The Feminine Mystique (Betty Friedan)| theworthyhouse.com
I did not like this book as much as I expected. In part that’s because, as an American, a narrative of British decline resonates with me less deeply, simply because much of the culture, politics and daily life of Britain is not familiar to me. In part it’s because the book is written in a| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages (Anne Mendelson)| theworthyhouse.com
The American conservative movement is traditionally dated to 1955, the date William F. Buckley started National Review to “stand athwart history.” For decades, conservatives looked back to that event as some combination of Moses parting the Red Sea and Prometheus bringing fire to Man. Some still do, dreaming misty-eyed of the past as they fumble| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
This may be the worst well-written book I have ever read. That is, most awful books are bad in their writing, bad in their organization, bad in their reasoning, and bad in their typesetting. No such badness is evident here—How Democracies Die hits all the points it intends to, and reads crisply and smoothly. But| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
“Empire Of Cotton” is really two books. First, it’s an exhaustive exposition of the history of cotton as a textile raw material. That’s about 80% of the book, and by exhaustive I mean very, very exhaustive. Second, and unfortunately dominating, it’s a puerile, scattered, self-contradictory and confused attack on the Great Boogeyman “Capitalism,” along with| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
This is the story of a man—Robert de La Rouchefoucauld, scion of one of the oldest noble families in France, who lived from 1923 to 2012. He led a life in full; the focus of this book is his three years fighting against the Germans in France, as a résistant. It is a tale of| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Americans have always liked fighting stories: autobiographical and third person, fictional and non-fictional. From dime novels about outlaws and Indians to, more recently, war movies, Americans have vicariously enjoyed American combat, and American successes in combat. There are even meta fighting stories: an organizing frame of Clint Eastwood’s movie Unforgiven is a biographer trailing Eastwood’s| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
I did not have high hopes for this book. But I was wrong—this is an outstanding book. It’s way better than the middle book of the trilogy (One Year After), which was overly talky and seemed like filler. Sure, it’s not as awesome as Fortschen’s first book, One Second After—but it’s hard to capture lightning| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
This is a sprawling mess of a book. Flashes of arguably brilliant insight alternate with meandering musings. Fascinating narrow conclusions are drawn from carefully parsed evidence—and then sweeping conclusions are drawn from highly dubious evidence. Historical insights are used incisively in an argument—then the next argument is undermined by total historical illiteracy. At the end,| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
In this brief book, or rather pamphlet in the old political, Tom Paine-ish use of that term, law professor and well-known blogger Glenn Reynolds offers some thoughts on how the class structure of the judiciary affects judicial decisions. Rather than focus on the general class divide in American society, Reynolds focuses on that divide in| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Mark Lilla’s books are all polished gems, perfectly and fluidly written, brief yet complete within the ambit Lilla sets for each of his works. This book, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics, was written about a decade after the collapse of Communism. From its title, the casual browser might think it was a general attack| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
For no reason that is fully clear to me, I have always been fascinated by heresies. It matters to me what the difference between a Monothelite and a Monophysite is. Hence, I thought this book (from 1938, by the famous Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc) would survey various heresies and would explain, as its title says,| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
“Liberal Fascism” is really a history book, not the book of political analysis I expected it to be. I didn’t love this book (written in 2007—apparently a 2009 version is updated to include talk about Obama), even though it’s famous among conservatives. I’m not sure why I didn’t love this book. Maybe it’s because despite| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants is part history and part social analysis. The history related in The Attention Merchants tells us something we all basically know—that economic forces simultaneously drive businesses to offer us “free” entertainment, while at the same time making our attention to that entertainment a product to be sold to advertisers. Hence| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Anne-Marie Slaughter’s book is compelling. But too frequently it relies on unsupported, and in fact unvoiced, assumptions. And like a stick figure with one leg, the result is instability. “Unfinished Business” lays out a solid case for social change, buttressed by data and concluding in policy proposals. Unlike with most arguments nowadays for social change,| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise (Darío Fernández-Morera)| theworthyhouse.com
Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits, and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World (Noel Malcolm)| theworthyhouse.com
How We Got To Now (Steven Johnson)| theworthyhouse.com
