David Sheff, Yoko: A Biography. An excellent work, I view Yoko as a quite good visual and conceptual artist, a sometimes quite interesting but hard to listen to in any volume musical creator, and overall a pretty stunning woman. Sheff has known Yoko well for decades, so you get a real sense of her from this book, even if you wonder that perhaps not all details are being reported. I learned also that the same guy at Sarah Lawrence dated by Yoko and Sylvia Plath.
Diane Coyle has a new book coming out, The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters.
Reviel Netz, Why the Ancient Greeks Matter: The Problematic Miracle that Was Greece. Uneven but periodically fascinating: “But science was but a small part of the Greek cultural sphere and it would be surprising if the overall contours of Greek cultural life could be explained through science alone. It seems much more promising to consider…what mattered the most to the Greeks themselves. This was their literary legacy: their canon.”
There is Michael M. Rosen, Like Silicon from Clay: What Ancient Jewish Wisdom Can Teach Us About AI.
And Jill Eicher, Mellon vs. Churchill: The Untold Story of Treasury Titans at War.
Edward Tenner, Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge: Essays in Unintended Consequences, collects many earlier essays by the master. From The American Philosophical Society Press, a new venture.
And there is James Grant, Friends Until the End: Edmund Burke and Charles Fox in the Age of Revolution.
I’ve also been reading “in the cluster,” trying to better understand what is sometimes called The Hundred Years War, between England and France.
The post What I’ve been reading appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
