Results for “best book” 1946 found
What I’ve been reading
1. David Thomson, A Light in the Dark: A History of Movie Directors. One of the best attempts to make the auteur notion intelligible to the modern viewer, he surveys major directors such as Welles, Kubrick, Hitchcock, Godard and others. Stephen Frears is the dark horse pick, and he recommends the Netflix show Ozark. I always find Thomson worth reading.
2. Wenfei Tong, Bird Love: The Family Life of Birds. Now this is a great book, wonderful photos, superb analytics and bottom-line approach throughout. By the way, “Superb fairywrens are particularly adept at avoiding incest.”
3. William Deresiewicz, The Death of the Artist: How Creators are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech. Ignore the subtitle (which itself illustrates a theme of the book), this is the best book on the economics of the arts — circa 2021 — in a long time. “The good news is, you can do it yourself. The bad news is, you have to.” Every aspiring internet creator, whether “artist” or not, should read this book. If you don’t think of your career itself as a creative product — bye-bye!
I very much enjoyed Richard Thompson (with Scott Timberg), Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice, 1967-1975, still smarter than the competition and you don’t even have to know much about Thompson.
Dorothy Sue Cobble, For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality is a serious and thorough yet readable account of what the title promises, with a minimum of mood affiliation.
Joanne Meyerowitz, A War on Global Poverty: The Lost Promise of Redistribution and the Rise of Microcredit. A history of antipoverty efforts, with an emphasis on the shift toward “enterprise” in the 1980s, with the microcredit treatment being mostly pre-Yunus.
Mathilde Fasting has edited After the End of History: Conversations with Frank Fukuyama.
Julian Baggini’s The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well is not written for me, but it is a lively and useful introduction to one of humanity’s greatest minds.
Don’t forget Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Bettering Humanomics: A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science.
Arrived in my pile there is William D. Nordhaus, The Spirit of Green: The Economics of Collisions and Contagions in a Crowded World, and in September Adam Tooze is publishing Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy, and also for September there is Gregg Easterbrook’s Blue Age: How the US Navy Created Global Prosperity — And Why We’re in Danger of Losing It.
Have you noticed there are lots of books coming out now? How many were held over from the pandemic?
*American Republics*
That is the new Alan Taylor book and the subtitle is A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850. Excerpt:
With 124,000 inhabitants in 1813, Mexico City was twenty times bigger than Washington, D.C. — and about forty times grander. Poinsett described the public buildings and churches as “vast and splendid,” providing “an air of grandeur…wanting in the cities of the United States.” A German intellectual, Alexander von Humboldt, thought the city’s statues and Baroque palaces “would appear to advantage in the finest streets of Paris, Berlin and [St.] Petersburg.”
…Mexico City had an array of cultural institutions created during the colonial era. “No city of the new continent, without even excepting those of the United States, can display such great and solid scientific establishments as the capital of Mexico,” marveled Humboldt. The United States had nothing to match Mexico’s Academy of Fine Arts, National Botanic Garden, National University, and School of Mines. Founded in 1551, the university was the oldest in the Americas.
The book is excellent, including on Mormons, and also the War of 1812, and it will be one of the best books of this year. It is time to admit that Taylor is not only one of the best historians, but he is one of the best writers period in any field. Recommended.
*Empire of Silver*
The subtitle is A New Monetary History of China, and the author is Jin Xu. This is the first book this year to go straight to my “best books of the year list,” here is one excerpt:
Let’s shift the scene back to 1262, when the two poles of world civilization, Venice in the West and the Southern Song in the East, both faced the specter of war, and funding for these wars hung by a thread. Almost simultaneously, the authorities of both places came up with plans to deal with their emergencies, both involving the most advanced financial innovations of that time. The Southern Song’s Jia Sidao raised military funding by using the steadily devaluing huizi to buy up public land the strip the populace of wealth. Venice took a different road: Its parliament authorized the government to mortgage its tax revenue, and when a fiscal deficit developed, the administration issued government bonds paying interest of 5 percent. In retrospect, Venice’s financial innovation summoned the magic power of public debt as capital and effectively led Europe into an era of financial revolution. As for china, the excessively issued huizi did not regain the favor of the market; rather, public discontent and unrest threw open the door for invasion by the Mongolians.
…we witness China taking the lead on finance and currency, but in the wrong direction. China, at a very early stage, had “flying money” (feiqian) for remitting funds, as well as pawnshops, silver shops, and other such establishments for credit transfer; the Song dynasty’s paper currency originated in private institutions; and private local banks (qianzhuang) and money-exchange shops (piaohao) experienced extraordinary growth in the Ming and Qing dynasties. So why didn’t China produce a modern banking industry?
