Like the Grinch I am, I thought I would spend Christmas harassing family members by reading passages from "The Communist Manifesto." Here's the resulting book review. Enjoy 🙂
Book review: Karl Marx’s “The Communist Manifesto”
Book review: “The Righteous Mind” by Jonathan Haidt
I just finished reading Jonathan Haidt's most recent book The Codding of the American Mind, and I wanted to go to his original work The Righteous Mind which he wrote back in 2012. I was already familiar with some of the ideas in The Righteous Mind from his TED talk, "The Moral Roots of Liberals... Continue Reading →
Book review: “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure”
Rating 5/5 Goodreads Summary The generation now coming of age has been taught three Great Untruths: their feelings are always right; they should avoid pain and discomfort; and they should look for faults in others and not themselves. These three Great Untruths are part of a larger philosophy that sees young people as fragile creatures... Continue Reading →
He who only knows his own side knows little of that: Review of “Conflict of Visions”
Rating: 4/5 Goodreads blurb Controversies in politics arise from many sources, but the conflicts that endure for generations or centuries show a remarkably consistent pattern. In this classic work, Thomas Sowell analyzes this pattern. He describes the two competing visions that shape our debates about the nature of reason, justice, equality, and power: the "constrained"... Continue Reading →
Dogs of God: Columbus, The Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors
Rating: 4/5 A beautifully crafted narrative about the three pivotal events that all converged in the year 1492: the Spanish Inquisition, the defeat of the Spanish Moors, and the voyage of Columbus. The basic premise is that these three events, while portrayed with religious and apocalyptic imagery, were all used as tools of the state... Continue Reading →
Fake news before it was cool: Book review of Noam Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent”
Rating 3/5 Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent argues that, while America's free press is generally believed to be a constraint on government, keep it honest, and provide opposing viewpoints, the exact opposite it true in practice; America's press becomes an organ of the state sticking to the narrative structure provided by the federal government, and providing justification... Continue Reading →
Book review of “Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations”
Rating: 5/5 Goodreads blurb: Humans are tribal. We need to belong to groups. In many parts of the world, the group identities that matter most - the ones that people will kill and die for - are ethnic, religious, sectarian, or clan-based. But because America tends to see the world in terms of nation-states engaged... Continue Reading →
The Politics of Cultural Despair
I forget exactly where this book popped up initially-- but I assume it was a Goodreads recommendation based on some of the politically oriented books or German history books I've been into as of late. Here's the Goodreads blurb: This is a study in the pathology of cultural criticism. By analyzing the thought and influence... Continue Reading →
A Mormon and an existentialist go into a bar: Book review of “At the Existentialist CafĂ©”
These past few months, I have been trying to read a book simultaneously with various friends, and this is the second thus far (my previous co-read was "The Spiritual Roots of Human Relations" which I read with my dad). "The Existentialist Cafe" was next on my list, which I read in conjunction with my friend... Continue Reading →