Is Administrative Law Unlawful? (Philip Hamburger)| theworthyhouse.com
I oppose the theory and practice of Euro-multiculturalism as both stupid and suicidal. Thus, when I read Pankaj Mishra’s recent review of Rita Chin’s book in The New York Times, it struck me that, in order to be fair, I should read it. All work and no play makes Jack a dull and narrow boy,| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Mass immigration to Europe is one of those topics about which there is little mainstream discussion, both in the United States and even more so (paradoxically) in Europe. What discussion does happen is purely facile, on the “pro” side, or often lacking nuance, on the “anti” side. Douglas Murray’s book, The Strange Death of Europe,| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Last month, in December 2016, maybe as a Christmas gift to himself, Thomas Sowell announced that he was retiring. Technically, he announced that he was retiring from writing a syndicated column, but at age 86, it seems likely that he does not intend to write any new books, either. This is unfortunate, but his work| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Thomas Sowell’s latest book, published in 2015 and now revised a year later, is the usual tour-de-force. It’s not so much that there’s anything startlingly new (although there are some interesting new statistics and several new lines of thought), but that Sowell has a unique ability to clearly and concisely bring together an analysis. In| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Anthropology and ethnography are definitely not areas about which I know much, so it is hard for me to tell where this book fits into the professional literature. It is a hybrid—a book by a professional anthropologist, meant largely for a popular audience, but not written in a popular style. It is, however, a book| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (Theodore Dalrymple)| theworthyhouse.com
Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography (William F. Buckley)| theworthyhouse.com
To the extent most people ever think about Charles, Earl Cornwallis, they think of him as portrayed in Mel Gibson’s film The Patriot. There...| theworthyhouse.com
I am not sure how often most people think about death. For myself, I think about my death several dozen times per day. This is not a morbid fixation, merely focused self-interest combined with practicality. I have never understood those who refuse to think about their own deaths, or who do things such as decline […]| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past
To the extent most people ever think about Charles, Earl Cornwallis, they think of him as portrayed in Mel Gibson’s film The Patriot. There he is an aged, somewhat hapless, conflicted military officer, ultimately defeated at Yorktown, whereupon he sails back to England in disgrace. Little of this is true, and his life after the War of Independence was full of distinguished service to England, which pushed his service in the colonies to the background. And as this excellent biography shows, ...| theworthyhouse.com
I have long admired Hernán Cortes, conqueror of the Aztecs. He may not have gotten to Heaven, though who can say, but he exemplified the spirit of the West, that which from Charlemagne to Frémont drove the world forward. Fifth Sun would have us stop and shed a tear for the Aztecs, considering them on| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Starship Troopers, sixty years old, is a famous work of science fiction. As with most Robert Heinlein novels, the point is more the ideas than plot or character. Heinlein therefore often swerves dangerously close to message fiction, but it never becomes intolerable. This book is Heinlein’s vehicle to explain who he thinks should rule a| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
This is a ferociously erudite book. The author, David Gress, offers an analysis and synthesis of essentially all thought on the idea of the West, from the Greeks to the postmodernists, in a book that seems to contain more than its actual six hundred pages of small print. The amount of thought he presents is| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Barbara Holland’s “Gentlemen’s Blood” is a series of jaunty anecdotes about dueling through time and around the world. Most of it focuses on America and Britain, with side tours into Germany, France and Russia, touching on famous duelists like Pushkin (who ended up the worse for wear as a result). The book is interesting for| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Recent Appearances (May 2023)| theworthyhouse.com
Myths about Christianity abound, and some myths even pass as common knowledge. One myth is that Christians, after Jesus Christ started a new religion, worshipped in a very simple manner, revolving around undeveloped doctrines of love and sharing. Only later, we are often told (by both devout Protestants and by unbelievers, advancing different agendas) was| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
It has been a long time, a millennium and a half, since Ethiopia was a relevant player on the world stage. But I sometimes wonder if, as the present age grinds to its stupid end, the time of Ethiopia, with its ancient, self-confident Christian civilization, has come round again. Out of the corner of my| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
The Roman Empire, or at least the western Roman Empire, is a history of decline, as we all know. But not linear decline, and that matters. Ten Caesars, the latest offering from the always-excellent Barry Strauss, profiles the ten most consequential Roman emperors, narrating the ups and downs of the empire they ruled. Strauss’s book| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
