Books of the month — January 2024
Five books, briefly reviewed: Karl Sigmund on the Vienna Circle, Hanno Sauer, Alizée Delpierre, Thomas Bernhard, and Spiegelhalter's The Art of Statistics.
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El sueño del Círculo de Viena. Karl Sigmund. A phenomenal book. It moves at a fantastic pace despite the extensive documentation behind it, and it manages to tell, with real charm, one of the most interesting intellectual adventures of recent history.
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The Invention of Good and Evil. A World History of Morality. Hanno Sauer. The kind of book you can underline from cover to cover. :) Unlike more usual approaches, it does not focus on moral philosophy —what would be inside our heads— but on its realisation: cities, laws, practices. Wearing those glasses, it walks through history in order to understand the present. It brings in the empirical contribution of many disciplines (genetics, palaeontology, anthropology...) and points to a sort of uncomfortable truth behind everything that allows us to live the way we live.
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Les domesticités. Alizée Delpierre. A good sociological survey of domestic labour. It continues the research of her previous book, Servir les riches, which focused on the more striking aspects of domestic service among the very wealthy.
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Correction. Thomas Bernhard. Brilliant. I had been meaning to get into this writer, and I started with this story full of rivers of sentences that stay murmuring in your head, rather in the manner of Houellebecq.
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The Art of Statistics. Learning from Data. David Spiegelhalter. Essential. The best introduction to statistical concepts I have found so far, built out of practical cases. It handles probability in a way that is entirely different from the usual, and I think that makes it more comprehensible. Highly recommended for anyone who works with data and would rather not do it blindly. ;)