That the “ideological” project to replace the only human condition we know with a utopian “Second Reality” oblivious to — indeed at war with — the deepest wellsprings of human nature and God’s creation has taken on renewed virulence in the late modern world, just thirty-five years after the glorious anti-totalitarian revolutions of 1989.

The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now, Daniel J. Mahoney

Modern political discourse is many things, but a commonality is each side believes the other to be crazy. That’s a given. Political disagreements have always occurred, and past discourse wasn’t as civil as people envision, yet the internet has made politics far more divisive by fueling the innate impulse of tribalism. The Left, whether legacy media, institutions such as hospitals or schools, or individuals, wears its politics on its sleeve to signal a self-believed and self-appointed moral rectitude while claiming it isn’t politics but rather that it’s being a good person. But they posture their beliefs, perhaps more so, to display loyalty because, as Daniel J. Mahoney succinctly states in his latest work, “Progressive Ideology requires absolute fealty to the cause.” The Right, on the whole, is less keen on performative public displays given elements of the right-leaning nature, and those who do display it display it more along the vibes of exasperated 1980s punk rockers going against the approved grains of institutions since Progressive ideology crowded itself into every corner of life from Catholic leaders, local coffee shops, movies, hospital patient forms, and on and on the list goes.

So while it’s not new that the other side thinks the other is crazy, here is a reality of one side:

• Can’t define what a woman is

• Believes sex isn’t determined at birth but is an identity picked by the individual and the individual can choose from over 74 choices of genders or from an infinite spectrum

• Has infiltrated institutions best exemplified by the Language Games

• That America’s founding was purely racist, and that the slaves in America freed themselves from slavery

• That the Revolutionary War was fought to keep slavery

• That the laws of this country were set up to favor wealthy white men

• That there is no true good or bad and that it’s relative and subjective

• That human rights should define laws and anything pertaining to natural law must be supplanted by these rights

• That a school curriculum including LGBTQIA curricula, 1619 Project and or Southern Poverty Law Center History Curricula, Marxism good capitalism bad curricula, and teachers walking out on classes to protest ICE is not at all political or politics, and saying anything otherwise is political

• That equity can be attained in society without consequence and disparities in outcome reveal systemic issues such as racism, misogyny, privilege, so on and so forth.

• That 2+2=5

This side does live in a Second Reality, and this side demands uniformity. Not everyone on the Left holds those convictions, but if put on national television, 99% would almost certainly parrot them for fear of being canceled and outcast. I’ve been told that the other side thinks that I’m crazy, that my side lives in a Second Reality, but I and others on the Right can tell you what a woman is; I can tell you that the Revolutionary War was not fought to keep slavery, and, while no math whiz, I can take two apples and know that if I add two more apples I would then have four apples.

The ideological conviction of the Left poses profound concerns for our country. And Daniel J. Mahoney’s The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now is a work of penetrating cultural analysis and penetrating political philosophy. The work articulates the philosophy and nature of Progressive Ideology, the influences, why it’s a conviction for those with that worldview, and the totalitarian consequences of that worldview.

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Quick Background Mahoney

Daniel J. Mahoney is a conservative intellectual, has published multiple books, and is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and a senior writer at Law and Liberty. His writings make frequent appearances in The Claremont Review of Books and The New Criterion. His specialty is political philosophy, and the politics, philosophy, and art of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. His mastery is his ability to analyze the background of political worldviews, categorize without generalizations, and then unveil the arguments, positions, and influence of these worldviews. He does this whether it’s the statesmanship of Abraham Lincoln or the racist concepts of Nikole Hannah-Jones of the 1619 project. He’s heady; he introduces topics requiring a look-up and consideration, but spending time with him sharpens perspective. His observations are astute, thought-provoking, and pragmatic.

The Persistence of the Ideological Lie guides the reader through epistemological analysis of ideology, how it’s playing out today, the tools and concepts used to force this ideology onto individuals, and the various defenses that warn or nobly fight against this ideological and totalitarian wave.

The Enemy of Reality

We live in an age of enforced uniformity, prosecuted in the name of preserving “our democracy” and keeping “disinformation” and “Far Right” lies at bay. 

The relativists, the postmodernists, the Leftists, the boomer Liberal aunt who protested at No Kings, have won institutions. It’s difficult to tell whether elected Democrats or an institution like the New York Times is obeying or commanding constituents—a Hobbesian feature of the Left. Who commands whom and who obeys whom, but one thing is for certain, the moralizing cause must be adhered to and followed by all because the grand goal is uniformity. Mahoney details what comprises and what’s behind those Instagram stories sharing memes telling us that —almost always a white liberal woman—Trump voters should have apologized before but can apologize now for whatever reason is going on in the world. Or in more recent events, how journalists demanded apologies from players on the United States Hockey team for talking to Donald Trump, demanding the playings to apologize for saying they were proud to be Americans after the win, and to apologize and reflect for laughing at a natural, good-natured girls-versus-boys joke Trump made. The latter here is a result of what Mahoney labels the “information oligarchy.” That one side, Liberals, which now run the majority of mainstream media and academia and so on, have certain narratives, certain information, which they deem morally pure and right. Even though much of it is baloney and ludicrous, Leftists demand that everyone must fall in line with these narratives.

The Left has a preferred name for this: those who resist the pressure of intellectual conformity, of stifling political correctness, are “enemies of democracy.” 

Today, at a more local and personal level, if a parent questions the curriculum, particularly something like the 1619 Project curriculums in schools, those parents are cast as political, racist, backwards, and stupid. Those parents are not falling in line. The most common example of this demanded uniformity is seen with the phenomenon of Trump Derangement Syndrome, aka TDS. Mahoney does a remarkable job of giving oomph to TDS, a term lobbied around by many but often without the philosophical depth Mahoney provides. Mahoney expands that behind TDS we find the Enemy of Reality. The Enemy of Reality has a distinct background of Marx, Robespierre, critical theorists, and so on—the Enemy of Reality demands that you buy narratives and lies wholesale and any criticism of it means you’re an enemy of democracy. For instance, for the majority of modern liberals, politicians to your neighbor, if Trump is for anything they are reflexively against it, whatever it is. They, in fact, become unglued. One can peruse social media and see someone in an unglued rage saying if any of their followers voted for Trump then to unfollow them immediately (this is also done by the person to display fealty to the Progressive cause). Or one can look at former “conservative” writers like Bill Kristol or David French. If Trump takes a position, French and Kristol immediately take the opposite position, even if they made a career of defending that position for decades, they’re now hardline against it. One not need look further than Kristol’s The Bulwark which is built on a fanatical mission to express Trump Derangement Syndrome. Regardless whether it’s your neighbor or Ilhan Omar, Trump Derangement Syndrome has played out by allowing outright lies of Trump to be expressed as truths with total impunity, such as Trump is a pedophile, Russian Collusion, or less so Trump, that America is the most racist country in the world.

If one zooms out, TDS represents a greater concern:

A moment of reflection suggests that a precondition for being politically correct today is to parrot one untruth after another, while immediately and often cruelly castigating those who refuse to deny their rational judgment and moral good sense. Political correctness can justly be called systematic and coercive mendacity at work. Whatever it is, it is hardly “scientific” or self-evident. 

