We'll close this year of reading with Neil Howe's The Fourth Turning is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End.  We're all the way to Book Review No. 16 and I really should rethink how much energy to devote to what areas of venting and ranting I engage in in 2024.

If popular books were presented and sold ( Read more... )

I had Roger Koppl's Expert Failure along for reading the evening the DeKalb Municipal Band played a tune inspired by the Omaha Nation dividing itself into two sub-tribes, one responsible for the defense of the nation, the other with the spiritual health of the people.  (There might have been something similar among the Tribes of Israel, but I'm not ( 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... )

On the lighter side, Book Review No. 8 features Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World.  Although authors Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell are academic economists, with degrees from Florida State and George Mason, and, as of 2019, institutional affiliations with Southern Methodist and Texas Tech, theirs is ( 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... )

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John Andrew's The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics is part of an academic series called Perspectives on the Sixties, and that series and this book might be unusual in that it's not part of the usual Celebration of the Counterculture that one often sees among academic writers, particularly ( Read more... )

Major Garrett and David Becker's The Big Truth:  Upholding Democracy in the Age of THE BIG LIE pretty well tells readers what their message is and what their priors are.  Let me open Book Review No. 3 by expressing general agreement with their central message, about the 2020 presidential election, which is that Donald Trump failed to turn out ( Read more... )

Here it is, the end of April, and now comes Book Review No. 1, George Will's The Conservative Sensibility.  It's another book I engaged with extensively, as my end-notes and underlinings indicate.  The book might better be understood as The Libertarian Sensibility, at least that's the impression I got.  The preface spells out where Mr Will intends ( Read more... )

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