The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, Joseph Henrich (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). Until 2002, diplomats at the United Nations didn’t have to pay their parking tickets. Double-parking, blocking a fire hydrant, blocking a driveway, blocking an| www.thepsmiths.com
Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, Ronald Blythe (1969; NYRB Classics, 2015).| www.thepsmiths.com
The Children of Men, P.D.| 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
The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century CE to the Third, Edward N.| www.thepsmiths.com
The Cruise of the Nona, Hilaire Belloc (1925; Loreto, 2014). Late in the May of 1925, around midnight, Hilaire Belloc climbed into a tiny boat and put out to sea so that he would have some time to think. The sea gives ample time to think, especially if like Belloc you disdain the use of a motor. Some wag once jested that sailing is like being at war: long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of abject terror. I suppose in some sense that’s correct, but give me the boredom of the sailb...| www.thepsmiths.com