January 2012: Instead of a Book Selections entry: I.P., Best Essays, David Brooks, more
December 2011: The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature – and comics
November 2011: the Renaissance, Rev. Jen, the Michelin Man, and more
October 2011: The Recipe Project (with One Ring Zero, Tanya Donelly, and more)
September 2011 (3 of 3): The Steampunk Bible by Jeff VanderMeer
September 2011 (2 of 3): Lord Macaulay's History of England (plus Michael Lind)
September 2011 (1 of 3): Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
August 2011 (4 of 4): Destroy All Movies! The Complete Guide to Punk on Film
August 2011 (3 of 4): Are You Serious? by Lee Siegel (plus prog rock, seasteading, and more)
August 2011 (2 of 4): a dozen free speech items (four of which are books)
August 2011 (1 of 4): The Science of Evil by Simon Baron-Cohen
July 2011 (4 of 4): Miles Gone By by William F. Buckley (plus a banjo player)
July 2011 (3 of 4): Exposing the Real Che Guevara by Humberto Fontova
July 2011 (2 of 4): The Essential American, Jackie Gingrich Cushman and Newt Gingrich, eds.
July 2011 (1 of 4): Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea (and Transformers)
June 2011: Scanlon, Thurber, Dennett, and humor
May 2011: comics and sci-fi including Book of Genesis and Umbrella Academy
April 2011: zombie book and film selection including World War Z
March 2011: Death of the Liberal Class and How to Disappear
February 2011: ten capitalistic works (including Todd Seavey dancing)
January 2011: Passing Strange by Joseph A. Citro
December 2010: Hitchens, Ridley, Narnia, and more
October 2010: Proud to Be Right (including Todd Seavey's "Conservatism for Punks" essay)
September 2010: The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism by Martin Sklar
August 2010: After the Victorians by A.N. Wilson
July 2010: Victorian Norwich by Arthur Lester Lathrop
June 2010: Victorian Vista by James Laver
May 2010: English Thought in the Nineteenth Century by D.C. Somervell
April 2010: History of the Goths and Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
March 2010: The Death of Conservatism by Sam Tanenhaus
February 2010: Philosophy: Who Needs It by Ayn Rand
January 2010: Aristotle, Chesterton, D. Friedman, Bussel, In Character
December 2009: Cabell, Mirrlees, and Williams
November 2009: Chronicles of the Lensmen by E.E. “Doc” Smith
October 2009: “Month of Utopia” surveying many texts
September 2009: The Gate of Time by Philip Jose Farmer
August 2009: Dan Greenberg picks 25 great sci-fi stories
July 2009: The Devil’s Piper by Susan Price
June 2009: The Great Rock ’N’ Roll Swindle by Michael Moorcock
May 2009: “Nine Billion Names of God” and more by Arthur C. Clarke
April 2009: Dumbocracy, greens, Muppets, and general idiocracy
March 2009: Watchmen, Peanuts, Terry Gilliam, and the Futurists
February 2009: Ray Bradbury and several new/old items
January 2009: Lawyers, guns, and money (and Dick)
December 2008: Eight religion-related items
November 2008: Global warming round-up
October 2008: Three Thousand Dollars by David Lipsky
September 2008: The Dangerous Joy of Doctor Sex by Pagan Kennedy
August 2008: American Nerd by Benjamin Nugent and Being Logical by D.Q. McInerny
July 2008: Critical Review, edited by Jeffrey Friedman
June 2008: Sources of the Self by Charles Taylor
May 2008: Final Crisis by Grant Morrison and J.G. Jones
April 2008: Rapture Ready! by Daniel Radosh
March 2008 bonus: William F. Buckley's Getting It Right
March 2008: Right, left, and libertarian books
February 2008 (4 of 4): The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
February2008 (3 of 4): The Best of H.P. Lovecraft
February 2008 (2 of 4): The Irrational Atheist by Vox Day
February 2008 (1 of 4): Atheist Manifesto by Michel Onfray
January 2008: Made in America by Matt Hughes with Michael Malice
December 2007: Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg (plus war and globalism)
November 2007: Todd Seavey! (now with Bibliography)
October 2007: Prince of Darkness and Crunchy Cons
September 2007: Comic Books!
August 2007: Seven books on science — and its opposite!
