1. Bécquer Seguín, The Op-Ed Novel: A Literary History of Post-Franco Spain. I really liked this book, as it gave me a very useful background for the Spanish fiction that I enjoy. It might make sense to read if you don’t already know the proper fiction, but in any case good job. Imagine, if America had an equally strong association between novelists and Op-Ed writers.
2. Ken McNab, Shake It Up, Baby! The Rise of Beatlemania and the Mayhem of 1963. At the beginning of that year, John and Paul lost hope of making it as a rock band, and were expected to end up as songwriters for other people, like Goffin-King at the time. However, at the end of the year… This is the story of how that happened. You did very well.
3. Ian Frazier, Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough. An excellent, entertaining, and much-needed book. I especially liked the parts about the 20th century. I still long for that cost-benefit analysis of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, though. We know that the Interstate Highway system is very successful in the cost-benefit analysis, but are all of its main components?
4. Simon Morrison, The Empire of Tchaikovsky: The New Life of Russia’s Greatest Composer. My favorite book is about Tchaikovsky, engaging but also involving music for music’s sake. I liked this sentence from the jacket of the book: “His life and his art were shaped by the ambition of the Russian nation, and his work was the manifestation of the theme of the empire: kaleidoscopic, capacious, cosmopolitan.” This book does not fit well with Tchaikovsky’s um…personal life.
There’s Matt Grossman and David A. Hopkins, and their aptly titled Polarized Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics.
Pakistan is a very hidden country, but now Lahore has a sector, in Manan Ahmed Asif’s Disturbed City: Walking the Lanes of Memory and History in Lahore.
Marieke Brandt, Nations and Politics in Yemen: A History of the Houthi Conflict was much more detailed than I was looking for. But I read about a fifth of it, and I learned a lot from that.
JCD Clark, The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History, sounds brilliant but somehow stays too much on the meta level of commentaries?
Victor Davis Hanson has a new book called The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Destruction.
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