Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Bibliophilia

  • Sebastian Haffner: Totalitarians Intolerant of Private Life

    Among the dozen or so books I am currently reading is Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: A Memoir (Picador, 2003).  Written in 1939, it was first published in German in 2000. The Third Reich is no more, but the following passage remains  highly relevant at a time when the main forms of totalitarianism are Chinese Communism,…

  • The Bookman and the Rifleman

    You know things are getting bad when a bookman must also be a rifleman if he intends to keep his private library safe from the depredations of leftist thugs who are out to 'de-colonize' it. You cannot reach these evil-doers with arguments, for it is not the plane of reason that they inhabit; there are,…

  • The Twilight Zone from A to Z

    A NYRB review of a book I will have to purchase. In fact, after I post this, I will head to Amazon.com to look it up. Your humble correspondent is a Twilight Zone aficionado from way back. The original series ran from 1959-1964. 

  • Reading Now: Leszek Kolakowski, God Owes Us Nothing

    I'm on a Kolakowski binge.  I've re-read Metaphysical Horror (Basil Blackwell, 1988) and Husserl and the Search for Certitude (U. of Chicago, 1975).  I purchased the first at Dillon's Bookstore, Bloomsbury, London, near Russell's Square in late August, 1988.  Auspicious, eh? I was in the U. K. to read a paper at the World Congress…

  • Up with Free Speech! Down with the History-Erasing and Deplatforming Left

  • Reading Now: Lev Kopelev on the Horrors of Communism

    While completing an invited essay for a collection of essays by dissident philosophers, I pulled down from the shelf many a volume on Marx and Marxism, including Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford UP, 1987). In the front matter of that very good book I found the following quotation from the hitherto unknown to me…

  • Never Buy a Book You Haven’t Read

    Wisdom and wit with a soupçon of paradox.

  • A Monk and His Political Silence

    Mary Gordon, On Thomas Merton (Boulder: Shambala, 2018, 118): By the late fifties Merton was deeply disturbed about his political silence. Should he have been? This world is a passing scene. The temporal order is next to nothing compared to eternity. That is the old-time Roman Catholic teaching that justifies the world-flight of monks and…

  • Time Was . . .

    . . . when I had space for books, but no money. Now it's the other way around. So I allowed myself only two purchases today at the antiquarian Mesa Bookshop in downtown Mesa, Arizona, Gary Wills' slim volume, Saint Augustine, Viking 1999, and Joseph Agassi's Faraday as Natural Philosopher, University of Chicago Press, 1971. …

  • The Amazon 100

    It's a crappy list, but I've read ten good titles on it. How about you?  Keith Burgess-Jackson's read five. 1. 1984, by George Orwell  2. A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking  27. Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens 40. Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl  46. On the Road, by Jack Kerouac  59. The Catcher in the Rye, by…

  • Reading Now: Paul Gottfried on Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt

    Paul Gottfried, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy, University of Missouri Press, 2002. Excellent background to current developments.  I may be missing something, but the subtitle seems poorly chosen.  'Toward X,' like the German Zur X,' signals that the author is for X, that he advocates it.  But I take it…

  • Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959

    This is one of the books I am reading at the moment.  Tr. Ryan Bloom.  First appeared in French in 1989 by Editions Gallimard, Paris, English translation 2008, first paperback edition 2010 (Ivan R. Dee, Chicago). Some good stuff here, but some nonsense as well, for example: A priest who regrets having to leave his…

  • What I Am Reading Now

    At any given time I am reading a half-dozen or so books on a wide variety of topics.  I'll mention three I am reading at the moment. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, Ignatius Press, 2004, trs. J.T. Foster and Michael J. Miller. German original first published in 1968.  Outstanding.  Ratzinger has a good probing…

  • Of Books and Gratitude

    Occasionally, Robert Paul Wolff says something at his blog that I agree with completely, for instance: To an extent I did not anticipate when I set out on life’s path, books have provided many of the joys and satisfactions I have encountered.  I am constantly grateful to the scholars and thinkers who have written, and…

  • The Bookman Speaks

    It would be a hard choice, but if I were forced to choose between books and people, I would choose books. In any case, a book is a man at his best. So it is in one sense a false alternative: choose books, and you get people, distilled, reduced to their essence, and in a…