A factor of this Enemy of Reality is our own reflectiveness. The West has a feature of reflectiveness, a feature of Aristotle’s Reflective Choice and Christianity’s concept of free will.1 Yet as is natural for certain dispositions, especially those who reject Judeo-Christian worldviews, that reflectiveness morphed past guilt for past mistakes and into pure nihilism and self-loathing.

Today, what comes first is Western self-loathing, the obscene conviction that the Western world, and it alone, is the source of colonialism, slavery, racism, injustice, totalitarianism, and economic exploitation.

Mahoney analyzes the infamous but widely accepted as truth inside institutions: Postcolonial Ideology. As quoted above, the postmodernist, or, in reality, the Marxist position has been digested into the masses as ideological clichés. For instance, countries in Africa are failing because of American imperialism or colonialism, not because of their instability, culture, and corruptness. All that’s put forth from these clichés is how awful America is on a global scale. It’s repeated ad nauseam and taken as fact. Another example, that Cuba’s issues are a result of American embargo, as Mahoney points out, and not its communist government. Most ignore that before Castro, in 1959, Cuba was the fourth most prosperous country in the Americas and enjoyed a thriving middle class.2

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The Background of The Enemy: The Influences, The Voices, Where Did it Come From 

How and why did the Progressive posture come to wield such force and influence in our world? How did it become the worldview of such a large population? And why does it hold such a grip over institutions, even institutions at its core opposed to it such as Christian institutions?

Common answers to this are steeped in recency bias. Most look to the Covid shutdowns of 2020 and the summer BLM riots. Nearly overnight companies, people, and so on suddenly and intensely expressed the views of Progressive Ideology. What was two years prior never considered a “right” such as trans rights was now a “right” required to save democracy and to end the genocide against trans people. Just as it was believed that cops were killing thousands of blacks each year, a lie still postulated with impunity.

But it’s not recent; it goes back a long way. 2020 put woke despotism into the spotlight, but it was not an overnight success as Mahoney carefully details. One such step in woke despotism becoming mainstream resulted from constant wins with language, what’s also called The Language Game by Mahoney, and others such as David Mamet. This is also known as political correctness. A simple history: consider the journey to “the unhoused.” What was once vagrant, bum, and hobo became judgmental and triggering to some. It then became homeless, and then homeless became triggering and now it is “unhoused.” The “unhoused” are claimed to be victims of capitalism and some are suffering a mental health crisis due to “global warming.” (A cliche taken as fact by many living in the Denver area).

A clear example of the Language Game which comprises both Mahoney’s Enemy of Reality and a Culture of Repudiation are the forms now standard at hospitals. Where it’s no longer “man or woman” but chosen identity and beyond. For example, at a pediatrics office in Denver, here are the forms for a newborn provided by the massive company Athena:

That form is for newborns and up to two years old. Note how no other option exists; you must adhere to it and if you deny it or at least reasonably want a basic “male/female” form it means you’re being political and, likely, “an enemy of democracy.” The goal of the language game is to have everyone fall into line.

The fevered politics of purity and perfection are in every respect an enemy of the good, of mutual respect, and of shared liberty under the rule of law. If we don’t recognize this elementary truth, and soon, we shall surely lose our civilizational soul and perhaps our freedoms, too.

Mahoney argues that we must reject wholesale, in our daily lives and on a bigger scale, the Language Games and Culture of Repudiation which have permeated institutions, and our daily lives; he argues that we must create a parallel polis which is something those inside the Soviet Union did to work towards liberty. A great example of this, as Mahoney argues, is the Barney Initiative by Hillsdale College. It’s a charter school featuring a classical curriculum. One could argue that TPUSA tried this at the Super Bowl halftime, the debate whether it was worth it or not could go on for days, but it is still an attempt, and an admirable one. We see more and more parents doing homeschooling, we see people flocking to red states, we see a rise in the interest in traditional Catholicism among young men. If some of these catch on like how the Barney Initiative has (and Christian Classical Education), then it gives life to counter the politics of purity and perfection of the Left.

The parallel polis fights:

Ideological Manichaeism, the temptation of ideologues and revolutionaries everywhere to localize evil and see its embodiment in suspect groups, whose elimination (or even “cancellation”) will lead the world forward to revolutionary bliss. We witnessed this mechanism at work in the totalitarian regimes and ideologies that gave rise to death camps, gulags, and killing fields. We see the same impulse at work in the coercive virtue signaling that is the specialty of the woke.

Two common claims stemming from the fear that we’re totally lost today, especially from right-leaning people, are that we’re either like German culture post World War I which led to the Third Reich or we’re like the degenerate periods of the Roman Empire. Historical ignorance and a lack of perspective inform both claims; our modern day rhymes more with the ideologues of the French Revolution from 1789–1793, particularly the fanaticism of Maximilien Robespierre. We see the same demands of Progressive purity, fealty to the Progressive posture, and the same terror towards those who disobey. One need not look further than the riots against ICE along with the mayors and governors pushing neo-Confederacy policies to diminish ICE and resist the Trump administration, those celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk, or the nurses who go on TikTok and push for poisoning or giving terrible care to MAGA supporters.

Dostoyevski/Burke Warnings and Pathways Out

This moralistic fanaticism, this moral inversion, is, as Mahoney calls it, toxic nihilism. The ideal of communism was proven bust by the Soviet Union. And that totalitarian state, that communist ideal, was toppled in 1989 to the jubilation of millions. But the lessons of that regime, the lessons we were supposed to carry forward are all but forgotten by many. The claim goes, real socialism was never tried. And that in the experiment of real socialism, people still see the ideal. That somehow from the failed experiment of it the ideal still exists, and as Pierre Manent argues, how are we to know what life is like if everyone conforms to this ideal, which was tried before?

And we see this moral fanaticism, this moral inversion, this toxic nihilism everywhere. It’s in school boards, it’s in local HOAs, it’s inescapable in certain areas, particularly blue states. Is there a way out?

Mahoney argues that there is. His answers come from the warnings of Edmund Burke and from Fyodor Dostoyevski. From Burke, looking at the fanaticism of our modern day, and rejecting it wholesale when we encounter it. Rejection not in the manner of the “Right Retreat” but in the manner of courage and moderation. Courage here could be as simple as refusing to fill out nonsensical forms to speaking up at school boards. Moderation is understanding that a parallel polis is required not an outright revolution. Build and fan the flames of those working to bring light. With Dostoyevski, it’s finding the moral compass again, it’s finding the moral order of Judeo-Christian values, particularly Christian with Dostoyevski, and to have that guide us. That our way out is at the individual level and at the metaphysical level, and Mahoney makes a compelling case.

The work is penetrating, concerning, and heady. Penetrating in the manner of how Mahoney can summarize with exhaustive depth. You get the whole picture and the steps forward. The heady element: Mahoney is an intellectual, he’s well-read, and his choice of words, his dropping of various philosophers and concepts, will require most readers to look things up. Which makes for good, deliberate reading if you’re willing to engage with the work—which is worth engaging.

