REVIEW: Cuisine and Empire, by Rachel Laudan
Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History, Rachel Laudan (University of California Press, 2015).| www.thepsmiths.com
Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History, Rachel Laudan (University of California Press, 2015).| www.thepsmiths.com
Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America’s Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy, Michael J.| www.thepsmiths.com
Cambridge Latin Course: Unit 1, 4th Ed., The Cambridge School Classics Project (Cambridge University Press, 2001).| www.thepsmiths.com
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, Ben Horowitz (Harper Business, 2014).| Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf
Road Belong Cargo: A Study of the Cargo Movement in the Southern Madang District, New Guinea, Peter Lawrence (Manchester University Press, 1964).| www.thepsmiths.com
Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, Ross Douthat (Zondervan, 2025).| Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf
Cræft: An Inquiry Into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts, Alexander Langlands| www.thepsmiths.com
The Doomed City, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (1972; Gollancz, 2017).| www.thepsmiths.com
Imperial China: 900-1800, F.W. Mote (Harvard University Press, 1999).| www.thepsmiths.com
Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training, 3rd Ed., Mark Rippetoe (The Aasgaard Company, 2011).| www.thepsmiths.com
A Means to Freedom: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard 1930-1932 (eds. S.T. Joshi, David E. Schultz, and Rusty Burke; Hippocampus Press, 2017). In my review of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories I mentioned his two-volume collected correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft, for which I was of course not going to shell out the $60.| www.thepsmiths.com
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
The Ancient City: A Study of the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (1864; trans.| www.thepsmiths.com
Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age, Eric Berger (BenBella Books, 2024).| www.thepsmiths.com
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, C. S. Lewis (1955; HarperOne, 2017).| www.thepsmiths.com
Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation, Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber (Stripe Press, 2024).| www.thepsmiths.com
Please enjoy a final guest review while our baby works on some teeth.| www.thepsmiths.com
Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be, Timothy P.| www.thepsmiths.com
Math from Three to Seven: The Story of a Mathematical Circle for Preschoolers, Alexander Zvonkin (Moscow Center for Continuing Mathematical Education, 2007).| www.thepsmiths.com
Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founders, Dennis C. Rasmussen (Princeton University Press, 2021).| www.thepsmiths.com
The Albigensian Crusade, Jonathan Sumption (Faber & Faber, 1978).| www.thepsmiths.com
The Philharmonic Gets Dressed, Karla Kuskin (illus. Marc Simont, HarperCollins, 1982). The least negotiable thing in the Psmith household — after death and taxes, but only barely — is bedtime. I won’t say we’ve become a well-oiled machine, because we have been outnumbered for many years and that has a way of throwing toothpaste in the gears, but we are| www.thepsmiths.com
Baby Meets World: Suck, Smile, Touch, Toddle: A Journey Through Infancy, Nicholas Day (St. Martin’s Press, 2013). All you really need to know about me, demographically, is that a couple of times a year someone I know will say, “Hey, we’re expecting our first baby! What books should we read?”| www.thepsmiths.com
Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, Ronald Blythe (1969; NYRB Classics, 2015).| www.thepsmiths.com
Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony, Robert B.| www.thepsmiths.com
Our universe is fractally strange, and so are our societies. This is a post dedicated to works of non-fiction which, if you close your eyes or change the names, give the same imaginative thrill as the most daring speculative fiction.| www.thepsmiths.com
The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia, Andrei Lankov (Oxford University Press, 2014).| www.thepsmiths.com
After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations, Eric H.| www.thepsmiths.com
Please enjoy another guest review while our baby learns to sleep.| www.thepsmiths.com
Your regular reviewers are busily tending to the newest Psmithling and will return anon. In the interim, we present a guest review by Thomas Casey. The Wake: A Novel, Paul Kingsnorth (Graywolf Press, 2015). What if the apocalypse had already happened? Your friends and family dead, your home and city reduced to ash, your language erased, your gods forgotten, and your temples reduced to a few blocks of bleached stone scattered across a grassy field. Your world has ended. That is the case for co...| www.thepsmiths.com
Einstein’s Unification, Jeroen van Dongen (Cambridge University Press, 2010).| www.thepsmiths.com
The Spirit of the Mountains, Emma Bell Miles (James Pott & Company, 1905).| www.thepsmiths.com
Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, Seymour Papert (Basic Books, 1980). I go to some effort to teach my kids math at home, to the point that they’re generally a year or two ahead of whatever’s happening at school. Most of my reasons are personal and idiosyncratic: I like math, and it’s fun to share my hobbies with my kids. I also despise the way math is usually taught, and want their first encounter with certain beautiful ideas not to be ruined by a teacher who doesn't ...| www.thepsmiths.com
We try pretty hard to review good books we think are worth reading.| www.thepsmiths.com
Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit, Ashley Mears (Princeton University Press, 2021).| 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
Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food, Fuchsia Dunlop (W.| www.thepsmiths.com
The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World, Charles C. Mann (Picador, 2018). There used to be famines. Poor harvests and crop failures have been with us since the development of agriculture. Archaeological evidence makes it clear that farmers have always lived on the knife’s edge of subsistence, often hungry or malnourished, and it doesn’t take much to push them over the edge into famine: too much rain or not enough, volcani...| www.thepsmiths.com
The Education of Cyrus, Xenophon (trans.| www.thepsmiths.com
The Children of Men, P.D.| www.thepsmiths.com
Jane: So, it’s been almost year since I said, “hey, we should start a book review Substack” and I think it’s turned out pretty well.| 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
South Africa’s Brave New World: The Beloved Country Since The End Of Apartheid, R.W.| 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
As I’ve written before, I am an absolute sucker for alternate history. Most of it, unfortunately, is not very good, even by the standards of genre fiction’s transparent prose: the attraction here is really the idea, with all its surprising facets, so the best examples are typically the ones where the idea is so good, the unexpected ramifications so startling at the moment (but so obvious in retrospect), that you can forgive the cardboard characters and lackluster prose.| www.thepsmiths.com
The Variational Principles of Mechanics, Cornelius Lanczos (University of Toronto Press, 1949).| 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
How to Read a Tree: Clues and Patterns from Bark to Leaves, Tristan Gooley (The Experiment, 2023). Okay, I admit it: I read this book because I wanted to know more about the trees in my yard. I’m afraid that’s not how Tristan Gooley means it to be used. He’s an expert in what he terms “| 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
How To Be a Tudor: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Tudor Life, Ruth Goodman (Liveright, 2016). Ruth Goodman is a reënactor, costume drama and museum consultant, and historian of Tudor England “as it was lived”: not names and dates, nor tables of agricultural production by county, but the practical concerns of daily life from clothing to cooking to ploughing. We’ve already met her in| 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
