Jurgen Brauer's 3 favorite reads in 2025

• 2023
• 2024
• 2025

I am an academic economist (retired) whose career always has had a strong interdisciplinary orientation. Among other fields, I have long been interested in psychology, especially social psychology, but also been skeptical of the tendency among its practitioners to use convenience samples of handy crowds of U.S. (or otherwise "western") undergraduate students to draw grand conclusions about human behavior. Prof. Henrich, a cultural anthropologist (and aerospace engineer!), shares this skepticism. In particular, he presents in this book theory and evidence of how WEIRD people in the Western world are relative to the majority of peoples elsewhere. (WEIRD = people in western, educated, industrialized, rich, developed countries.) This matches my own experiences across the world, and so I was curious to read this book. Culture, Prof. Henrich writes, influences brain development and results in persistent ways of seeing the world, and vice versa. Culture and psychological form and reform each other -- but differently across different cultures, often to dramatic effect. In laying out his theory, he combines evidence from across the social sciences, often with great ingenuity and much caution as to what studies can and cannot say. I think you'll find this book illuminating. To get a better handle on some of the evidence and claims the book makes, I am currently discussing it chapter by chapter with my daughter, a neuroscientist and biopsychologist. So far, so good: It is a serious book, lightly written for a general audience.

Not only, but perhaps especially in the United States, people seem far more uncomfortable thinking about sexual relations ("sex") than its overt presence in the arts, media, religion, and politics might suggest. The discussion in this book, written by a retired Oxford professor, starts about a thousand years before Christ, to capture the underlying currents of the existing mores of Christ's time. Thus, you get an erudite reading of some 3,000 years of argument about sex and how the evolving church (or rather churches, for there were and are many branches) has struggled to read and interpret its holy scripts in regard to intimate relations among humans. I won't be giving anything away here. Or perhaps just this nugget: did you know that marriage in church, still an aspiration, and even norm, for modern-day couples today, is an invention that dates back only about one thousand years? How and why would the church claim a say over how people marry, and why did marriage arrangement via the church start only midway through the Christian era? Read all about it in this fascinating book, whose only drawback is that the good professor writes at times with a heavy hand. Take your time, then, to read, discuss, and digest this valuable dissection of sex and the church.

Wow! What a romp across 5,000 years of time to study and understand the "cradle of civilization". Iraq, of course, should be familiar to U.S. and other readers given the very many recent wars that involved its lands and peoples. Mr. Bull first traveled there as a war correspondent, and his journalism background is evident in his writing. That said, he's certainly made an impressive go of drawing together a vast amount of scholarship. The modern nation-state of "Iraq" is, like most places, a mishmash of peoples and their cultures. Mesopotamia, its more general name, is literally the land between the (Euphrates and Tigris) rivers. Connecting Africa, Asia, and Europe, for ages it was the center of trade routes crisscrossing the land from north, south, east, and west. He who controlled the routes controlled the riches of trade. No wonder the land has been both, settled and contested for millennia. An illuminating read, and highly recommended.