…The unbankability of China’s currency led to the failure of China’s paper currency system and forced it to take the silver route. Without banks, and without the coinage of silver, progressing from bank notes to paper currency was out of the question. Currency could only exist in the form of confusing and outmoded metage currency.
Definitely recommended, you can buy it here. And “metage” — what a good word!
What I’ve been reading
1. Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820. One of the best books on the history of Enlightenment science, in addition to the core material it focuses on how the leading researchers went about creating public audiences for their investigations and for the scientific questions that interested them. Indirectly, it is also a good book for understanding the importance of social media today. And unlike many books of science, it properly places the “could you actually make a career out of doing this?” question in the forefront.
2. The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922. It is striking how quickly in his life Eliot is corresponding with very famous people, including Bertrand Russell, Ezra Pound, Conrad Aiken, Julian Huxley, Herbert Read, Wyndham Lewis, and others, all before Eliot himself is renowned. I also enjoy the 23 March 1917 letter to Graham Wallas where Eliot boasts about his new job at Lloyds, praises the extraordinary nature of banking work, and roots for a salary boost. Later Hermann Hesse and James Joyce and Virginia Woolf are added to the mix, and this is only volume one (out of eight). I have ordered more. Simply reading the short bios of the letter writers, at the end of the book, is better than most other books.
3. Lara Lee, Coconut and Sambal: Recipes from my Indonesian Kitchen. Yes, I have been learning how to cook Indonesian food, a natural extension of my previous interest in cuisines from India, Malaysia, and Singapore. This is an excellent book for several reasons, and a better book yet for a pandemic. First, you can fold it open easily on the kitchen counter. Second, the pages can take some wear and tear. Third, the key ingredients are readily storable. Galangal, turmeric, and narrow red chiles all freeze very well. Refrigerated lemon grass stays good for at least a few weeks. Shallots and garlic and coconut milk and cream are easy enough to buy and store. This is actually the #1 issue for a cookbook, if like me you cannot so often plan your cooking in advance. The Thai grocery in Falls Church has all the “marginal’ ingredients as well. On top of everything, the resulting food product is yummy!
*The Stakes: American at the Point of No Return*
That is the new book by Michael Anton, the famed then pseudonymous author of the “Flight 93 piece.”
I consider this to be the very best book for understanding where the current Intellectual Right “is at.” In that sense I recommend it highly. The opening chapter is a polemical fear that all of American will go the route of California, and then Anton keeps on digging further in on what has gone wrong.
To be clear, my vision is not the same as Michael’s. I would like to see more emphasis on economic growth, on individual liberty, to recognize the emancipatory strands within the Left, to move away from the current historical pessimism of the Right and of Anton in particular, to be more unabashedly cosmopolitan, think more about science, and to become more Bayesian. Nor do I agree that “…there’s little wrong with President Trump that more Trump couldn’t solve.”
Nonetheless this book serves a very valuable purpose and many of you should read it.
What I’ve been reading
1. Brent Tarter, Virginians and Their Histories. The best book I have read on the history of Virginia, by an order of magnitude. And in turn that makes it an excellent book on race as well, and also on broader American history. If I have to spend the whole year in this state, I might as well read about it. I learned also that 21,172 Virginians have identified themselves as American Indians, and that this movement is more active than I had realized.
2. Diary of Anne Frank. It seems inappropriate to call this a “good” or even “great” book. I had not read it since high school, I will just say it deserves its enduring status, and the reread was much more rewarding and interesting than what I was expecting.
3. Howard Brotz, editor, African-American Social & Political Thought 1850-1920. A fascinating selection from the debates of the time, reprinting Douglass, Booker T., Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Martin Delany, and others. Douglass holds up best, including his critique of colonialism. The weakest argument in the volume was “Haiti is working out fine, so Liberia will succeed as well.” Of greatest interest to me was the extent to which the African-American debates of that time overlapped with opinions about Africa and the Caribbean. Recommended, and excellent background for many of the current disputes.
4. Simone Weil: An Anthology, and Gravity and Grace. Gravity and Grace is the early work. Its ten best pages are superb, but reading it is mostly a frustrating experience, due to the diffuse nature of the presentation (to be clear, overall I consider that a relatively high reward ratio). The former collection is the best place to start, noting again there is a certain degree of diffuseness, but as with Žižek there are insights you just don’t get anywhere else. A good question for any talent selection algorithm is whether it would pick out the teenage Weil and give her a grant to pursue her writing projects. Sadly she died at age 34 in 1943.
