The Worthy House

Analysis, Charles, Conservatism, Great Fragmentation, Left-Liberalism, Political Discussion & Analysis, Popular, Post-Liberalism, Social Behavior, Social Justice Warriors

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (John Carreyrou)

Published by Charles

While pretty much everyone in this book who is rich and powerful comes off looking bad, it is less a tale of typical fraud, like a Ponzi scheme, and...

May 24, 2018

Book Reviews, Business & Money, Charles, Law, Popular, Science, Technology

The Power of the Powerless (Václav Havel)

Published by Charles

This book was once famous, but was mostly forgotten when Communism died and so-called liberal democracy seemed ascendant. It is increasingly famous again, and relevant, in these days of...

May 18, 2018

comments 11

Book Reviews, Charles, Communism, Conservatism, Eastern European History, European History, Left-Liberalism, Political Discussion & Analysis, Popular, Post-Liberalism, Social Behavior, Social Justice Warriors, Wars To Come

Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy (Jonah Goldberg)

Published by Charles

I think this book is meant as a #NeverTrumper manifesto, an attempt to create intellectual backbone for that wispy band of conservative holdouts, who crouch behind the crenellations in...

May 2, 2018

comments 10

American History, Book Reviews, Charles, Conservatism, Great Fragmentation, Political Discussion & Analysis, Popular, Post-Liberalism

The Revolt of the Masses (José Ortega y Gasset)

Published by Charles

Oh, but this is a fascinating book. Written in 1930 by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, it is one of those books that is occasionally mentioned, especially...

March 24, 2018

Book Reviews, Charles, European History, Political Discussion & Analysis, Popular, Social Behavior

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (Steven Pinker)

Published by Charles

As with Steven Pinker’s earlier The Better Angels of Our Nature, of which this is really an expansion and elucidation, I was frustrated by this book. On the one...

February 16, 2018

comments 11

Book Reviews, Charles, Great Divergence, Left-Liberalism, Political Economy, Popular, Social Behavior, Technology

Why Liberalism Failed (Patrick J. Deneen)

Published by Charles

Poor Francis Fukuyama. He has been a punching bag ever since he unwisely declared the End of History, more than twenty-five years ago. Fukuyama, of course, meant that the...

December 19, 2017

comments 14

American History, Book Reviews, Charles, Great Fragmentation, Left-Liberalism, Political Discussion & Analysis, Popular, Post-Liberalism, Wars To Come

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (Richard Rothstein)

Published by Charles

Some years ago, I lived for a time in Oak Park, Illinois. Oak Park has for decades been filled with rich white liberals, who live just across the street...

August 15, 2017

Administrative State, Book Reviews, Charles, Ethnography, Law, Left-Liberalism, Political Discussion & Analysis, Political Economy, Popular, Social Behavior

All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.
T. E. Lawrence

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The Decadent Society: How We Became a Victim of Our Own Success (Ross Douthat)

Published by Charles

Almost always one reads a book of future-looking political theory long before or long after its substance has been proven or disproven. It is quite another experience to observe...

March 28, 2020

comments 6

Apocalypse, Book Reviews, Charles, Left-Liberalism, Political Discussion & Analysis, Post-Liberalism, Social Behavior

Great Society: A New History (Amity Shlaes)

Published by Charles

A few weeks ago, I watched Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and Quentin Tarantino’s movie delivered to me what I have been seeking. Namely, the exact point America...

March 16, 2020

comments 3

American History, Book Reviews, Charles, Foundationalism, Left-Liberalism, Political Discussion & Analysis, Post-Liberalism

The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam (G. W. Bowersock)

Published by Charles

When we think of Late Antiquity, we usually think of Rome, either its decline in the West or its continuation in the East. When we are feeling particularly adventurous,...

March 9, 2020

comments 3

Book Reviews, Charles, Christian History, Classical History, Islam & The Islamic World, Military History, The Orient, War

Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World (Graham Allison)

Published by Charles

For Americans who think that so-called liberal democracy is neither, and in any case is a dead end, successful modern societies with a different political model always intrigue. In...

February 9, 2020

comments 12

Biography & Autobiography, Book Reviews, Charles, Ethnography, Great Divergence, Political Discussion & Analysis, Political Economy, Post-Liberalism, The Orient

The Beekeeper’s Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America (Hannah Nordhaus)

Published by Charles

As befits one who seeks to be a man of wealth and taste (if I have to choose between them, the former), I aspire to live on a vast...

