We try pretty hard to review good books we think are worth reading.| www.thepsmiths.com
American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, Colin Woodard (Viking, 2011). We once lived for a few years in another part of the country. It was nice in a lot of ways — I have fond memories of that time, and not just because two of my babies were born there — but it was also| www.thepsmiths.com
A Field Guide to American Houses (Revised): The Definitive Guide to Identifying and Understanding America's Domestic Architecture, Virginia Savage McAlester (Knopf, 2013). One January a few years ago, I decided to learn about gardening. January, it turns out, is the perfect time to do this, because the ground is frozen and there’s no way you can be expected to actually| www.thepsmiths.com
The Man Who Rode the Thunder, William H.| www.thepsmiths.com
When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamín Labatut (New York Review of Books, 2021). Have you ever sat and stared at the sea? If you’ve been near it, then I’m sure you have. As soon as it hoves into view, our eyes are drawn ineluctably up to that far horizon, that endless undulating plain. Coast-dwelling cultures around the earth have stories and legends about the ocean’s strange magnetism, like some eldritch vista that once beheld deepens and ages the soul, but stare too long and...| www.thepsmiths.com
Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building, Claire Hughes Johnson (Stripe Press, 2023).| www.thepsmiths.com
Science in Traditional China, Joseph Needham (Harvard University Press, 1981).| www.thepsmiths.com
The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche, Bernard Yack (Princeton University Press, 1986). This is a book by Bernard Yack. Who is Bernard Yack? Yack is fun, because for a mild-mannered liberal Canadian political theorist he’s dropped some dank truth-bombs over the years. For example, check out his short and punchy 2001 journal article “| www.thepsmiths.com
Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Stay Healthy, and Lose Weight, Herman Pontzer (Avery, 2022). Compare these two covers. The one on the left, with the cover design that says “this is pop science to shelve with your Malcolm Gladwell,”| www.thepsmiths.com
The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian: The Original Adventures of the Greatest Sword and Sorcery Hero of All Time!, Robert E. Howard (ed. Patrice Louinet, Del Ray, 2003). Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars — Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haire...| www.thepsmiths.com