I've been quiet on the blog lately while I've been tearing through history books. I've now amassed a small backlog of book summaries to type up and publish.

As my posts of the last six months indicate, I've been fascinated with the "rise of the West," and I've already published six reviews on books related to capitalism and medieval history, but I've got many more in the hopper:

A few months ago, I finished Bruce Campbell's epic book The Great Transition, which describes the transition from the High Middle Ages (1100s) through to the Age of Sail (1400s), climaxing with the Black Plague (1300s). That story is surprisingly coherent. I just finished organizing my highlights from the book — 45,000 words, a novella in itself. I'm going to try to briskly summarize those notes.

I also read How the West Came to Rule, a great post-colonial history of the "rise of the West," and Robert Ekelund's Economic Origins of Roman Christianity, the first in Ekelund's three-part economic history of Christianity. I also read a large chunk of Nancy Folbre's Who Pays for the Kids, which includes a very interesting feminist read on Medieval English history.

My biggest outstanding book report is on David Graeber and David Wengrow's epic The Dawn of Everything, which lays out a theory of history based on three types of freedom and three types of domination.

At the same time, I've been working on the framework that renders this website, which I'd like to publish publicly soon. That's all to say: watch this space.