January 27, 2020

Book Reviews, Business & Money, Charles, Gardening & Farming, Political Economy, Practical Skills

The Accursed Tower: The Fall of Acre and the End of the Crusades (Roger Crowley)

Published by Charles

I often say that the Crusades were a high point of Western civilization. And they were, but they were also an example of flawed glory. Certainly, the goal of...

January 24, 2020

comments 9

Book Reviews, Charles, Christian History, European History, Islam & The Islamic World, Medieval History, Military History, The Orient, War

Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens (David Stuttard)

Published by Charles

We live in an age lacking dynamic leadership. We are instead led, if one can call it that, by men who are clowns, feminized, or confused—or, often, by confused...

January 14, 2020

comments 13

Biography & Autobiography, Book Reviews, Charles, Classical History, Political Discussion & Analysis, Social Behavior, War, Wars To Come

Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History (Peter Turchin)

Published by Charles

I am skeptical of those who predict the future by looking at the past. It’s not that history follows a random walk, like the stock market. Quite the contrary—it...

January 10, 2020

American History, Book Reviews, Civil War, Economics, Longitudinal History, Political Discussion & Analysis, Political Economy, Social Behavior, Wars To Come

Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (Frederick Lewis Allen)

Published by Charles

Much modern popular history is mendacious, written with an ideological agenda that deliberately distorts, or omits, or simply lies about, the truth. Sometimes, therefore, reading history written in the...

January 8, 2020

American History, Book Reviews, Charles, Left-Liberalism, Social Behavior

The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy (Mariana Mazzucato)

Published by Charles

I have long known in my gut that usual measures of social wealth, most of all GDP, are fraudulent, in that they falsely identify value where there is none....

January 6, 2020

comments 6

American History, Book Reviews, Business & Money, Charles, Economics, Political Economy

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Karl Polanyi)

Published by Charles

The Great Transformation, published in 1944, is an ambitious book. It attempts two huge tasks. First, to refute the free market ideology, sometimes called market fundamentalism, represented at that...

December 26, 2019

Book Reviews, British History, Business & Money, Charles, Economics, European History, Political Economy, Social Behavior

Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia (Christina Thompson)

Published by Charles

Interest in Polynesia is not much in fashion nowadays, except for using the islands as an exemplar of the claimed, always imminent yet never arriving, effects of global warming....

December 17, 2019

Book Reviews, Charles, Ethnography, Primitive Cultures, Science

A Time to Die: Monks on the Threshold of Eternal Life (Nicolas Diat)

Published by Charles

A Time to Die is a small gem of a book which works on two levels. On one level, it is a self-examination for the reader, offering him a...

December 12, 2019

Book Reviews, Charles, Christian History, European History, Religion

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (David Graeber)

Published by Charles

I am trying to understand how human beings create value through their actions, and what that implies for humanity. Although this goal is hardly original, and has occupied much...

December 10, 2019

comments 18

Book Reviews, Business & Money, Charles, Economics, Foundationalism, Political Economy, Social Behavior

The Captive Mind (Czeslaw Milosz)

Published by Charles

We all like to imagine ourselves as heroes. We watch movies, and we instinctively put ourselves in the place of the hero, not in the place of the villain....

December 5, 2019

comments 8

Book Reviews, Charles, Communism, Eastern European History, European History, Political Discussion & Analysis, Post-Liberalism, Social Behavior, Social Justice Warriors, Wars To Come

Frederick the Second: Wonder of the World 1194-1250 (Ernst Kantorowicz)

Published by Charles

This book defies easy characterization. It is, to be sure, a biography of the last of the great German medieval emperors, Frederick II Hohenstaufen. But it vibrates with a...

November 19, 2019

Biography & Autobiography, Book Reviews, Charles, Christian History, European History, Medieval History, Political Discussion & Analysis

The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (Matthew B. Crawford)

Published by Charles

Attacks on digital technology for destroying our capacity for attention are a dime a dozen. Despite its title, Matthew Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head is not such an...

November 14, 2019

Book Reviews, Charles, Life Advice, Political Economy, Post-Liberalism, Practical Skills, Social Behavior

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (Walter Scheidel)

Published by Charles

Economic inequality is, and has been for several years now, the talk of the town. But most of this talk is political—of economic goods today, and whether and how...

