September 15, 2021 Review of the Federalist Papers by Hamilton et al The Federalist Papers is a towering work of political philosophy that provides nothing less than a comprehensive rationalization and justification for the American experiment,…
August 10, 2021 Review of Outline of Psychoanalysis by Freud I won’t pretend that I had an unbiased view of Freud coming into this. I suspect that anyone who has any passing familiarity with…
July 3, 2021 Review of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea by Jules Verne My list is mostly made up of the books I feel the need to read, but I included a large selection of nineteenth-century pop fiction in…
June 14, 2021 Review of Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels is so pervasive in the culture that I didn’t expect to be surprised by it, and for the most part I wasn’t. Certainly…
March 1, 2021 Victorian novelist writes first draft of The Matrix Samuel Butler’s Erewhon is an excuse for the author to climb inside of an interesting idea and walk around a bit. He has a…
January 26, 2021 The secret of wealth accumulation. (I said of, not to.) I spent about six months reading The Theory of the Leisure Class, by Thorstein Veblen, and it occupied my brain throughout. I can’t think…
January 21, 2021 Russian master probably drunk at the time I expected more from Dostoyevsky. I included Crime and Punishment on my list with high expectations that it was money in the bank. I’d…
December 29, 2020 Revenge is a dish best served lavishly I packed my list with a good bit of nineteenth-century pop fiction, and I did this partly to have some light reading to balance out…
December 9, 2020 Scientist cracks the code for success in life! Darwin’s On The Origin of Species knocked me on my ass. I’d studied the concepts in school along with everyone else, and the idea…
November 20, 2020 Historical account of history repeating itself Livy’s Early History of Rome offers a great overview of Roman history from the founding story of Romulus straight through to the end of…