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Collected reviews from decades of reading — organized by subject and written for clarity, context, and long-term reference.
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The title of this book is a bit misleading. “Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy: 1300-1600” (1993) by Johns Hopkins history professor Richard Goldthwaite isn’t actually very much about art at all. It says nothing about individual artists or their patrons, nor does it attempt to interpret works of art or the functioning…
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The first thing you should know about “A Short History of the Italian Renaissance” (2013) by Kenneth Bartlett of the University of Toronto is that it isn’t particularly short. With fifteen richly illustrated thematic chapters covering nearly 350 pages, this book feels more authoritative than the title would otherwise suggest. In fact, it is the…
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Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979) is considered a seminal work because it reframed our understanding of the role of print in the development of modern society. Eisenstein’s arguments have had a profound and enduring impact on fields such as history, communication studies, sociology, and the history of science. However,…
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What if Adam Smith (invisible hand) and Charles Darwin (evolution) had a baby? The offspring might be pretty amazing: intelligent, dynamic, innovative, problem-solving. At least that’s what British science writer Matt Ridley argues in “The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves” (2011). First, Ridley wants you to know that being an optimist is long been lonely,…
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Erik Larson has a rare talent for making popular history read like gripping historical fiction. His trademark approach – finding lesser-known figures like serial killer Dr. H.H. Holmes or American diplomat Martha Dodd and placing them amid moments of great historical consequence – has yielded some of the most compelling nonfiction narratives of the past…
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David Hackett Fischer writes delightful books. He expertly combines the breezy readability of a master popular historian with the professional craftsmanship and deep primary research of a top rate academic. The end result is a narrative that is at once a dazzling adventure tale and a groundbreaking piece of historiography. The adventure tale aspect of…
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I only heard about Philip Tetlock’s “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” (2005) in late 2024. Vinod Khosla, the legendary co-founder of Sun Microsystems and later venture investor, was speaking at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco. It was an casual style discussion on stage discussing the state of…
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Portrait of a Pessimist Dictator Antonio Salazar was born the fifth and last child to devout peasant parents in the coastal city of Vimieiro in 1889, a time when roughly eighty percent of Portuguese were illiterate. The future dictator was a brilliant scholar and a sincere Catholic who believed the teachings of the church were…
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Some books are worth reading because they are grand and insightful, even if the writing is a bit stale and dry. “The Visible Hand” falls into that rare fraternity of non-fiction; a book that is tough to get through, but will forever alter how you perceive a given subject, in this case, the early economic…
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