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A Grounding of Worldview

This work resonated with me. 2020 was a cornerstone year for me metaphysically. I came home to values and it hit fast and hard. Since then, I’ve looked around the corners of my worldviews, opinions, convictions, and spirituality. I wanted answers, and the search opened up a lot to me, got me in front of various thinkers and concepts, and gave me further convictions. This work contributed to my worldview, contributed to my political nature, contributed to a return home to my Catholic faith.

But the bigger resonation is various personal experiences affected by the concepts Mahoney analyzes, affected by toxic nihilism, affected by a culture of repudiation, affected by displays of Progressive moral rectitude, and affected by those who demanded intellectual conformity to the Progressive posture. For instance, when my wife and I began dating in 2022, my wearing my conservatism on my sleeve cost her her social circles. She was on a journey herself to her conservative and Catholic values but kept it to herself. Whereas her friends looked up my social media, and many told her, quite explicitly, how awful I was, and that she needed to leave me immediately because I supported Trump. They told her, without having met me, that I was racist, sexist, physically abusive, would oppress her creativity, and a downright awful human being. A psychiatrist in this group demanded she leave me, saying women must stay away from Republicans, Conservatives, as we’re toxic, violent, racist, and low IQ. Her staying with me, they one by one kicked her out of the social circle. One of these friends, recently, stood in line at a coffee shop for over three hours to get a “fuck ICE” cappuccino.

I’ve gotten nasty looks from eavesdroppers when I mentioned I voted for Trump or something conservative—a group of women in one place got up and left and went to another table, huffing and puffing along the way. Progressivism marinates Denver. Go into a local coffee shop and one is confronted instantly with the ideological fanaticism and its rules.

Mahoney gave me further understanding on why this is, and further depth to my courage and conviction to reject it wholesale when I encounter it. And how to reject it from a place of depth, not reflexiveness. Mahoney also helped me understand the disposition and the nature of the women who ejected my wife from their social circles, and of the skinny-armed men still donning a mask in 2026 while driving their cars.

Who Would Like It

Mahoney is heady. A dictionary and some lookups on Grok to understand various elements will be necessary for most readers. But he’s worth reading, he’s worth spending time with. He also will send curious readers down rabbit holes of books to read; I added a few to my Amazon lists.

Man has a political nature. I argue that it’s worth it for anyone to spend time to grasp their worldview and why they hold the positions, form the opinions, and have connections with certain people and ideas. That’s why Mahoney is a must-read for serious thinkers on the Right. He takes the red meat and dissects it to the grass the cow grazed on and in the method it was led to graze by the rancher and why the rancher does what he does. He also does this on the other side; he likely has read more of the basis of the worldview of Progressives and Democrats than the Democrats in Congress and Senate combined. Which gifts Mahoney, a man of intellectual gifts, penetrating insight and gifts readers an excellent analysis of either side. Which makes him worth the time. The book is short, but spending time with it, looking up what you don’t know, rereading a few passages here and there, makes him worth it.

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I’ve long announced my YouTube page but the promise of it became like George R.R. Martin teasing the White Walkers and winter.

But alas it has arrived.

I did not spend a whole lot of time producing it. I riffed it. I riffed it to keep it authentic. I’m sure and know it wanders and I probably repeat myself with some of the first time nerves. But I loved the process. I riffed it because I want to keep it authentic, and to get it going. Had I scripted it I would have obsessed over it. The videos will get better, but for the first one, watching a bit, and seeing some feedback already, it’s not bad.

I plan on doing them frequently, I will likely record the next one this week and upload it. All of the tech is new to me, how to edit and all that, but it’s up, it’s here, and more to come.

The topic and where you can watch it: The 3 Best Books on the Roman Empire

Or you can click the picture below.

More to come.

Are we in a decline like the Roman Empire?

Was it because of the Christians?

Did inflation cause the fall?

Did the degenerate culture cause the fall?

I heard it was the greatest culture, claims of its degeneracy are overblown, and the fall was because of something in the water lowering testosterone, is that true?

Ideological validation via the causality of the Roman Empire’s fall is the desire of someone asking those questions. One-size-fits-all theories are abound regarding the Roman Empire. People swing the Roman Empire around as a means for their ideological perspective. They abuse the history of the empire to warn of our fall. People rehash positions — many long debunked — of why the Empire fell, or argue of its sterling virtues and how some factor like lowered testosterone ruined it, or argue of its extreme lechery as a reason for its fall. Crypto bros, cultural moralizers, alt-right Nietzschean vitalists, Marxist Materialists, combative secularists, preachy Christians, among others, all abuse the Roman Empire for their ideological moralizing.

Finding clarity amongst the racket is challenging. Barry Strauss’s Ten Caesars does provide clarity, succinctness, and nuance to the massive and complex Roman Empire. Barry Strauss is a Hoover Fellow and famed historian of the Roman Empire. His other works include The War That Made the Roman Empire and Jews vs. Rome (read review here). Strauss accomplishes a remarkable feat by making the Roman Empire, from politics, war, to culture, accessible while remaining substantive in the Ten Caesars. The book comprises ten biographical vignettes. Each vignette goes far beyond the biography of the emperors analyzed; Strauss details political norms, social norms, and the cultural norms of each emperor’s era. We learn why and how the Roman Empire evolved, regressed, progressed or stagnated. Strauss introduces us to the power players of the Roman Empire, the power brokers who gave rise to emperors, and those who held enormous power and influence behind the scenes. Many power brokers of the Roman Empire were women, the mothers, wives, sisters, of emperors. Strauss gives us both a window and clarification onto the Roman Empire. He clarifies modern misconceptions and long debunked theses still taken as truth today, such as specific theses of famous figures like Edward Gibbon.

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Modern Day Suetonius But Far Better And Far More Accurate

The ten vignettes are ordered chronologically. The entire timeline reveals how the empire evolved, regressed, and stagnated. With each vignette we get a clear, and sometimes myth busting, sometimes sobering, look into the empire’s culture, social dynamics, and politics. Strauss covers:

1. Augustus

2. Tiberius

3. Nero

4. Vespasian

5. Trajan

6. Hadrian

7. Marcus Aurelius

8. Septimius Severus

9. Diocletian

10. Constantine

In each we learn the rise of each emperor, how they came to be emperor, and who or what led to their ascendancy. That who or what provides concrete looks at the culture of the Roman Empire. We see the schizophrenic and perplexing marriage dynamics of the time. For instance, some women were married to their uncle, either related or not related other than by marriage, and vice versa, some nephews were wedded to their aunts, some stepsons, or stepdaughters, married to their stepfather or stepmothers. The custom was to marry for political or social station. Yet, as Strauss shows, certain women were sought after, and some emperors were fortunate to have arranged marriages with them because these women injected political force into the ruling legacy. These women were intelligent, cunning, Machiavellian, and resourceful. They could play the game of Roman politics and Roman statecraft and play it masterfully.

Strauss expounds the political styles of each emperor, and the dynamics of the period the emperor ascended and ruled, in other words the context and realities of their rule, what led to it, and what resulted after. The context and realities, under Strauss’s wise guidance, paint the reality of Roman culture giving a window upon each period.

