ToddSeavey.com

7 Responses to Book Selections

1. [...] 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). [...]

   ToddSeavey.com » Blog Archive » Conservatism and Punk | 10:50 am on the 25th of October, 2007

2. [...] •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. [...]

   ToddSeavey.com » Blog Archive » Libertarian Blues | 11:04 am on the 17th of November, 2007

3. [...] 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. [...]

   ToddSeavey.com » Blog Archive » Book Selection of the Month: Todd Seavey! (now with Bibliography) | 9:27 pm on the 26th of November, 2007

4. [...] 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). [...]

   ToddSeavey.com » Blog Archive » Retro-Journal: Across America in Late ‘91 | 3:15 am on the 14th of December, 2007

5. [...] 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. [...]

   ToddSeavey.com » Blog Archive » A Review of the Candidates, from Paul to Clinton | 6:04 pm on the 16th of December, 2007

6. [...] 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.” [...]

   ToddSeavey.com » Blog Archive » Book Selection of the Month: “Liberal Fascism” by Jonah Golderg (plus war and globalism) | 3:45 pm on the 23rd of December, 2007

7. [...] 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. [...]

   ToddSeavey.com » Blog Archive » Kerouac (Mr. Beatnik) vs. Ron Paul (Mr. Fission) | 6:53 am on the 25th of September, 2008