Alexandra Robbins has made a career out of exploring the lives of the young and ambitious, whether it's the overscheduled kids of the upscale suburbs or the social climbing of the southern sororities, and she continues her work in Fraternity: An Inside Look at a Year of College Boys Becoming Men.  The "becoming" leaves the "boys" at different ( Read more... )

It's a frequent theme of mine, and it's likely something everyone has in mind, if, perhaps, a different list of lamentations.  Consider Bill McKibben's The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.  The simplest way to motivate Book Review No. 11 is to view the ( Read more... )

Kurt Schlichter's We'll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America is his chronicling of the concatenation of E-T-T-S moments that followed the Pinnacle of American Greatness, which he identifies as late February, 1991, when his armored carwashing unit had precisely ... no tanks or trucks to decontaminate, as the Vaunted Republican Guards decided being ( Read more... )

Francis Spufford opens his Red Plenty with "This is not a novel.   It has too much to explain, to be one of those.  But it is not a history either, for it does its explaining in the form of a story ... The idea is the hero. ... Best to call this a fairytale, then - though it really happened, or something like it."  A blurb on the cover of my ( Read more... )

You get Geoffrey Hodgson's Wrong Turnings: How the Left Got Lost, which he intends as a reproach to his comrades among the Anointed, and which Book Review No. 7 notes, works well as a defense of Scottish Enlightenment concepts that at one time might have been a logic manual for pushing that Social Progress.  That pivot to the Scottish Enlightenment ( Read more... )

After my recent series of mini-dissertations, a change of pace.

Robin DiAngelo's Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm provides for an opportunity to offer a succinct Book Review No. 4.

The correct answer to that "how" is "by enabling dysfunction and calling it affirming diversity."  That's not where she goes, but it ( Read more... )

The Strong Towns site has been a useful source of information on urban form.  The aspect of their approach that most appeals to me is that its participants are able to make some of the same points more technocratic observers of the built environment, such as the smart growth advocates, make, without the implicit scolding of apostates or explicit ( Read more... )

Book 19: Culture Smart! Finland: the essential guide to customs & culture by Terttu Leney - 165 pages

Description from bookdepository.co.uk:Culture Smart! provides essential information on attitudes, beliefs and behavior in different countries, ensuring that you arrive at your destination aware of basic manners, common courtesies, and sensitive ( Read more... )

There's a large pile of books still to be reviewed, and I'll start the 2020 count with Mary Grabar's Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America.

This Book Review No. 1 will not deal with the content of the book to any length, as I am more interested in its usefulness in helping teachers, whether as ( Read more... )

Four months ago, I professed to be less than impressed with Yale's Daniel Markovits, who apparently clawed his way to the top of the status hierarchy only to complain about the struggles to get there.  I've subsequently acquired and read his The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and ( Read more... )