When we think of Late Antiquity, we usually think of Rome, either its decline in the West or its continuation in the East. When we are feeling particularly adventurous, we may think of the Sassanid Persians, or ponder the stirrings of the Franks in the dark forests of Gaul. We usually don’t think of the| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Holy crap, this is a bad book. I like the Koch brothers. I agree with them politically, both philosophically and in their desire to actually punch back at liberals and change the status quo, rather than simply feeding money into the rathole of establishment politicians and tasseled-loafer conservative consultants. Their demonization by the Left is| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
My Appearance on “Tucker Carlson Today”: Full Version| theworthyhouse.com
We (Yevgeny Zamyatin)| theworthyhouse.com
The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition (Jonathan Tepper)| theworthyhouse.com
Orbánland: How I Came To Understand Viktor Orbán’s Hungary And The Future Of Europe (Lasse Skytt)| theworthyhouse.com
King of Dogs (Andrew Edwards)| theworthyhouse.com
The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol (Carl Schmitt)| theworthyhouse.com
Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (Chrystia Freeland)| theworthyhouse.com
Although no author likes to have his book lumped with another, this book is an excellent complement to Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants. Both books discuss, from different angles, possible practical reactions to the modern dominance of digital toys and tools. Today, when companies such as Facebook and Google are increasingly under fire from across| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Tyler Cowen is a popular economist, known for an influential blog (Marginal Revolution) and a set of books on economics directed at a general audience. In Average Is Over, a book from 2013, Cowen predicts an American future of increased economic (and thus social) division, as new technology enables those most conversant with it to| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
This is a famous book, but “Bowling Alone” was not what I expected. What I expected was social commentary. What I got was social science, proving with reams of statistics what is now a commonplace, that social capital in America has eroded massively over the past several decades. Of course, that it’s a commonplace is| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Whether this book is good or bad depends largely on what you expect it to be. If you expect it to be a cautious attempt to open up to discussion the subject of the existence of distinct races and genetic racial differences, and how those might affect social structures and institutions, you will think it| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
This book is part of the sub-genre that might be titled, if being honest, “Why Are All Today’s Rich People Europeans, Actually or Honorary”? It’s fascinating, though ultimately has, if not holes, lacunae that still need to be filled in before the argument becomes compelling. Clark’s basic thesis is that certain desirable social traits arising| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Strangers In A Strange Land (Charles Chaput)| theworthyhouse.com
Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town (Brian Alexander)| theworthyhouse.com
Among the many idols of our age, there is one that rules them all: John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, the belief that an individual’s choices may never be legitimately hampered, by anyone at all, except if he is harming others. Bizarrely, this idea, radical in 1860 when Mill published On Liberty, has now even been| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
James Bloodworth, an English sometime Trotskyite, has written a book which combines the television series Undercover Boss and George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. He took jobs in a variety of low-wage, low-security occupations to get first-hand knowledge about what it is like today to be a member of the largely invisible| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Jon Gertner’s The Idea Factory is a mild corrective to the commonly found anguished certainty that America’s days of innovative scientific greatness are behind us. In its exploration of the might and works of Bell Labs, this book reminds us that genius requires the right cultural environment to flourish, and it addresses whether collective or| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
This book is just not very good. I was excited to read The Rise and Fall of American Growth; it was extensively and positively reviewed and it promised to illuminate an important topic by giving extended, specific analysis. In particular, I wanted to learn about changes in productivity over time. Instead, I first got an| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism (James Stevens Curl)| theworthyhouse.com
I sometimes think of my project to pass Reaction through the refiner’s fire as beginning with the raw material of a simple stout tree, which has grown straight but has many branches. My task is to examine and prune those branches, and to plane down the tree to its core, creating a smooth and solid| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
I hate milk. I find many of the recipes in this book frankly loathsome, were I to try them, which I won’t. On the other hand, I like science and history (and ice cream). So despite my stomach churning at some of the recipes and descriptions, I actually enjoyed reading this book. Milk begins with| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Trotsky: A Biography (Robert Service)| theworthyhouse.com