Clarification

Modern theories, claims, and “takes” surround the Roman Empire, especially on a platform like X. The most common style: a neurotic focus on modern culture steered through the lens of a personal ideology and the required elimination or correction of particular ills in our modern culture to obtain the ideology’s promised societal utopia, and brandishing theories apropos to the Roman Empire, glibly or conspiratorially, as a form of argument to validate their personal ideology. In other words, cast the blame for the fall on a single cause, and that single cause being a personal gripe with modern society, bonus points for moralizing or outright repudiation of modern society. For instance, bikinis caused the fall of the Roman Empire, and since we have bikinis now, therefore the fall is near. Or that when the Roman Empire went Christian it instantly, with magic trick speed, imploded.1 The theories are unreflective and silly. If bikinis—or something else as silly—caused the fall of the Roman Empire, how could that Empire achieve complete power and domination for so long harboring the innate capacity of a sophomoric weakness that could wreck it all?

The popular “it was the Christians!” theory is directly or secondhand inspired by arguably one of the most iconic works in the Western canon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. A work abused by those who have never read it, much less even added it to their Amazon books-to-buy shopping list, and the trite “Read Gibbon” retort commonly found on social media betrays the abuser.

The comparison theories stem from gripes with modern culture. Strauss clears the air on the popular salacious rumors of Roman Empire cultural degeneracy, which also clears the air on the culture. Indeed, the Roman Empire’s culture did feature excess, vanity, and lechery. Yet, in some aspects not to the extent claimed today, nor was it some Hallmark version of the Victorian Era hoisted upon the Roman Empire as some pseudo-Roman Empire revisionists wish to portray. Whether certain emperors indulged to the point claimed in ancient sources requires nuance and the eye of an expert like Strauss. Generally, certain historical sources written from political or social agendas would either embroider salacious rumors about an emperor to diminish him or to make that past emperor appalling and the current emperor the savior. The sex lives of famous Roman women were a popular salacious rumor to leverage in the Roman Empire, as they are today. The reality is, yes, lechery was a feature of the Roman Empire, for both men and women. With couples, marriage dynamics, as stated, were schizophrenic, baffling, and ennui inducing. Misogyny was rife in the Roman Empire, and powerful women faced the brunt of the salacious rumors. Those conflating today’s promiscuity (which is not as rampant as claimed by certain groups) to the Roman Empire’s promiscuity make the mistake of viewing the Roman Empire through the relationship and dating norms of the modern West. The feasible comparison is not so much a comparison, rather it’s a reflection on human nature: a culture of transgression feeds personal and cultural apathy. We humans are always capable of transgression, it’s innate to us and the transgression is not always a result from the influence of the current thing in popular culture. Strauss clarifies the mistaken conflations and carefully guides us to the likely realities.

Such as this from Suetonius on Tiberius:

Following his retirement to Capri, he set up a brothel where he could devote himself in private to sexual activities, and in these he would watch troops of girls recruited from far and wide, male prostitutes in the full bloom of adulthood, and children whose particular talent was for fucking and getting fucked at the same time (’sphincters’, he called them) all joining together in an orgy of threesomes: a spectacle sufficiently obscene to excite his flagging libido. … He set up shrines to Venus in woods and groves across Capri, where young boys dressed as Pan and girls dress as nymphs would solicit sex outside caves and grottoes: because of this people openly made play with the island’s name, calling it ‘Goat Park’.

Strauss clarifies:

The historian Suetonius is full of juicy stories about Tiberius’s sexual misdeeds on the island. The “old goat,” as people are said to have called him, supposedly went after women as well as children of both sexes. His debaucheries are said to have included orgies, threesomes, pedophilia, and the murder of someone who refused him. He supposedly trained little boys to chase him when he was swimming and to get between his legs and lick and nibble him — he called them his “minnows.” Reports like this may have contributed to Tiberius’s low public standing in Rome, but Roman history is full of salacious rumors, and we should be skeptical. In reality, stargazing and fortune-telling are probably as risqué as Tiberius got on the island.

Turning to the Christian theory, Strauss shatters the theory that when the empire went Christian it fell:

Gibbon suggested long ago that Christianity played a big role in the fall of Rome because it sapped the fighting spirit of its people. This is nonsense. The eastern half of the Roman empire was more passionately Christian than the west, and it did not fall in 476. In fact, it remained as an empire for another 150 years, until the Islamic conquest of most of it. Afterward, it survived as a regional power for another 800 years, finally coming to an end only in 1453, nearly 1000 years after the fall of the West. Nor did Christianity stop European states from fighting one another and conquering much of the world for the better part of two millennia. 

Still, an argument laments the loss of Rome and the West, and that argument implies that Christians caused the fall and loss of Rome. The argument is nostalgic lamenting over a loss of their personal fantasy of Rome. A basic, economic truth is that society, and all it encompasses, flows towards dynamic areas. An oversimplified saying of this: money goes where money is welcomed. But it’s not just money, it’s social and cultural dynamism that allures. New York City attracts people from all over the world to experience the various and variegated possibilities on offer. The business, culture, arts, fashions, all attract people to New York City, and New York City is often at the leading edge of those elements. The same can be said of Los Angeles. And in today’s era, cities like Miami (or heck, the state of Florida) are now luring people with its dynamism. The eastern part of the Roman Empire was the most cultured and the most dynamic. From Caesar onward, each emperor had eyes on the east. The Western part of the empire was more or less a cultural backwater that had to be dealt with. Rome was the only great city as dynamism in Germany, France, or England was nonexistent. The east heavily influenced the Roman Empire, Greece and past Greek cultures had a heavy sway over Rome, exemplified by the wide influence of Stoicism in the Roman Empire.

As Walter Scheidel articulates in his superb Escape from Rome:

It is therefore misleading to identify “Western Christianity” as an ultimate cause of Europe’s fragmentation: its path was secondary to outcomes in state formation. While Christianity undoubtedly contributed to post Roman polycentrism, it was above all the antecedent weakening of centralized Roman political authority that allowed and, indeed, encouraged it to do so. 

Well before Christianity held any sway or even made a blip in the Roman Empire, eyes were on the East. Dynamism in the West sprang from the fall of Rome in the west and Christianity’s influence over European polycentrism.

So no, Christians did not cause the fall of the Roman Empire. Christians begat a much greater legacy: dynamism of the modern West, the science, culture, values, economics, everything that made the modern West the greatest culture in human history.

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Edward Gibbon

Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a critical work in the Western canon. It’s included amongst the Great Books for good reason. Gibbon’s prose is otherworldly and the work is a masterpiece of historical writing. Gibbon is still iconic. If you go on social media, X or Substack, it looks like everyone has read Gibbon. Yet if one reads Gibbon it’s fast apparent the people on social media have not read Gibbon.

Gibbon’s theses still dominate the modern discourse surrounding the Roman Empire. Strauss mentions Gibbon a total of four times in this work. Gibbon does not dominate Ten Caesars, yet is mentioned with gravity. Strauss does not denigrate Gibbon or Gibbon’s work. It’s clear Strauss regards the work as a masterpiece, rightly so. Yet Strauss sheds light on Gibbon’s flaws. A key flaw most people are unaware of is that for a number of generations now some of Gibbon’s positions and claims have been debunked empirically. Strauss bluntly points out the driving flaw of Gibbon.

Gibbon was a snob, writing in the age of Enlightenment, with little sympathy for upstarts and outsiders.