*Markets, Minds, and Money: Why America Leads the World in University Research*
One of the best books on the history of American higher education, author Miguel Urquiola of Columbia argues for the importance of market competition in the rise and dominance of the American system. Strongly argued and full of good evidence and stories, here is one excerpt I found of interest:
That Columbia would be among the first successful American research universities would have surprised many observers around 1850, as the school had seen real oscillations in its fortunes. For the first decades after its creation in 1754, Columbia was a wealthy but small school. In 1774 it had the highest collegiate endowment, but only 36 students, while Harvard and Yale had four or five times as many…in 1797 the college had eight faculty members, during most of the 1800s it had four. In 1809, an inquiry warned that Columbia College “was fast becoming, if it has not become already, a mere Grammar School”; between 1800 and 1850, even as New York City grew, the school’s enrollment stagnated, and even in 1850 the average entering age was 15.
And this:
Among wealthy countries, the United States is unusual in letting its university sector operate as a free market. Self-rule, free entry, and free scope are much less prevalent in Europe.
Recommended, you can pre-order here.
*Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom*
That is the new, forthcoming book by my colleague Ilya Somin, due out in May. It is the best book on geographic mobility and exit that has been written to date, and thus I am happy to recommend it heartily.
Here Ilya provides basic information about the book. Here you can pre-order it on Amazon.
Monday assorted links
1. The pricing of Lego blocks and sets, more interesting than it sounds, though not to me. And hockey is too expensive for a growing number of Canadians (NYT).
2. Fixing the problems of credentials today.
3. Ben Thompson podcast with Dan Wang.
4. A new bibliography on the best books against socialism.
5. Erik Torenberg channels/integrates some of my remarks from interviews.
*A Treatise on Northern Ireland*, by Brendan O’Leary
This three-volume set is quite the remarkable achievement, and it would have made my best books of 2019 list (add-ons here) had I known about it earlier. It starts with “An audit of violence after 1966,” and then goes back to the seventeenth century to begin to dig out what happened. It has more detail than almost anyone needs to know, yet at the same time it remains unfailingly conceptual and relies on theoretical social science as well, rather than merely reciting names and dates. How about this?:
The breakdown of hegemonic control in Northern Ireland [mid- to late 1960s] exemplifies Tocqueville’s thesis that, when a bad government seeks to reform itself, it is in its greatest danger.
Here is an excerpt from volume II:
The thesis advanced here is that hegemonic control was established between 1920 and 1925 by the UUP, and, aside from a few exceptional moments, exercised successfully until 1966. After 1925 opportunities for effective opposition, dissent, disobedience, or usurpation of power were minimal. The major possibilities of disruption came from the outside, from independent Ireland or from Great Britain, from geopolitics, or the world economy. Eventually, when external forces of disruption combined with major endogenous changes, hegemonic control would be contested, and would shatter. But at no juncture did Northern nationalists or Irish Catholics in the North internalize the UUP’s rhetoric, or become significantly British by cultural designation. When the civil-rights movement learned to exploit the claim to be British citizens entitled to British rights, the regime’s days were numbered.
I will continue to spend time with these volumes, which will not be surpassed anytime soon. Unlike in so many history books, O’Leary is always trying to explain what happened, or what did not. You can order them here.
As a side note, I find it shocking (and I suppose deplorable) that no American major media outlet has reviewed these books, or put them on its best of the year list, as far as I can tell. We are failing at something, though I suppose you can debate what. And I apologize to O’Leary for missing them the first time around.
Thursday assorted links
1. Losing faith in religion and losing faith in the humanities are somewhat the same thing. The truth of this has not yet been internalized.
2. Sebastian Mallaby reviews Krugman.
3. MIE: Qatar hospital for falcons (NYT).
4. Bowles and Carlin on how to change Econ 101, John Komlos comments. That the 2010s were the best decade in human history is perhaps the first thing they ought to be taught?
5. Yuval Levin best books of the year.
6. “One opinion poll suggested 59% of people believed the Netherlands was now a narco-state…“
Tuesday assorted links
1. An occupational satisfaction index?
4. Stephen L. Carter best books picks. And Australian best book of the year picks, hardly any overlap with any other lists. Or try these Irish lists. El Pais picks books of the century, very good selections.
*Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power*
That is the new wonderful and stunning book by Pekka Hämäläinen, here is one excerpt from the opening section:
Two centuries earlier, in the middle years of the seventeenth century, the Lakotas h ad been an obscure tribe of hunters and gatherers at the edge of a bustling new world of Native Americans and European colonists that had emerged in the Eastern Woodlands of North America. They had no guns and no metal weapons, and they carried little political clout, all of which spelled danger: the odds of survival were slim for people who lacked access to Europeans and their new technologies of killing. That crisis set off what may be the most improbably expansion in American history. Lakotas left their ancient homelands and reinvented themselves as horse people in the continental grasslands that stretched seemingly forever into the horizon. This was the genesis of what I call Lakota America, an expansive, constantly transmuting Indigenous regime that pulled numerous groups into its orbit, marginal and dispossessed its rivals — both Native and colonial — and commanded the political, social, and economic life in the North American interior for generations. Just as there was Spanish, French, British, and the United States of America, there was Lakota America, the sovereign domain of the Lakota people and their kin and allies, a domain they would protect and, if necessary, expand. A century later, the Lakotas had shifted the center of their world three hundred miles west into the Missouri Valley, where they began to transform into a dominant power. Another century later they were the most powerful Indigenous nation in the Americas, controlling a massive domain stretching across the northern Great Plains into the Rocky Mountains and Canada.
…Yet they never numbered more than fifteen thousand people.
I will blog this book a bit more, for now I’ll just say it is very much in the running for very best book of the year. It brings Native American history to life in a conceptual manner better than any other book I know. You can buy it here, I found every section gripping and highly instructive and fun to read as well. Here is a very good and accurate Parul Sehgal NYT review.
*Essays One*, by Lydia Davis
Is there anything more enthralling than a writer of supreme intelligence covering topics she understands deeply? Here is just one bit from this fantastic collection:
We know we are not being asked to believe in a woman named Oedipa Maas or a man named Stanley Koteks, and our attention is distracted from the story to the artifice and artificer. What is shared by the two books is a sense of tight control by the author over the characters, the language, the book, and probably the reader. Sometimes the control is achieved through his mastery of a graceful prose style or an appealing notion (“Creaking, or echoing, or left as dark-ribbed sneaker=prints in a fine layer of damp, the footstep of the Junta carried them into King Krjö’s house, past pier glasses that gave them back their images dark and faded, as if some part were being kept as the price of admission”): here is control by persuasion. Sometimes, on the other hand, the young author goes beyond eloquence to a kind of hyper-eloquence that becomes a display of power over language itself that perhaps borders on control by coercion.
Or how about this?:
Franz Kafka’s “The Burrow,” because of the confident and convincing narrative voice of its obsessed narrator, who begins: “I have completed the construction of my burrow and it seems to be successful.” Kafka fully inhabits his characters and presents them with a realism that makes them, though they are impossible, believable.
And:
I have given students in writing classes the assignment to read, analyze, and then imitate stylistically one of [Thomas] Bernhard’s small stories. Younger writers these days often have trouble constructing long, complex sentences. They often restrict themselves to short, simple sentences, and when they try a longer, more complex one, they run into trouble. I see this in otherwise good writers — including good published writers.
Make sure you read her short essay “Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits” (you won’t agree with them all, though I think I do)
This is one of the very best books to read if you wish to think about writing more deeply. You can pre-order it here.
What I’ve been reading
1. Christopher Tyerman, The World of the Crusades: An Illustrated History. The best and most engrossing history of the crusades I have read. By the way, the “children’s crusade” probably didn’t have that much to do with children. The periodic topic-specific two-page interludes are especially good.
2. Tobias Straumann, 1931: Debt, Crisis, and the Rise of Hitler covers a critical episode in European history, and one which has not entirely faded into irrelevance. The author is a financial historian rather than an economist, so think of this book as scratching your history itch, in any case recommended.
3. Jim Auchmutey, Smokelore: A Short History of Barbecue in America is the most current of the best histories of barbecue and it is more bullish on the barbecue future than most treatments.
4. Chris Miller, The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the Soviet Economy. One of the best books on the beginnings of the reform era, with a special focus on whether the Soviets could have chosen a Chinese path (no, too many embedded interest groups, so does that mean Mao is underrated?).
5. Katherine Eban, Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom. A “worth reading” look at what the title promises, but all the best parts are about how the FDA tries to regulate generic drug production in India.
6. Roger L. Geiger, American Higher Education Since World War II. Not as sprightly as I might have wished for, nor does it cover the controversial issues in the conceptual fashion I was hoping to find, but nonetheless an extremely useful resources for teaching you the basic facts of how the sector has evolved.
New out from Princeton University Press is Robert J. Shiller, Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral & Drive Major Economic Events.
There is Heather Boushey’s new How Inequality Constricts Our Economy and What We Can Do About It.
Yale has published a new translation of Book of Job, translated by Edward L. Greenstein, very likely worth a read.