It slipped through our fingers like sand through the hourglass! We nearly fainted with the outpouring of yearly best-of lists and insightful mentions. We’re too overwhelmed to keep everything under wraps until Thursday next—we offer the below, with humility for the tardy appearance of this post and fervor for the warp and weft of a wrap-up of that week that was:
“This must be Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays.”

The Boston Globe reviews The Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World, our most recent offering from the “outrageously prolific and always fascinating” economist and writer, Deirdre N. McCloskey. “The latest chapter in what has to be one of the most interesting scholarly careers in America today.” We agree!
Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time finds worthy mention at the Atlantic‘s “The Best Book I Read This Year” series. “It’s a particularly interesting book to read in one’s twenties.” Hey, we remember when we wrote at the Atlantic in our tw—wait, the Atlantic (Monthly)? Er, nevermind. That ship has sailed, Christopher Cross. That ship has sailed.
Jonathan Messinger commends Larry Bennett’s The Third City: Chicago and American Urbanism with a solid tagline in Time Out Chicago—”a fascinating portrait of the city.”
Berggasse 19: Sigmund Freud’s Home and Offices, Vienna 1938, The Photographs of Edmund Engelman. We published it in 1976! It’s one of the Art Newspaper’s Best Books this Year! Better grab a copy fast before Doc Brown rewires the DeLorean to go BACK TO THE FUTURE!

Note to self: nuns still going wild. See here and here (a charming interview in the Boston Globe with Nuns Behaving Badly author Craig Monson).
The Chronicle of Higher Education is just as excited as we are about Nicole R. Fleetwood’s Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness. Fleetwood, an American studies scholar at Rutgers University, analyzes a persistent presumption in American culture: that seeing blackness is problematic.
Do you follow the Millions and their “Year in Reading” feature? If you do, you’ve already seen Seth Mnookin drop Richard Stark’s Parker novels as a worthy pursuit for your addictive tendencies and/or thief/antihero fixation. If they’re good enough for James Franco, then truly: what more do you need?
Rebecca Messbarger, author of The Lady Anatomist: The Life and Work of Anna Morandi Manzolini, was recently featured in an extended profile devoted to her research and ideas at the Washington University site. As if her study of one of the Enlightenment’s most renowned anatomical wax modelers and burgeoning feminist icons couldn’t get more interesting, Messbarger has her own story to tell: “I should have been a doctor,” she says. “I love reading anything about anatomy. I get so excited about it. I’m the person at the cocktail party who can’t stop talking about their work.” Three cheers, Rebecca!
Looking for gifts for Your Father, The Architect (film reference sleight of hand)? The San Francisco Chronicle recommends Blair Kamin’s Terror and Wonder: Architecture in a Tumultuous Age (excerpt here), while the Wall Street Journal endorses Stanley Greenberg’s Architecture under Construction (image gallery available here).
And finally, Ruth Franklin praises Robert K. Elder’s “extraordinary” Last Words of the Executed for The Read’s “Books I Missed” column at the New Republic.
Did I miss anything?