Gibbon’s snobbery was targeted at Christians. Gibbon claimed Christianity weakened the will of Roman men, as if it were the OnlyFans of the day, isolating men in their bedrooms. Gibbon made fabulist claims of droves of men and women going into Christian monasteries to live a comfortable life, checking out of the Roman Empire, which emptied the empire of its strong citizens. Records show this claim as pure nonsense. For the claim to have been true, the monasteries would have been the size of cities, no such monastery existed at that size, and the amount of monasteries was minuscule. Again, Gibbon does give us a rigorous history but he has his flaws. And archaeological evidence and firsthand resources kept emerging and still emerge long after Gibbon’s death that prove his Christianity caused the fall thesis as false.

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What Caused the Decline and Fall?

Today people take something going on in our culture, see a similarity in the Roman Empire, even if it’s a stretch, and peg it as the reason for the fall. As mentioned, degeneracy is the common blame. Absolutely, a culture rife with ennui, nihilism, cynicism, and obsession with the objectification spectrum of sex, is not good. It points to issues in the culture from boredom to stagnation, but most simply, it points to cultural decadence. Often tied to these issues, or upstream of them, is a lowering of decorum. And despite manosphere moralizations of women wearing something risqué at the airport, we need to zoom out from the one attractive woman dressing provocatively, and look at the majority of the population. A lowering of decorum is clear when behavior and dress is considered, and it isn’t always risqué dress. Returning to the airport, consider grown men walking around in pajamas, people who cut their toenails on the plane, the more common fat women wearing the same tight yoga pants of that attractive woman complained about by the manosphere, which highlight her aesthetic defects as she jiggles around the airport. This lowering of decorum is a loss of understanding, care, respect, and tact for standards. But something like widespread lechery does not cause a civilization to fall, it might be indicative of a culture in trouble, but it’s not the cause of the fall, in fact it barely has any role in a fall. Culture is downstream of politics. It’s downstream of institutions. Certainly the Roman Empire’s culture had issues and a rotting culture at various periods. The rotting culture didn’t help the Empire, but the Empire ebbed and flowed, it looked gone at times but Diocletian and Constantine brought it back from the brink and made it robust.

So What Caused The Fall?

Strauss answers:

The Roman Empire in the West fell because of bad leadership as well as poorly deployed military resources, internal division, strong enemies, unfavorable geography, and a decline of resources. The empire would have other great leaders before the West fell, but most of them would be in the East.

That’s Strauss’s summary in the epilogue of the Ten Caesars. The context is all over the book. Those reasons are not as sexy as blaming bikinis or the Christians or lead in the water lowering testosterone or cryptocurrency bros’ claims. Most people lack knowledge on deployed military resources, or what is the context behind the decline of resources, or topics like economic inelasticity. When that discussion happens eyes glaze over. It’s much easier for someone who dislikes modern sensibilities, or rather, the trend of women’s current bikini fashion to include thongs, to decry it and wield the Roman Empire as their argument versus enumerating and dissecting the decline of resources effect on an inelastic economy. And for the concept of modern enemies, it’s easier to go conspiratorial like Nick Fuentes and blame the Jews or marriage, instead of going into the intricacies of foreign policy and foreign statecraft. Which is why the impatient, the unprincipled, the unserious, and the dummies will stew over topics like Jews, Christians, and bikinis as the catalyst for the fall.

Who Would Like It & Why Read It

Strauss is a compelling writer. He’s accessible and rigorous. His other works, The War That Made The Roman Empire and Jews vs. Rome complement Ten Caesars well. One can read them all with this, yet Ten Caesars stands alone. It delivers an encompassing look and understanding of the Roman Empire.

If you have any interest in the Roman Empire, then this is a superb work. Whether you want to just read one book on it, or kick off reading a few books on it, you will not go wrong starting with Ten Caesars.

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Human nature ended up the key theme for me in 2025, either serendipitously or the influence of the books that kicked off the year, then bolstered by David Mamet, and cemented with the birth of my daughter. All that drove the themes and picks this year, which highlighted the human condition.

The Books I Read in 2025 (In order, top to bottom)

1. The Iliad, Homer (Richmond Lattimore translation)

2. Civilization: The West and the Rest, Niall Ferguson

3. From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present, 500 Years of Cultural Life, Jacques Barzun

4. Hunger, Knut Hamsun

5. Till We Have Faces, C. S. Lewis

6. The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad

7. The Collapse of Parenting: How We Hurt Our Kids When We Treat Them Like Grown-Ups, Leonard Sax, PhD

8. Girls on the Edge: Why So Many Girls Are Anxious, Wired, and Obsessed—and What Parents Can Do, Leonard Sax, PhD

9. Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know about the Emerging Science of Sex Differences, Leonard Sax, PhD

10. Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters: 10 Secrets Every Father Should Know, Meg Meeker, M.D.

11. Praise of Folly, Erasmus

12. Utopia, Thomas More

13. Jaws, Peter Benchley

14. The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment, David Mamet

15. The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny, Victor Davis Hanson

16. Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch, David Mamet

17. Everywhere an Oink Oink: An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood, David Mamet

18. The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, David Mamet

19. Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett

20. The Dain Curse, Dashiell Hammett

21. The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett

22. Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire, Barry Strauss

23. The Lives of the Caesars, Suetonius (Tom Holland translation)

24. The Happiest Baby on the Block: The New Way to Calm Crying and Help Your Newborn Baby Sleep Longer, Harvey Karp, MD

25. Raising Mentally Strong Kids: How to Combine the Power of Neuroscience with Love and Logic® to Grow Confident, Kind, Responsible, and Resilient Children and Young Adults, Daniel G. Amen, MD, and Charles Fay, PhD

26. Ten Caesars: Roman Emperors from Augustus to Constantine, Barry Strauss

Not included are a number of parenting books and a handful of books regarding vaccines for kids.

And the winner is . . .

The Best Book of 2025: Praise of Folly, Erasmus

First of all, what can be sweeter or more precious than life itself? And to whom is it generally agreed life owes its beginning if not to me? For it certainly isn’t the spear of “mighty fathered” Pallas or the shield of “cloud-gathering” Jupiter which fathers and propagates the human race. Even the father of the gods and king of men who makes the whole of Olympus tremble when he bows his head has to lay aside that triple-forked thunderbolt of his and that grim Titanic visage with which he can terrify all the gods whenever he chooses, and humble himself, put on a different mask, like an actor, if he ever wants to do what he always is doing, that is, “to make a child.” And the Stoics, as we know, claim to be most like the gods. But give me a man who is a Stoic three or four or if you like six hundred times over, and he too, even if he keeps his beard as a mark of wisdom, though he shares it with a goat, will have to swallow his pride, smooth out his frown, shake off his rigid principles, and be fond and foolish for a while. In fact, if the philosopher ever wants to be a father it’s me he has to call on— yes, me.

Praise of Folly, Erasmus

At times satirical, at times ironic, and at times explicit, Praise of Folly is a paramount work in the Western canon. Jacques Barzun declares Erasmus more impactful than Martin Luther and that Erasmus wielded the far more powerful mind. In Praise of Folly, the wisdom on the human condition is profound, the arguments sharp, and, often, irrefutable.

