Month: February 2017

Strangers In A Strange Land (Charles Chaput)

This is a self-help book. I don’t mean it’s to be found in the bookstore under the sign “Self-Help,” where people gather to remake their lives by unlocking the secret of costless auto-regeneration. Rather, this is a self-help book because it, like the famous Kitchener poster, points at the reader and says, “You—there is a problem, and you are the solution.” Of course, since the author, Charles Chaput, is a bishop (and an archbishop at that), and this is not Pelagianism, the reader is not expected to act in isolation, but with the guidance and help of God. He is to act nonetheless, and much hinges on what he does.

Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World (Justin Marozzi)

Published by Charles Haywood

I, and many others, have been exhausted in recent months by the nonstop political noise machine. So I pulled this book off the shelf, figuring that a biography of the 14th Century warlord Tamerlane would be pretty much non-political. Maybe not as non-political as a coffee table book about, say, flowers, but close, and to me more interesting. I was not disappointed. This book proved an informative escape—depressing at times, certainly, like any tale of violence, but at least I didn’t have to think or talk about 21st Century politics at any time, and won’t in this review. For like all of us, I am weary unto death of all that (though not weary enough to not return to it).

The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Robert Gordon)

Published by Charles Haywood

This book is just not very good. I was excited to read The Rise and Fall of American Growth; it was extensively and positively reviewed and it promised to illuminate an important topic by giving extended, specific analysis. In particular, I wanted to learn about changes in productivity over time. Instead, I first got an interminable, plodding exposition, which repeated commonly known facts ad nauseum for its first 600 pages. But I soldiered on, knowing that the last 100 pages were analysis of current problems and of future productivity. I should have cut my losses—those last 100 pages are exemplars of rank illogic and incoherence. It didn’t end there, either—the book is then, at the last, capped by shrill, unsupported demands that America ingest a massive dose of insufferable and, at best, non-effective, leftist nostrums, considerably more pernicious than the 19th Century patent medicines the author unoriginally decries. When I finished this book, I had to drink a fifth of cheap whiskey just to dull the pain, but now that the hangover is gone, I …

The Weapon Shops of Isher (A.E. van Vogt)

Published by Charles Haywood

The right to be armed is the right to be free! This call, like the battle cry of the Archangel Michael, Who is like God?!, echoes down the ages of Man. If you are not armed, you are always wholly at the mercy of tyrants. Who can argue with such a truism? A lot of people, actually. For the phrase does not, in fact, echo down the ages of Man. It dates only to 1941, when this book, a now obscure science fiction classic, was first published—and the principle itself is not much older. So, rather than making this review the pro-weapons screed my (few) readers doubtless expect, I will explore the principle itself—in particular its limitations within a conservative philosophical framework.

The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order: 1964-1980 (Steven Hayward)

Published by Charles Haywood

I read The Age of Reagan, the first volume of a massive two-volume biography, because I wanted to learn more about Ronald Reagan. I knew something about Reagan’s presidency, having been an adult for part of it, and that Reagan had been Governor of California, a popular speaker and commentator, head of the Screen Actors Guild, and an actor himself. But I knew very little about how Reagan came to be President. This book filled in many of the gaps. However, as the author, Steven Hayward, makes clear up front, it is a book not about Reagan, but the Age of Reagan. That is, it covers American political life from 1964 to 1980, with Reagan as a key character, but it is not really a biography of Reagan, at least in the traditional sense.

The Golden Key (George MacDonald)

Published by Charles Haywood

This is a very famous book, not quite children’s fairy tale and not quite adult allegory—or rather, it’s both, and more. As fairy tale and as allegory, it has so light a touch as to be ethereal, combined with a feeling of enormous substance. There is, for child or adult, little obvious moral, yet the reader is left with a feeling of transcendence. Quite an accomplishment in what is really just a short story, and doubtless why the book is still famous today.

Colloquy: On Christian Duty As Related To President Trump’s Executive Order On Immigration

Published by Charles Haywood

[This is designed to be a colloquy regarding the recent executive order by President Trump, relying on authority granted by Congress to temporarily bar most entry into the US by individuals from seven named, predominantly Muslim, countries. As always, responses of interlocutors are in italics, color-coded to differentiate different interlocutors.] The topic here is (as phrased by me; feel free to correct!), “what is the duty of individual Christians, in their personal lives and their political activity, with respect to the matters covered by Trump’s executive order?” This choice of topic therefore necessarily excludes analysis of the legality/constitutionality of the order and its wisdom as a political matter.

The Great Heresies (Hilaire Belloc)

Published by Charles Haywood

For no reason that is fully clear to me, I have always been fascinated by heresies. It matters to me what the difference between a Monothelite and a Monophysite is. Hence, I thought this book (from 1938, by the famous Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc) would survey various heresies and would explain, as its title says, the “Great Heresies.” But that is not what this book is.

Colloquy: On Global Warming

Published by Charles Haywood

[This is a back-and-forth to a response to that portion of my review of Milk which suggested five specific reasons why any public policy advocacy position could be taken, only one of which was rational analysis, and indicated that the demand for action to combat anthropogenic global warming was distorted by those reasons, but without those reasons being adequately adverted to. Italics are my interlocutors; regular text is me. The interlocutor in the first set of responses is a different person than the interlocutor in the second set, who is different than the third. Each interlocutor is therefore identified by text of a different color.]