More than twenty years ago, as a very young man, I traveled in Ukraine. In one place, the local authorities were excavating a mass grave from the 1930s. Hundreds of skeletons, men and women, many with flesh and clothes still attached, had been laid out on wooden platforms, for attempted identification before reburial. If you| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Reading this third volume of Richard Evans’s massive study of the Third Reich, scenes from the television show The Man in the High Castle kept flashing before my eyes. That show (based on a Philip K. Dick book) posits a National Socialist victory in World War II, and depicts how the postwar Greater German Reich| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Once upon a time, it seemed that Russell Kirk might, as he so devoutly wished, “redeem the time.” For two brief, shining moments, in the late 1950s and the early 1980s, Kirk’s efforts must have seemed to him like they might bear permanent fruit. But the moments passed, and it is clear now (in the| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
I recently wrote of the Finnish Civil War, where the Whites defeated the Reds. In the twentieth century, that pattern was unfortunately the exception, with the more common result being seen in the Russian Civil War of 1918–20, where the Russian Reds defeated the Russian Whites. That struggle, though not as forgotten as the Finnish| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
When we think of the Soviet Union, we mostly think of it as a fully realized totalitarian state. We think of Stalin, of World War II and of the Cold War. Lenin is a shadowy figure to most of us, usually lumped in with the chaos that preceded and surrounded the Russian Revolution. As a| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Most of us have only the dimmest idea of Russian history prior to the Soviet era. We’re vaguely aware that there were some Mongols, then Ivan the Terrible (not a Romanov), Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and then a mass slaughter by the Bolsheviks. Along the way there was lots of unpleasantness; Napoleon was| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Postwar, by the late Tony Judt, is the type of book for which the term “magisterial” might have been invented. Judt takes an enormous amount of information and condenses it down to a manageable narrative, not in the service of some overarching thesis, but simply to communicate the basic history of the period (namely, from| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
I read The Age of Reagan, the first volume of a massive two-volume biography, because I wanted to learn more about Ronald Reagan. I knew something about Reagan’s presidency, having been an adult for part of it, and that Reagan had been Governor of California, a popular speaker and commentator, head of the Screen Actors| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (Arlie Hochschild)| theworthyhouse.com
Lord of All the Dead (Javier Cercas)| theworthyhouse.com
I have long known in my gut that usual measures of social wealth, most of all GDP, are fraudulent, in that they falsely identify value where there is none. I have intuited we were all being lied to, and that those who assured us that ever more value was being generated by our society by| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
This book defies easy characterization. It is, to be sure, a biography of the last of the great German medieval emperors, Frederick II Hohenstaufen. But it vibrates with a subdued roar under the surface. By turns it is fierce, melodramatic, evocative, pitying, and electric. Maybe, in 1927, with Germany at its nadir, Ernst Kantorowicz was| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Attacks on digital technology for destroying our capacity for attention are a dime a dozen. Despite its title, Matthew Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head is not such an attack. It is far more ambitious. Somewhat to my surprise, it is a direct assault on the Enlightenment for ruining the habits of mind and practice| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
This classic book, by a long-dead and almost-forgotten German economist, is suddenly relevant again. I have had a copy on my bookshelf for thirty years, never read, and I was startled by how timely A Humane Economy is. Today, elements of Left and Right are ganging up to kick neoliberalism when it’s down, aiming to| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
This is not a book about how you can make more money as a plumber than by going to law school. It is, rather, a book of philosophy, revolving around thoughts on alienation, self-reliance, and what we owe to others. I found it to be both a bit rambling and unexpectedly deep—it manages to connect| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Naked Money, by Charles Wheelan, has a primary goal and two secondary goals. The primary goal, admirably accomplished, is to simply, but not simplistically, explain monetary policy. One secondary goal, also well accomplished, is to defend fiat money against those who call for going back to a currency backed by gold or some other physical| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Karl Polanyi)| theworthyhouse.com
Food City (Joy Santlofer)| theworthyhouse.com
Defying Hitler: A Memoir (Sebastian Haffner)| theworthyhouse.com
Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Mark Sedgwick)| theworthyhouse.com
Exhaustively documented, and in some ways just exhausting, though at the same time exhilarating, Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation is a towering achievement. It synthesizes centuries of history and multiple avenues of thought to analyze how we arrived at certain negative aspects of modernity. Gregory’s claim is that we got here as the result of| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