Erasmus intended this work as a letter to his friend Thomas More. The work requires footnotes because as happens with friends, we can change tone and meaning two or three times in a sentence. Think of an insider text thread with a friend, full of banter, full of inside jokes, that turns into seriousness. Fortunately, Erasmus left a large body of work which elucidates his positions in Praise of Folly.

The story is told through the mouthpiece of the god Folly. Folly is dressed as a jester, and his “followers” are:

• Flattery

• Forgetfulness

• Idleness

• Pleasure

• Madness

• Sensuality

• Revelry

• Sound Sleep

He uses these “followers” to attack human pretensions, display innate foibles, and lambaste preachy pastors, preachers, priests, philosophers, and anyone who moralizes, especially those using Christianity to rebuke others. And the genius of the work castigates those on the opposite spectrum, those who choose to wallow in decadence and reject Christian morality.

Erasmus is pragmatic; he grasps the nature of reality. The quoted passage reflects the arguments Erasmus makes throughout the work. That passage calls out the moralizers against sex. That those who preach the most against sex as a vice forget that their existence depended upon the lustful folly of their parents. But Erasmus goes deeper. He’s showing that sex is part of human nature. Comprised in that nature exists man and woman’s sexual and sensual expression, and those expressions comprise spectrums. The nature of those spectrums is designed to attract or signal to a partner, then with folly help ignite the spark of the eros, the eros containing the cerebral, emotional, and physical elements of our sexual expression, which opens up the vast pastels of that expression from romantic to primal lust. All that makes sex and sexual expression enjoyable and desirable, which helps beget children so man can be fruitful and multiply, and more so, stokes the expressions to fuel a bond in a relationship. Because, as Erasmus points out wittily, the burdens of child labor, man’s capability to impregnate multiple women without much burden on a physical level, and then how hard it is to raise a child, the capacity and depth of those expressions help keep the bond between man and woman. Despite all the preaching and moralizing the eros keeps mankind alive.

Erasmus shows that contradiction is a feature of mankind, and that contradiction is a feature of faith. He reveals the contradictions in the Bible, and how people, often with an agenda, skate past or rationalize the contradiction, or tailor it to their ends.

Another piece of powerful wisdom: the real world practicalities of prudence. A common concept is that the best kind of prudence is grave purity, to always shelter oneself from any form of pleasure, vice, and so on. Erasmus’s argument is that of taking down a modern academic who preaches on prudence yet has never lived a life beyond the halls of academia—as in, they never took risks. Whereas, as Erasmus argues, someone who has gone out and taken risk and learned from bad choices and good choices, is capable of pragmatic wisdom versus someone who lives solely in words and theory. For instance, a sheltered nun moralizing to teenagers why premarital sex is an unforgivable sin, and taking drugs is the behavior of the devil, yet has never been in or near a situation to say no to what she lectures to teenagers about. Whereas someone else who has lived some life, they know what it is like to say no or to say yes, they know the regret, they know the pleasure and the downsides of the vice, and they know the consequence. They may have never done the drugs, but they’ve been in a situation or near it to grasp the temptation, the strength to say no under pressure, and can articulate why they did. Or if the night went lustfully, that at the time it was fun and felt like the right decision, but later, regret, reflection, or the night ending up lackluster, or some other reason, the person wishes they could take back that decision. In sum, they have perspective and can articulate this perspective in a manner relatable to someone. This is a powerful lesson on prudence. Erasmus isn’t saying to live a few years hedonistically; rather, he’s revealing pragmatics. The person who lives in the real world has the ability to articulate situations, decisions, and perspective, whereas the person living inside of theory does not. They have an opportunity to put Christian morality to work. Even if the living-in-theory person is correct, and person who lived life says the same thing, how each delivers the message tells us who has the wisdom and who has never faced a chance to gain that wisdom. It’s a beautiful truth.

The depth of the human condition is where Erasmus shines with his wisdom on Christianity. That Christianity, and God, can help us navigate ourselves and our world. That we are imperfect and full of contradictions, as is the Bible. But the contradictions of the Bible, of Christianity, to Erasmus reveal the divine. And the Bible, Christian faith, gives us the compass to live well and handle the unknowable — to avoid being chained by the darker parts of our vices, to not moralize, to have humility, and even strength to face the world. For instance, his parts on youthful ambition, and why it’s good. That the pride a cocksure twenty-one-year old has is the essence of what makes society better. That ambition can bring us the art of da Vinci, the convenience of Amazon bestowed to our lives, something as simple as roads, experiencing the youthful vibrance of a dynamic city, or how Jesus went out to gain more followers—he had an ambition. So always decrying any form of pride as always bad is misguided, that, instead youthful ambition is good. That purpose and harvesting dignity in work, whether being a great mother or great builder, is worthwhile ambition.

Praise of Folly is an enjoyable read and heavy on wisdom. Its lessons on human nature, its lessons on why we need God, are otherworldly.

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Fiction

Best Fiction (excluding Praise of Folly): The Iliad, Homer

Lessons on masculinity sum up the Iliad. Homer and his Iliad (and his Odyssey) have long been emasculated by academia since postmodernism seeped into the classics departments starting around the 1960s. Achilles has been claimed to be trans, gay, or a white supremacist. Achilles is none of these things.

The Iliad is robust on masculine wisdom. It is the oldest work of the Western canon, and it teaches us the four virtues of masculinity:

1. Courage

2. Wisdom

3. Skill

4. Physical strength

The definition of masculinity today is getting vaguer and vaguer and further bastardized. But the Iliad conveys true masculine virtues and extolls those virtues.

How Homer paints the virtues, each virtue interacts with the other; they’re not categorical and separated. For instance, take the baseline of physical strength. For a man to get it he needs to get some kind of movement. Let’s say he goes to a barbell gym. That choice to go the first time, whether he’s fifteen or fifty-five, takes courage. That knowing to go derives from wisdom, whether taught to him or observed under his own volition. Then, at that gym, to keep showing up takes courage as well as wisdom, knowing it’s a lifelong process and not a quick fix. As he does this he gains skill. He might get a coach. To do so he either might ask his dad or he might have the means. That takes courage to ask for help. As his strength increases his skill increases, and that offers wisdom. To get stronger he needs to lift heavier weights. And at times, he will be unsure, nervous, or anxious if he can lift heavier weight. To get under that bar takes more courage and from that experience comes wisdom.

Now, while physical strength may not fuel intellectual wisdom per se, the notion to learn, to advocate for your wisdom, all requires the same virtues. It takes courage to tackle Dostoevsky the first time, and wisdom and skill come from seeking to know more.

Now those examples fuel the disposition, the character of the man, and they apply to his living life. For instance, asking a girl out. The first time, it takes a ton of courage. As life goes on, a man will gain wisdom and skill from reading a girl, flirting, asking out, date dynamics, and so on. The physical strength part, he knows it’s a selling feature; it’s a signal of his discipline, lifestyle, and his standards. And in time he goes from “I hope she says yes” to vetting women for a woman who complements his values, to then having the courage to take a risk and bet it all on one. All that requires the masculine virtues, and the process of it shapes and strengthens the virtues. The strength part? As implied, it triggers ancient provide-and-protect signals in women. It triggers signals for physical intimacy which include the potential of robust offspring—in sum, it’s an age-old human nature reality.

