of the reign of Peter.

1. Andrea G. McDowell, We the Miners: Self-Government in the California Gold Rush.  An important law and economics study of an “anarchistic” episode, going much deeper than some earlier accounts on matters involving Native Americans, fairness of trials, dispute resolution, miner-mining company interactions, and more.

2. Chris Blackwell, with Paul Morley, The Islander: My Life in Music and Beyond.  Obviously an interesting story in its own right, and well-written as well.  I also found this a good take on talent search.  First, if you come across a very talented cluster (in this case Jamaican reggae), never stop supporting it and working with it!  Sounds trivial, but it runs against the spirit of our age.  Second, if you ever have a chance to work with a very talented person (people), just do it.  Yes, try to get the arrangements right but in the final analysis just do it.  Chris understands and articulates that principle very well.  One of my favorite parts of the book was his account of his decision to simply advance 4k to Bob Marley and the Wailers with no agreement whatsoever.

3. Lane Kenworthy, Would Democratic Socialism be Better?  No.  “My conclusion is that capitalism, and particularly social democratic capitalism, is better than many democratic socialists seem to think.”  The notion of writing a book that argues clearly and directly for a correct conclusion remains vastly underrated!  That said, I worry a bit this book is ignoring what is upstream and what is downstream.  If a socialist claimed “Cuba is better than Haiti,” would it really work to shoot back “The Nordics are better than either!”  How about the Dominican Republic?  What exactly is on the menu here?

4. Edmund Burke and the Perennial Battle, 1789-1797, edited by Daniel B. Klein and Dominic Pino.  It is sometimes forgotten that the great Irish thinkers of the 18th century (Swift, Berkeley, Burke, Sterne, etc., and don’t forget Shaftesbury wrote there) are really not so far behind the Scots.  Yet when do you hear talk of an Irish Enlightenment?  This much-needed book assembles excellent quotations from the wisdom of Burke.

Jorge Almazán Studiolab, Emergent Tokyo: Designing The Spontaneous City, very good for those who care.  The book also provides excellent visuals on how the city actually is laid out.  Do note that much of the Tokyo of the 1980s and 90s is disappearing, due to high-rise towers.  Visit while you can!

1. Dan Werb, The Invisible Siege: The Rise of Coronavirus and the Search for a Cure.  An excellent book on the history of coronaviruses more generally, with much of the strongest material coming on how earlier coronavirus investigations fed into the progress we have made on Covid-19.  Recommended, not just what all the other Covid books are telling you.

2. James Poskett, Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science.  A useful account of what the title promises, with a look at contributions from pre-conquest Mexico, China, and other non-Western locales.  Maybe the book pushes the non-Western theme a little too much at points, but this is basically a sane and readable account, and most of the cross-cultural connections are valid rather than strained.

3. Evan Lieberman, Until We Have Won Our Liberty: South Africa After Apartheid.  An interesting book, and one which contains a lot of useful information.  Yet the author works too hard to avoid recognizing just how badly matters have gone.  Overall, incomes are down and the racial wealth gap has not improved…and that is after getting rid of one of the most inefficient economic systems of all time, namely apartheid.  For sources try this and this, among others.  The income gains you can find are focused in a super-small group.

4. Paul Mango, Warp Speed: Inside the Operation that Beat Covid, the Critics, and the Odds.  Written by an HHS insider and participant, this is kind of cheesy and fanboyish.  But probably it should be!  For one thing, the book gives you a sense of just how much talent was involved in OWS, an under-discussed lesson.  On p.69, you can learn that they repeatedly considered human challenge trials and learn their question-begging reasons for refusing to do them.

5. David Hackett Fischer, African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals.  An extended history of U.S. slavery, focusing on regional differences, for instance Carolina Gullahs vs. New Orleans vs. Mississippi.  As you might expect, the broader story is integrated with that of the particular African origins of the slaves as well.  A strong book, recommended.

Michael Magoon’s From Poverty to Progress: Understanding Humanity’s Greatest Achievement is a very good introduction to the importance of progress and material wealth in history.