To my surprise, I found this to be an extremely topical book, even though it discusses only people long dead. It bridges, or at least brings more clarity to the framework of, recent bestselling books such as Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed and Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now. The former claims that the Enlightenment was a| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
The Gunpowder Age succeeds in its lesser goal, which is convincing the reader that the common belief the Chinese only used gunpowder for fireworks is wrong. But it fails in its greater goal, which is convincing the reader that except for a brief period in recent history, China has been the equal of the West| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
This book has a not-new thesis, beloved by Marxists and Charles Beard: that economic reasons were the real driver behind the Civil War. Actually, Charles Adams tells us that only one economic reason was the sole driver—increased tariffs dictated by the North. As with all ideologically driven analysis, this ignores that all complex happenings have| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
This is an excellent book, doubly excellent in that the writer, George Hawley, has written a book both even-handed and superbly accurate in detail about a difficult and controversial topic. I am personally deeply familiar with nearly all the facts covered in this book, and Hawley has not fallen into any significant error. Moreover, his| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Billed as a continuation, this book is really the chiral image of Michael Walsh’s earlier book, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace. That book was an attempt, with limited success, to outline and discuss the poisonous Frankfurt School of political philosophy, Critical Theory, through the prism of art. This book, on the other hand, aims to discuss| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
I stay away from the shouters, such as Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin. Sure, they’re right in their conclusions, most of the time, but the lack of nuanced thought annoys me. There are plenty of ways to get easily worked up today, without seeking out more that don’t offer a corresponding benefit. Angelo Codevilla is| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
This isn’t a great book, but it’s a starting point for discussions that are worth having. Richard Reeves gently flogs his own class for their sins, an act he thinks is very daring, though he uses a thin, silken cord and doesn’t put any muscle into it. The upper middle class, he says, is pulling| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Some years ago, I lived for a time in Oak Park, Illinois. Oak Park has for decades been filled with rich white liberals, who live just across the street from a City of Chicago neighborhood, Austin, that is filled with poor black people. Yet, for some reason the citizens of Oak Park simply can’t fathom,| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Published in 2014, this book has an eerie vibe, redolent of a past that seems distant but really was just yesterday. Intertwined with gentle criticisms of Nordic foibles is an iron self-confidence that “we,” a group constantly referred to but never defined, desire above all things “modernism”: absolute equality of result and a rejection of| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (John Carreyrou)| theworthyhouse.com
It is universally accepted today that the Dark Ages are a myth, roughly as believable as the Australian bunyip. In fact, medieval Europe was far more dynamic and far more intelligent than it was once portrayed. Certainly, post-Roman Europe underwent material decline, and it temporarily lost the high culture, and high thought, of Rome. But| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
This is a self-help book. I don’t mean it’s to be found in the bookstore under the sign “Self-Help,” where people gather to remake their lives by unlocking the secret of costless auto-regeneration. Rather, this is a self-help book because it, like the famous Kitchener poster, points at the reader and says, “You—there is a| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism (Ross Douthat)| theworthyhouse.com
Windfall: How the New Energy Abundance Upends Global Politics and Strengthens America’s Power (Meghan O’Sullivan)| theworthyhouse.com
We in America have long thought highly of ourselves. This feeling crested during the early Cold War, when most Americans believed that our “system,” our way of life, was superior to any other—especially Communism, but more broadly any based on any other values. Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize winner, was expelled from the Soviet Union in| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
My project here is to analyze, in the detail required for all necessary understanding, the thought of Curtis Yarvin, who wrote under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. Yarvin is the most prominent figure of what has been called the Dark Enlightenment, one thread of modern reactionary thought. My short summary is that he offers mediocre analysis| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Jason Brennan is The Man Who Was Born Yesterday. His book is incisive, insightful, interesting, funny, and well-informed. It delivers a sound and compelling case that democracy is fatally flawed. But everything he says in “Against Democracy” lacks depth, because he thinks that history began roughly twenty-four hours ago. So, while his analysis of democracy| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