The examples can go on. From work, to purpose, to the seasons of life, the masculine virtues are always with a man.

The modern world sells men that a rite of passage works like a Hollywood-style montage. That you spend some weekend acting like a Spartan warrior and that graduates you into “manhood” and that we’ve lost this ceremony. But Homer shows us rites of passage into manhood come from working on having the masculine virtues imbued into your being. For instance, playing sports as a kid, a championship season or a season of zero wins, all rites of passage. The first time you ask a girl out, the first time you get rejected, all rites of passage. Rites of passage arrive with a man’s maturation, from his living and taking risks and trying new things. It can be solo; it can be amongst teammates or colleagues. It’s often a slow process, not the going out into the woods and acting like a Spartan. It’s much less commercial than we’re sold. It’s our own journey. It’s both physical and metaphysical. And it’s not as glamorous, and sometimes no one is there to validate it; it’s just ourselves. It’s not performative or a big thing; it just is.

Another powerful lesson on masculinity from The Iliad is how Homer excoriates the cad. The cad being the standard bro on the dating apps who merely wants to Netflix and Chill. He may tease a relationship, but that tease is simply to sleep with more women. On a platform like X, certain corners of the manosphere, seduction corners, and the red pill, they preach to men to have sex with as many women as you can in order to be more valuable, then settle down with some nineteen-year-old illiterate virgin when you’re forty.1 And then the contradictory messages of if she sleeps with other men, she’s damaged goods, yet if she doesn’t sleep with you on the first date, you’re cooked. All of this theorizing is at one end projection of psychosexual fantasies and at the other end is profoundly sophomoric, nihilistic, and vicarious. It’s all proffered by weak, damaged men scared of risk and accountability. The kind of men Homer exposes. Homer shows the wisdom of a man who is choosy, not some prude, but choosy, and that cad behavior is the sign of a weak man.

Masculine wisdom abounds in The Iliad. It is a masculine novel. One every man should read, multiple times over the course of his life.

Hunger, Knut Hamsun

The novel that kicked off the twentieth century. Knut Hamsun was tired of the novels of his era believing they lacked psychological reality. He created a character, a nameless, manic vagrant. Through this character Hamsun shows us a truth of human psychology: we’re all irrational. Yet that irrationality is not always a bad thing like rationalists proclaim.

The novel reads manic. And true to real life, the character does not “change” or evolve in his arc. People do not “change” as claimed. People can do any of the following: evolve, mature, regress, or stagnate — but disposition is the same. And at various times in our life we might be maturing but for the period it all looks the same. With Hamsun’s character, the manic vagrant, we witness his wallowing in his mania, and through it, we learn of man’s irrationality. We see both the good, bad, and the it-is-what-it-is side of it all. A truly brilliant novel and fun to read.

The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad

A common saying is that art can’t be political, that literature sucks if it is loaded with a political message. On the whole, that is true. Progressive Enlightenment—aka “woke” ideals—are infused into Hollywood stories. A trans character is the lead, but given the principles of Progressive Enlightenment, you’re not allowed to make the trans character flawed. Only white males can have flaws, and the flaws are predictable tropes. The same can be said of the Progressive dross shoved down your throats at most indie bookstores. The novels by Ta-Nehisi Coates, for instance, or Madeline Miller who loves to make all of Homer’s characters gay and all of the women sexually unsatisfied. It’s all on the nose, it’s all predictable and boring.

But Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent is an exception to the rule. He gave the Western canon a classic in political fiction. Conrad surveyed the bombings done in the name of revolution of his era and wondered how someone could easily kill others as a means for their ends and not feel bad for it. That rumination spawned this classic. The characters of The Secret Agent reveal truths of political worldviews. Some accuse the other side of not believing what they claim, but in reality, this is a trope. People do believe it and they believe they’re right, and many see their way as morally pure in any circumstance, even if it involves killing or the celebration of someone on the other side of the aisle dying.

A modern example of this are the leftists celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk. The death was abhorrent, gruesome, and evil. Yet a large population of those with a liberal worldview hail the death as a positive. Many tropish explanations exist around why a person celebrates the death of Kirk, such as, “Surely they can’t believe it’s good to celebrate the death of him, they must be doing it to sound edgy.” But they do believe it; they do believe his murder was right. That’s the reality. Why? Conrad asks and answers this question in The Secret Agent. It’s a wonderful work, rich on politics, and should be read by every conservative.

Till We Have Faces, C. S. Lewis

Till We Have Faces is C. S. Lewis’s vision of the myth Cupid and Psyche. Lewis looks into themes of self-love, love, jealousy, suffering, and belief in God. A psychological novel showing man’s natural impulse to wrangle with God and faith, and how that wrangle manifests in ourselves and others. The question of believing derives from that unknown, the edges of the world that cannot be explained. For instance, when you go to cross a crosswalk and the cars stop, at any moment those cars can kill you. Anyone, including yourself, would see the atrocity if the driver of that car does kill you. If he does it on purpose, we see the evil. If it’s a mistake, we lament the senseless loss of life. That edge of why the drivers stop and why if they didn’t we’d lament is edge where God exists. This is just one of many things Lewis reveals to us in Till We Have Faces.

Utopia, Thomas More

A key book of the Western canon. I’ll be blunt, it didn’t resonate with me. But the further removed I am from it the more I think on it. It grows on me, and I understand more of it. Utopia was More’s answer to Praise of Folly. Yet with More, it’s harder to tell if he’s satirical at first. Which is why the book, and its meaning, has been argued over now for centuries. More tells of a society so rigid with its rules that it’s clearly nonsensical. But when you ruminate on the themes, it’s a takedown of the rigid black-and-white theories people cook up whether it’s on society, women, men, religion, economics, and so on. We get a sense why those rigid theories will not work, and why marginal changes and inherited changes work better. It’s a famous Catholic piece, yet I haven’t reached an articulate position on what Utopia offers on faith, other than hard-line rigidity is a failure.

Red Harvest; The Dain Curse; The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett

Hammett poured a foundation for the hard-boiled detective novel. His story beats, such as double-crossing, Gordian knot of whodunnit, dames throwing themselves at the main character, and so on, are now key elements in the mystery canon. I’m a massive Raymond Chandler fan. Hammett influenced Chandler, and Chandler took the mystery novel to sonic heights. Where I struggled with Hammett was in The Maltese Falcon. In it the main character, Sam Spade, lacks impulse control around women. He sleeps with his partner’s wife; he sleeps with a woman on the case; any woman coming his way he sleeps with. I like tragic hero masculine figures because they’re authentic. And many men, and women, have their foibles. But how Spade can’t refuse, whereas Chandler’s famous character, Marlowe, has a gravity of choosiness which injects a ton of masculinity into his character, I struggled with. Even a more playboy-style character like Jack Reacher still chooses. He, like Marlowe, is sensitive in the definition of reading others combined with introspection. I had a hard time trusting Spade. Regardless, Hammett is fun and worthwhile.