July 2007: I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter
June 2007: Rules for Saying Goodbye by Katherine Taylor
May 2007: Girlbomb by Janice Erlbaum
April 2007: The First Man-Made Man by Pagan Kennedy
March 2007: Radicals for Capitalism by Brian Doherty
February 2007: The Death of Common Sense by Philip K. Howard
January 2007: After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre
December 2006: Thrill of the Chaste by Dawn Eden/A Christmas Caroline by Kyle Smith
November 2006: Natural Right and History by Leo Strauss
TODD SEAVEY author of Libertarianism for Beginners and writer of/speaker about many other things
7 comments:
[...] The other trending-libertarian note for the week is less surprising: I spoke briefly to National Review’s Jonah Goldberg at the International Policy Network awards event where he took third prize (for the year’s best market-oriented columns), and he said writing his upcoming book, Liberal Fascism, did make him a bit more libertarian. I’ve seen an advance copy of the book and will write about it more as my Book Selection of the Month for December, but for now I’ll just say that it’s probably going to surprise a lot of people with the breadth of its condemnation of statism across the modern political spectrum. It’s not going to be just an Ann Coulter-type left-as-punching-bag book (vegan-bashing subtitle and so forth notwithstanding). [...]
[...] •Mona Charen, in an NRO piece likening Paul to David Koresh, proved herself to be one of those neocons — ah, but then, according to the juvenile Charen, I have just engaged in anti-Semitism by calling her a neocon — even though I’ve probably referred to myself as sort of a neocon at some point over the years (you may have read my Retro-Journal entry about being influenced by Leo Strauss via Alan Bloom — and I just finished reading a book by Norman Podhoretz, which I’ll describe at greater length in December’s Book Selection of the Month entry). Charen merely notes that Paul criticizes neocons and that some people use the term to refer primarily to conservatives of Jewish ancestry. [...]
[...] No, I haven’t finished writing a book (though Conservatism for Punks will exist eventually, sooner rather than later, I hope — and for a little right/left remixing in the interim, check out what’s on deck for our Dec. 5 Debate at Lolita Bar, now that I’ve found a hawk and dove to spar). However, I have written book reviews — not just the twelve monthly Book Selection entries that preceded the one you’re reading now (which began even before the blog was fully operational) but previous reviews for venues like New York Post and People magazine. [...]
[...] So it was that I lived for three (undeserved) pleasant months — at least, pleasant when I managed to keep my mind off the job anxiety — in a big house with a few friends including fellow ex-Film Bulletin writer Holly Caldwell and her boyfriend Jake. Yet there were moments when even that coziness had a tinge of unspoken dread, like something out of the horror stories of H.P. Lovecraft, who had lived in and written about Providence (one of his best-known protagonists, from the story “The Call of Cthulhu,” was a Brown professor — but more about that in my February Book Selection of the Month essay). [...]
[...] Then again…I have long thought the cold-blooded Hillary is more ideological than her jovial, approval-seeking husband, and as I’ve learned from Jonah Goldberg’s impending book Liberal Fascism (which I’ll review on this site next week as my Book Selection of the Month), she is no mere emotionless, unphilosophical bean-counter but rather a woman schooled since an early age in a religious-left outlook that requires approaching earthly reforms with zeal and forging a sense of community centered on government (what Bill called “The New Covenant” back in 1992, as I’ll recount in this coming Friday’s Retro-Journal entry), a politicized, nation-sized version of community that nonetheless rivals the closeness of a religious sect or, if you will, a village. [...]
[...] Goldberg also reminds readers of the immense popularity of eugenics, across the political spectrum and among all the high-minded idealists of the interwar period (witness George Bernard Shaw’s unbridled enthusiasm for combining socialist economic planning with eugenic reproductive planning — and come back in February for my analysis of another brilliant yet eugenics-influenced writer of the 1920s, H.P. Lovecraft, as that month’s Book Selection). That is troubling enough to make me rethink my casual use of the word as a neutral or even positive thing when promoting biotech, which is quite a different, less centralized, less authoritarian phenomenon — voluntary, piecemeal enhancement for unforeseen but diverse ends vs. enforced purity and a single, all-natural “ideal.” [...]
[...] If it all leads to the complete triumph of the left, will I at least be able to console myself with the thought that the world may become less religious and thus less superstitious? Probably not, argues my fried Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (libertarian, religious) in a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, in which she recounts stats suggesting that as people drift away from mainstream religion, they usually just adopt other, sometimes even weirder superstitions (the article was pointed out to me by history professor Christine Caldwell Ames, whose impending book on the Inquisition will be one of my December Book Selections). Bill Maher, star of the upcoming anti-religion movie Religulous, Hemingway notes, does not believe in vaccines, aspirin, or the germ theory of disease. [...]
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