Category: Books
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Lessons from a Second Annual Reading of “Christmas Carol”
Everyone should read Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” once a Christmas – it is short and so well-written as to fill the brain and heart both with enough sustenance to last the holiday season. I did so for the first time last year and really loved it. Last night I repeated the act and loved…
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Mandarin Idioms, Ouyang Xiu and Medieval and Modern China
Sloganeering and some literary history in China – real sightseeing stuff today.
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Coming Late to McPherson’s “Battle Cry of Freedom”
Review of James McPherson’s excellent Civil War tome.
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Review: Niall Ferguson, “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe”
Doom ultimately fails for lack of substance. Though it attempts a history of catastrophes, it ends up more like a literature review of intellectual traditions which might be applied to understanding catastrophe. He swings from big name to big name, one field to the other, summarizing their findings and asking the reader to go “Hmm!”…
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Review: Daniel Immerwahr, “How to Hide an Empire”
Daniel Immerwahr’s 2019 history deserves more excavation than it’s already got – what nuggets of novel historical arguments can we take from this popular success?
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Notes Towards a Biography of Martin Van Buren
I’m in the middle of the rightly much-lauded How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr – expect a review shortly. Importantly, although Immerwahr has unimpeachable credentials when it comes to academic history, Hide an Empire is not meant to overturn our understanding of belle-epoque American imperialism; it’s a popular work, briskly written, with at…
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Review: Peter Zeihan, “Disunited Nations”
If geopolitics ever found itself in need of a fabulist, it could do worse than to give Peter Zeihan a call. To be fair, geopolitics today does need a fabulist – one of the wittier passages in Zeihan’s recent book, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World, concerns the moment in 1990…
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Selections from Toni Morrison, “Jazz”
Get it here: https://amzn.to/2Yms599 This notion of rest, it’s attractive to her, but I don’t think she would like it. They are all like that, these women. Waiting for the ease, the space that need not be filled with anything other than the drift of their own thoughts. But they wouldn’t like it. They are…
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What I’ve Been Reading
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities Wonderful, erudite, full of such funny tags: the triunity of Ecclesiastical Latin, Koranic Arabic, and Examination Chinese as the pillars of the religious-hierarchical pre-modern world; the importance of SE Asian history – the Malay states, colonial Philippines; the ways in which colonial social hierarchies molded individual careers eventually creating something like…
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