ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (March 2010): The Death of Conservatism by Sam Tanenhaus
When Ali Kokmen gave me a copy of this book, I was suspicious because it’s only 118 pages long, basically an extended version of the author’s New Republic article by the same title, but at that length, I figured I may [...]
ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (February 2010): Philosophy: Who Needs It by Ayn Rand (featuring the 1960 speech “Faith and Force: Destroyers of the Modern World”)
A fine anthology of philosophical essays and fiction snippets for the newcomer to Rand’s thinking, this collection contains in particular the aptly-titled speech “Faith and Force: Destroyers of the [...]
ToddSeavey.com Book Selections of the Month (January 2010)
Would you rather be a traditionalistic, sword-cane-owning British eccentric, devoted to his wife, living in the early days of the twentieth century — or a highly attractive young person in the early twenty-first century having covert sex on an airplane?
This is the question with which I was confronted [...]
ToddSeavey.com Book Selections of the Month (December 2009):
Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice by James Cabell
Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees
Descent into Hell by Charles Williams
If proudly amoral people, lesbians in academia, and Christians with a theatrical bent are your idea of a good time — and aren’t they everyone’s? — you’ve come to the right Christmas Eve [...]
OK, my Earthlink e-mail seems fine again — and tonight’s Debate at Lolita Bar about NASA just got a little better, too, as I have decided to create a little synergy between this month’s debate and this month’s ToddSeavey.com Book Selection.
That’s right, in order to remind everyone how high the stakes are as we debate [...]
ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (November 2009): Chronicles of the Lensmen, Vol. I by E.E. “Doc” Smith
Having recently abandoned comics and TV reception, the next step is to abandon sci-fi and fantasy novels (simply because life is short and there are other things in need of doing). I have arguably saved the goofiest [...]
I suppose I deserve my ironic fate, trying to scrounge up a leftist for next week’s debate, since I’ve spent this “Month of Utopia” (a) being skeptical of mostly-left idealism, (b) arguing against left-leaning libertarians, and (c) saying nice things about Ayn Rand in GQ.
However, I should note, lest I seem too narrow-minded, that I [...]
Our protagonist wakes up, his memory having been erased, on a prison planet on which the prisoners are allowed to do anything they want — and, being rotten people, what they want to do is construct a rigidly hierarchical society based on murder, slavery, and comically heartless opportunism. Indeed, he eventually learns from a [...]
In 1990, just after European Communism collapsed (about which, more next month), I was at Brown amid socialists, many of them calling themselves “liberals.” Brown professor James Morone’s book The Democratic Wish came out that year and must have caused at least some Brown students to worry that their utopian dreams were not likely [...]
This book is sufficiently obscure that it is not even mentioned as a used book on Amazon, but it exists — and I’m lucky Helen spotted it on a shelf at the Strand used books store. In it, William B. Scott (not, as far as I know, the same one who writes about aviation [...]
I read of both Newt “Real Change” Gingrich and Mitt “insurance mandates” Romney recently saying we need to “get beyond” idolizing Reagan and thinking he holds the answers for today’s problems. David “Comeback!” Frum has written much the same thing, with unforgivably greater length and detail that shows more forethought (and even greater deference to [...]
Off to jury duty this morning, reminded again that much of the staying power of majoritarian democracy comes from the hollow pretense that when we do things (like jury duty) collectively, we are doing them with a common will, like one multi-part organism acting in unison — when in truth most of us are simply [...]
As I promised author Jeff Madrick, I read his book The Case for Big Government, and the case is very weak. A mostly-unrepentant FDR-admiring liberal who fears Obama won’t go far enough (as well as a New School economist and former New York Times economics columnist), Madrick does not so much present an argument [...]
My boss was recently traveling in China — seeing firsthand the explosion of economic activity that can occur in a place like Shanghai when a totalitarian government even partially gets out of the way and allows commercial activity to occur.
Alas, at the very same time she was over there, it was being revealed over here [...]
•I very rarely plug a book I haven’t actually read, but there is one that I was planning to read as a counterpoint to the “Month of Utopia” entries I’ve been doing that I didn’t get around to: Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony by Robert B. Edgerton.
•My understanding, though, is that it [...]