ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (August 2010): After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World by A.N. Wilson
Before we get to England: I wrote about the Victorian-era goings-on in my own hometown, Norwich, CT, in last month’s Book Selection entry — and I’m still learning things about the Norwich of that era, [...]
ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (July 2010): Victorian Norwich by Arthur Lester Lathrop
Until Helen gave me a copy, I had no idea anyone had written a book about the town I grew up in, Norwich, CT (there’s been more than one such book, apparently).
Thanks to Lathrop’s tome, which depicts the different-yet-very-familiar Norwich of the [...]
ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (June 2010): Victorian Vista by James Laver
First: If you’re Victorian enough to dislike burlesque, please contact me immediately — per the Contact page in my front page right margin — and volunteer to be our anti-burlesque debater at Lolita Bar next week. In this town, alas, it’s easier [...]
ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (May 2010): English Thought in the Nineteenth Century by D.C. Somervell
What a great find. I had intended to blog about this rich, philosophical, and surprisingly funny little book earlier in the month (sorry — new job) and now realize I wouldn’t have been doing half bad if I’d [...]
ToddSeavey.com Book Selections of the Month (April 2010): History of the Goths by Herwig Wolfram and Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford
Look closely at some old thing thought to be more cohesive and coherent than our divisive modern age and you usually find that the old thing, too, was [...]
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 [...]