November 11, 2019

comments 12

Book Reviews, Charles, Longitudinal History, Political Economy, War

Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West (R. R. Reno)

Published by Charles

Rusty Reno, editor of the prominent religious conservative journal First Things, here couples an original diagnosis of how we got to the vicious decay of now with very muted...

October 25, 2019

comments 11

Book Reviews, Charles, Conservatism, Great Fragmentation, Left-Liberalism, Political Discussion & Analysis, Post-Liberalism, Social Behavior, Wars To Come

Alexander the Great: His Life and His Mysterious Death (Anthony Everitt)

Published by Charles

Different eras view Alexander III of Macedon differently. Though always honored as a hugely successful military leader and conqueror, in the ancient world, he got mixed press, seen as...

October 19, 2019

comments 8

Biography & Autobiography, Book Reviews, Charles, Classical History, Military History, Social Behavior, The Orient

The New Philistines (Sohrab Ahmari)

Published by Charles

I am a Sohrab Ahmari fanboy. I endorse his recent full-throated calls for creation of a post-liberal future, and admire that he has boldly claimed the mantle of leadership....

October 9, 2019

comments 13

Art & Architecture & Building, Book Reviews, Charles, Foundationalism, Left-Liberalism, Post-Liberalism

Bronze Age Mindset (Bronze Age Pervert)

Published by Charles

I am fascinated by what is to come. For someone who came of age imbibing the narrow, facile, weak, always-second-place conservative pieties of the late 1980s and the 1990s,...

September 23, 2019

comments 18

Book Reviews, Charles, Classical History, Conservatism, Great Fragmentation, Left-Liberalism, Political Discussion & Analysis, Popular, Post-Liberalism, Primitive Cultures, Sex Roles, Social Behavior

The Samurai (Shūsaku Endō)

Published by Charles

The Japanese author Shūsaku Endō is known primarily for his 1966 masterwork, Silence, about the persecution of Christians in mid-seventeenth-century Japan. The backdrop of Silence is the aftermath of...

September 20, 2019

comment 1

Book Reviews, Charles, Christian History, Christian Theology, Colonialism, Ethnography, Fiction, Religion, The Orient

A World Split Apart: Commencement Address Delivered at Harvard University, June 8, 1978 (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)

Published by Charles

We in America have long thought highly of ourselves. This feeling crested during the early Cold War, when most Americans believed that our “system,” our way of life, was...

September 18, 2019

comments 6

Apocalypse, Book Reviews, Charles, Communism, Conservatism, Foundationalism, Great Fragmentation, Left-Liberalism, Political Discussion & Analysis, Post-Liberalism, Wars To Come

The Memoirs of St. Peter: A New Translation of the Gospel According to Mark (Michael Pakaluk)

Published by Charles

New translations of the Bible, targeted at a broad audience and done by individuals, rather than committees, seem to be a growth industry. This book, a translation of the...

September 10, 2019

Book Reviews, Charles, Christian History, Christian Theology, Religion

The Improbable Wendell Willkie: The Businessman Who Saved the Republican Party and His Country, and Conceived a New World Order (David Levering Lewis)

Published by Charles

If the word hagiography had not already been coined, it would need to be invented for this book. To David Levering Lewis, Wendell Willkie was a combination of Saint...

September 5, 2019

American History, Biography & Autobiography, Book Reviews, Charles, Conservatism, Left-Liberalism, Political Discussion & Analysis

Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism (James Stevens Curl)

Published by Charles

High architecture, that of grand buildings, is a bridge between God and man, and a sinew binding state and people, the ruling class and the masses. Low architecture, that...

August 27, 2019

Art & Architecture & Building, Book Reviews, Charles, Foundationalism, Post-Liberalism, Social Behavior

American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm (Thomas P. Hughes)

Published by Charles

American Genesis is a cultural history of the grand century of American technology, from 1870 to 1970. Thomas Hughes published his book in 1989, when Americans believed that the...

August 21, 2019

American History, Book Reviews, Business & Money, Charles, Political Economy, Technology

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (James Fitzjames Stephen)

Published by Charles

Among the many idols of our age, there is one that rules them all: John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, the belief that an individual’s choices may never be legitimately...

August 16, 2019

comment 1

Book Reviews, British History, Charles, Conservatism, Left-Liberalism, Political Discussion & Analysis, Post-Liberalism, Social Behavior

Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography (Robert Irwin)

Published by Charles

I generally liked this book, by the erudite Orientalist Robert Irwin, but I am not sure why it exists. It is too academic to be popular, and too popular...

August 9, 2019