Category: Books
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Reading Now: Andrew Klavan, The Great Good Thing
Subtitle: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ. Thomas Nelson, 2016, 269 pp. I was aware of Klavan only as a hard-punching conservative PJ Media columnist before reading a review that 'turned me on' to this book. It arrived last night thanks to the synergy of Amazon.com and the U.S. Mail. I'm on p.…
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Reading Now: Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness
The book arrived yesterday via Amazon and I began reading it this morning. Looks good! Oxford University Press, 2001. Foot essays "a naturalistic theory of ethics: to break really radically both with G. E. Moore's anti-naturalism and with the subjectivist theories such as emotivism and prescriptivism that have been seen as clarifications and developments of…
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Reading Now: Gun Control in the Third Reich
Author: Stephen P. Holbrook Subtitle: Disarming the Jews and the "Enemies of the State" Essential reading on the eve of the disaster that is a Hillary presidency. "Gun Control in the Third Reich, Stephen Halbrook's excellent history of gun control in Germany, shows that, motives notwithstanding, removing weapons from the general population always disarms society…
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‘Baby Boomer’ Defined
Michael Kinsley, Old Age: A Beginner's Guide, Tim Duggan Books, 2016: Boomers — short for baby boomers — are Americans born during the "baby boom" that followed the end of World War II, as millions of couples tried to make up for lost time. Boomers include everybody born in the years between 1946 — the…
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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…
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Prostitution
A great evil well-exposed by Rachel Moran, a former prostitute, in Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution (W. W. Norton, first American edition 2015).
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Book Notice: Edward Feser, Neo-Scholastic Essays
The phenomenal Edward Feser. How does he do it? He teaches an outrageous number of courses at a community college, five per semester; he has written numerous books; he gives talks and speeches, and last time I checked he has six children. Not to mention his weblog which is bare of fluff and filler and…
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Recently Read
Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015, 865 pp. NYRB review here. 'KL' abbreviates Konzentrationslager.
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The Delight of the ‘Find’
One of the pleasures in the life of a bookman is the delight of the 'find.' As a reader reports: I saw that your cat is named Max Black. You might appreciate this anecdote. Twice a year here in Ithaca there is a three-week long used book sale. The price drops each week, so if…
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Amazon Pricing and a Book Bleg
I'd like to get my hands on a copy of Maria Reicher, ed., States of Affairs (Ontos Verlag, 2009). I didn't find it in the ASU catalog and so I headed over to Amazon.com where I found a used copy for the entirely reasonable price of $9,999.99 plus $3.99 shipping and handling. I kid you…
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On 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…
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Book Notice: Edward Feser, Scholastic Metaphysics
This from the back cover: Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (editiones scholasticae, vol. 39, Transaction Books, 2014) provides an overview of Scholastic approaches to causation, substance, essence, modality, identity, persistence, teleology, and other issues in fundamental metaphysics. The book interacts heavily with the literature on these issues in contemporary analytic metaphysics, so as to facilitate…
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A Note on David Mamet
I stumbled upon a good brisk read the other day by David Mamet in the genre, How I finally saw the light and stopped being a benighted leftist. The title is The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture (Sentinel, 2011). Here is a taste, from a footnote on p. 10: *The Left and…
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Reading About Commies
In partial answer to a reader's query, here are some good books about Communism. These are 'second-tier' books. First read Whittaker Chambers, Witness; Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism (three vols.); Cszelaw Milosz, The Captive Mind. What follows is a 1 August 2004 post updated and expanded from my first weblog. …………….. I like reading books…