Month: October 2018

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (Chrystia Freeland)

Published by Charles Haywood

From the cover, I expected this book to be a lightweight documentary version of Crazy Rich Asians, offering painfully amusing stories about the foibles of the super-rich, accompanied by cautions about the negative effects of such behavior upon the rest of America.  Plus, the picture of private jets in the driveway attracted me as a vision of my hoped-for future, since I am comfortably in the 0.1%, and much of my time is spent struggling to reach yet higher.  Instead, this book is a pretty dense, though rambling, web of analysis, with no funny stories at all.  Still, it’s modestly worthwhile in itself, and it has the additional benefit that it sheds light on today.

Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution (Tucker Carlson)

Published by Charles Haywood

Ship of Fools extends the recent run of books that attack the American ruling class as decayed and awful.  However it is characterized, as the professional-management elite, the Front Row Kids, or one of many other labels, all these books argue the ruling class is running our country into the ground, and most argue it is stupid and annoying to boot.  I certainly agree, and I also tend to agree with the grim prognostication in the subtitle, that revolution is coming—that is, this will end in blood.  What this book fails to offer, though, just like all these books, is any kind of possible other solution.  Which, after a while, reinforces the reader’s conclusion that there is no other solution.

The White King: Charles I, Traitor, Murderer, Martyr (Leanda de Lisle)

Published by Charles Haywood

As with Nicholas II, the last ruling Romanov, how we view Charles I is largely set by how his days ended.  And as with Nicholas, we have been further conditioned by generations of propaganda pumped out by the winners and their ideological allies, claiming that it was Charles’s own bad philosophy, coupled with incompetence, rather than mostly bad luck and choices only wrong in retrospect, that led to his death.  Leanda de Lisle’s The White King rejects the fake news and offers an even-handed view.

The Forest Passage (Ernst Jünger)

Published by Charles Haywood

Ernst Jünger was one of the more fascinating men of the twentieth century.  Remembered in the English-speaking world primarily for his World War I memoir, The Storm of Steel, he was famous in Europe for a range of right-leaning thought spanning nearly eighty years (he lived from 1896 to 1998).  His output was prodigious, more than fifty books along with voluminous correspondence, and not meant or useful as a seamless ideology, although certain themes apparently recur.  This book, The Forest Passage, was published in 1951, and is a compelling examination of how life should be conducted under modern ideological tyranny.

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us. . . . (Michael Pollan)

Published by Charles Haywood

I have led a boring life, at least as measured by the topics covered by this book, Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind.  Not only have I never taken any psychedelic drug of any type, I have never taken any illegal drug at all.  Similarly, I have never had any type of mystical experience whatsoever, though I am certainly open to such a thing and have total confidence that many other people have.  Just not me.  But here, as in many matters, others go where I have not tread.  Pollan, famous mostly for books on food, decided to explore drug-induced alterations of consciousness, and this book is the measured result of his spelunking in the caverns of the mind.

Militant Normals: How Regular Americans Are Rebelling Against the Elite to Reclaim Our Democracy (Kurt Schlichter)

Published by Charles Haywood

Militant Normals is an enjoyable read, a rollicking journey with the acid tongue of Kurt Schlichter as our tour leader.  It is full of facts that are impossible to dispute, because they are facts.  It draws difficult-to-argue conclusions, including that our near future is likely grim.  That said, I think Schlichter’s elite/normal framework misses important nuances and is a bit too glib.  But even so, the well-deserved spanking Schlichter gives the Left is worth the price of admission.