1. Paul Strathern, The Florentines: From Dante to Galileo.  It is not just Dante and Galileo, there is also Boccaccio, Petrarch, Machiavelli, Giotto, Botticelli, Leonardo, Fra Filippo Lippi, Michelangelo, Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, and many more, all from one small region of Italy.  This book doesn’t answer how that all happened, but it is perhaps the best survey of the magnitude and extent of what happened, recommended and readable throughout, good as both an introduction and for the veteran reader of books about Florence.  While we are at it, don’t forget Pacioli and the first treatise on double-entry bookkeeping.

2. Geoff Dyer, The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings.  A hard book to explain, mostly it is about how careers end or collapse or implode, only some of it is about Federer.  “De Chirico lived till he was ninety but produced little of value after about 1919.”  Calling a book a “tour de force” almost certainly means it isn’t, but this book…is a tour de force.

3. Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work.  One or two-page sections on the work habits of famous artists, the selection of names is intelligent and this book is like potato chips in the good sense of the term.

4. Asa Hoffman with Virginia Hoffman, The Last Gamesman: My Sixty Years of Hustling Games in the Clubs, Parks and Streets of New York.  A fun look back at the NYC chess world of the 1970s and trying to make a living as a chess and Scrabble hustler.  I knew Hoffman a bit back then, and even as a kid I wondered “is this guy happy?”  In the book he says he has largely been happy!  I am still wondering.  Maybe the secret is to play a game many discrete times where your losses are temporary and swamped by rapidly forthcoming wins?  I am reminded of the words of the recently deceased grandmaster and centenarian Yuri Averbakh (NYT): “The main thing was that I never obtained great pleasure from winning,’’ he wrote. “Clearly, I did not have a champion’s character. On the other hand, I did not like to lose, and the bitterness of defeat was in no way compensated for by the pleasure of winning.”

5. Christopher Duggan, The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy since 1796.  A good and very useful general introduction to the history of the latter part of the story of Italy.

1. Dervla Murphy, A Place Apart: Northern Ireland in the 1970s.  Imagine a single Irish woman in the 1970s bicycling though Northern Ireland at the height of The Troubles.  Charming and perceptive throughout, and remarkably well-written.  Murphy is in general an underrated figure, and note she is still at it, recently in her 90s she did a Lunch with the Financial Times.

2. Marc F. Bellemare, Doing Economics: What You Should Have Learned in Grad School — But Didn’t.  A sober and very useful book, covering topics such as “Navigating Peer Review” and “Finding Funding” and “Doing Service.”  The advice offered is on the mark.  Yet the book as a whole makes economics (academia?) as a whole come across as a grim and dysfunctional profession.  You won’t find much on “generating new ideas” or “influencing policy” or “inspiring students.”  I guess they taught all those things so well in grad school!

3. Gregory Forth, Between Ape and Human: An Anthropologist on the Trail of a Hidden Humanoid.  The claim is that the Flores mini-humanoids may have existed on the island until quite recently, or possibly even still today.  I am not persuaded (for one thing the villagers promote too many other ancillary hypotheses about these creatures, for instance they fly), but at the very least this is a fascinating take on how to interpret eyewitness evidence.  And the author is a credible authority.  They should invite this guy to Hereticon, he is an actual heretic!

William R. Cross, Winslow Homer: American Passage is a definitive biography with wonderful photos, maps, and images.  Not a “picture book” but a book with amazing pictures.  And text.

Yaffa Assouline, Avant-Garde Orientalists: Tribute to Igor Savitsky.  One of the largest collections of Russian avant-garde art is in Karakalpakstan in northwestern Uzbekistan — you can view the work here, recommended.

Thomas W. Merrill, The Chevron Doctrine: Its Rise and Fall, and the Future of the Administrative State, “This book is primarily a work of history about the Chevron doctrine — where it came from, how it spread, the fate of attempts to cabin it, and recent arguments that it should be overruled o significantly rewritten.”

I have not read Jerry Z. Muller, Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes, but it appears to be a work of promise.

1. Susanne Schattenberg, Brezhnev: The Making of a Statesman.  Can you have an interesting biography of a life and man that was fundamentally so…boring?  Maybe.  He ruled the world’s number two power for eighteen critical years, so surely he deserves more attention than what he has received.  “Nevertheless, Brezhnev had dentures and only stopped smoking in the mid-1970s because his doctors told him his false teeth would fall out at some point if he didn’t.”  And “Analysis of why Brezhnev’s children made themselves known largely for their drinking and scandals would fill another book.”  I’ll buy that one as well.

2. Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics.  One of the very best books on Ireland and Irish ideas, and more broadly I can recommend virtually anything by Kiberd.  Do note, however, that much of this book requires you have read the cited Irish classics under consideration.  Nonetheless there is insight on almost every page, recommended.

3. Olivier Zunz, The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville.  A self-recommending biography of one of the greatest social science thinkers.  Easy to read, and good for both the generalist and specialist reader.  Note that it is a complement to reading Tocqueville, in no way a substitute.

4. Kevin Lane, The Inca Lost Civilizations.  Short and readable and with nice photos, maybe the best introduction to this still underrated topic?

Paul Sagar, Adam Smith Reconsidered: History, Liberty, and the Foundations of Modern Politics considers the broader implications of Smith’s thought from a “freedom as non-domination” perspective.

John E. Bowit, Moscow and St. Petersburg in Russia’s Silver Age.  The early twentieth century, basically.  Beautiful plates, good exposition, and if nothing else a lesson in just how far aesthetic deterioration can run.  A picture book!

Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism is interior to my current knowledge set, but clear and I suspect for many readers useful.

Rainer Zitelmann’s Hitler’s National Socialism is a very thorough, detailed look at Hitler’s actual views.

James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington also serves as a better than average general history of the city.

1. Alan Bollard, Economists at War: How a Handful of Economists Helped Win and Lose the World Wars.  A useful book on a much underrated topic.  Keynes, Kantorovich, and Leontief receive the most attention, though the book also covers of Takahashi Korekiyo of Japan.  My main complaint is the absence of Thomas Schelling.

2. Elizabeth Wilson, Playing with Fire: The Story of Maria Yudina, Pianist in Stalin’s Russia.  She converted from Judaism to Orthodox Christianity, and her career spanned from the 1920s through 1970.  She was at times out of favor, other times Stalin’s favorite pianist.  Called a “holy fool” by many, this is an excellent biography that brings its subject to life.  And her playing was full of depth, albeit with often creaky sound..

3. Ian Barnes, Restless Empire: A Historical Atlas of Russia.  One of the very most useful books for understanding Russian history — about half of this one is maps!  Changing maps over the ages.  These are the maps that Putin looks at, you should too.  A high quality book in all regards.

4. Sarah Weinman, Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free.  The murderer is Edgar Smith and the conservative is William F. Buckley — how could anyone have been fooled by these remorseless criminals?  A good look at what had been becoming a forgotten episode.  A tale of self-deception to the nth degree.

5. Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire.  Yes, the empire truly was based in unacceptable levels of violence, and at its very core.  This excellent book is the very best demonstration of those propositions.  Historically thorough, and covers more than just a few cases.

There is a new reissue, with a new and good introduction, of Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery: Black Society in Jamaica, 1655-1838.

Ben Westhoff, Little Brother: Love, Tragedy, and my Search for the Truth is a very good narrative by a very good author.

Jeevan Vasagar, Lion City: Singapore and the Invention of Modern Asia is a decent first book to read on Singapore, although mostly it was interior to my current knowledge set.

1. Charles Clover, Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism.  An excellent look at all the icky ideas that have been circulating around Russia for the last few decades.  This book also brings the relevant characters to life, for better or worse.  Recommended.

2. Christopher Prendergast, Living and Dying with Marcel Proust.  Unlike most of the secondary literature, this book actually makes In Search of Lost Time sound like it is worth reading.

3. Elizabeth Popp Berman, Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy.  A useful book, and many people should read it, that said I have some caveats.  Was “equality” ever the standard?  Why isn’t there more public choice/political economy analysis in here?

4. Joseph Sassoon, The Global Merchants: The Enterprise and Extravagance of the Sassoon Dynasty.  A fun read, I had not known the family was Iraqi-Jewish, or so heavily involved in the opium trade in 19th century China.  The author, by the way, is a distant relation to the main family tree, but it turns out he can read all the relevant languages for deciphering the family archives (and hardly anyone else can).

5. Elizabeth Bowen, Eva Trout.  Bowen has to be one of the most underrated writers of the twentieth century.  No human ever has told me to read one of her books!  Yet this one is a subtle knockout.