Jaws, Peter Benchley

It sucked. The movie takes nearly nothing from the book, thank God, except for the opening scene of the bibulous college kids fooling around, and the gal getting killed by the shark when she goes for a swim. The story lines in the book are bizarre, like the weird mafia plot line that goes nowhere. All of the main characters are unlikable. The affair between Ellen Brody and Matt Hooper is cynical ennui. How the setting is on Long Island, or near it, is odd — it doesn’t feel like an island. Steven Spielberg and his writers extracted the idea from that book and shaped a classic story. They reworked all the characters to make them relatable, likable, and memorable. The book is a stinker, my only letdown read of 2025.

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Nonfiction

Best Nonfiction: David Mamet

My summer was the summer of Mamet. I read three of his works:

• The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment

• Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch

• Everywhere an Oink Oink: An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood

For me, the curation nearly made it as the best book of the year. Reading Praise of Folly and then later David Mamet was serendipitous. Mamet further detailed truths of human nature and demonstrated the worldview of liberals and conservatives. And as an aside, he served wisdom on art, storytelling, and character. His elucidation on choice, how we understand someone and ourselves through our choices, our decisions and actions, and that when we make those decisions we’re convinced we’re always doing the right thing, that struck a chord. It’s simple, yet it injected deep meaning and colors to personal perspectives. How I saw myself and others was clearer. He inspired countless ruminating walks in the Boise foothills before I moved back to Colorado.

Personal perspectives aside, Mamet packs a ton into each work I read. Politics, art, worldview, faith (Mamet also influenced a deepening of my Christian faith), religion, Hollywood, and more—Mamet paints a vivid picture. He’s a blast to read, at one end philosophical and at the other salty and witty.

From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present, 500 Years of Cultural Life, Jacques Barzun

An ambling, ruminating, beautiful walk through the Western cultural life and its influences from 1500 till 2000. Barzun goes through the modern Great Books, starting with both Erasmus and Martin Luther, going up until today. He looks at the ideas which influenced the culture of the eras he covers. And with culture he covers everything from religion, sex, art, fashion, and cultural mores. Mores meaning the essence, the fashions, the fashionable intellectual concepts, and social experiments. It’s an expansive work, covering Erasmus, sexual mores of the Victorian era, when absurdity or relativism took over, and so on and so forth. Barzun’s prose is beautiful and shows his rumination. He pours out in a somewhat French style, where it seems like a ramble, but then he comes to a strong argument, principle, or rhetorical device. It’s a monster work, 877 pages. Yet it’s an exhaustive masterpiece of the modern West and a guide through the modern portion of the Great Books.

The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny, Victor Davis Hanson

At one end psychological, another end revelatory on the nature of war, and at another eye-opening of human nature when a near-fanatical leader with a deep purpose and a democratic army outright emasculates the enemy through unconventional means. The book is in three parts: Hanson analyzes Epaminondas, William Tecumseh Sherman, and George Patton. The theme is an unlikely army, those who volunteered, marched and led by a near-fanatical leader who was often overlooked or disliked by more intellectual types, and how they not only defeated but emasculated the enemies. What makes each figure and the story intriguing is how each exposed the bluster of famous “warrior societies” as spineless. Sparta and Spartan warriors are still revered as a mighty warrior culture today, yet Epaminondas and his army had the men on the run and the women left to defend themselves, exposing the spinelessness. The Confederacy saw the Union as weak-willed and from a degenerate society, yet Sherman exposed southern aristocratic class as effete with his band of men. The Confederate women lambasted Sherman, yet the men were nowhere to be found, and if they did come to battle, Sherman’s fast-acting soldiers squashed them instantly. The last, the iconic George Patton, a well-read yet salty mind, learned quickly he had to expose and destroy the Nazi ideology. Patton was interesting since he was not “sober and judicious”; the sober and judicious types like Eisenhower held him back, which cost more lives in the end. But when Patton marched, he, like Epaminondas and Sherman, emasculated the Nazis. Also interesting, these three men, arguably wielding the most powerful soldiers at their helm, yet weeks after they were finished, all soldiers returned home to their normal lives. It’s this reality where Hanson shows the force capable in a democracy and those driven by a cause and led by a purposeful leader.

Jews vs. Rome; Ten Caesars, Barry Strauss

Barry Strauss has a rare talent. He writes history that’s accessible yet packed with depth and substance. Jews vs. Rome is a timely book regarding current affairs in Israel. Strauss covers how decisions of an emperor over two thousand years along with the Jewish response to that decision still reverberate today. Strauss offers clarity on a complex and confusing situation and insightful analysis of the Roman Empire.

Ten Caesars I read as a complement to Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars. I wish I had read Ten Caesars first. It’s one of the best windows onto the Roman Empire. The ten biographical vignettes paint the culture, political mores, and social elements of the Roman Empire. Strauss also debunks popular theories and theses of how the Roman Empire fell, such as it was the Christians or it was the degeneracy. Ten Caesars delivers clarity. Strauss also tells of the power-broker women during the Roman Empire and how certain women played a key role in the empire’s politics. If there is one book to read to understand the Roman Empire and know why it fell, this is the one. Superb.

The Lives of the Caesars, Suetonius

The pick for the test launch of my book club. A handful of readers stuck through it till the end. Many had a tough time with it, not the book per se, as Tom Holland gifts readers a great translation, but they had a tough time with the nihilism, degeneracy, ennui, and cynicism. Each vignette never seems to get better, which makes for tough reading. Lives of the Caesars was written during the reign of Hadrian by one of Hadrian’s insiders, Suetonius. It’s twelve biographical vignettes. While it does contain what is likely some salacious rumors and accusations, it does show modern readers the kind of degeneracy and political chaos of the time. It’s a tough read on the human element, but it’s an important read to gain understanding of why indifference to human life, which social media (screens, apps, and internet too) seem to be causing. We value life today, but online, objectification is the norm combined with the vicariousness of the online world. This makes for a bizarre twist of treating ourselves or others as a brand and using cynical methods to attain those ends. We see similarities of it in Suetonius, which is a sobering reality.

Civilization: The West and the Rest, Niall Ferguson

I must admit, starting in mid- to late 2024 my sleep was taking a big hit from sleep apnea. I struggled reading. The most affected reads were Jacques Barzun (the first half) and this one by Ferguson. It all instantly turned around when I got my CPAP. I’m bummed that poor sleep sapped my reading of Civilization. Niall Ferguson is among my favorite writers and favorite historians. I will venture my best summary. Civilization analyzes why Western civilization, particularly Western democracies, became the world standard. He boils it down to six “killer applications”:

1. Competition

2. Science

3. Property rights

4. Medicine

5. The consumer society

6. The work ethic

The combination of these applications, and how they germinated and then evolved, all gave rise to the Western world as we know it. What I remember best, the cultural and political will combined with institutions complementing their growth was the secret sauce. It gave rise to what we enjoy today, the most affluent leisurely culture in history.

The Happiest Baby on the Block: The New Way to Calm Crying and Help Your Newborn Baby Sleep Longer, Harvey Karp, M.D.

Parenting advice is not my lane. I was not going to include this book until I saw goober influencer Nat Eliason hail the “cry it out” method for newborns on X and, according to Nat, that the galaxy-sized amount of evidence saying “cry it out” is detrimental is in fact wrong. What struck me most was the horrific advice in his replies, those defending him, and those calling out those who don’t use the “cry it out” method as weak, and that attending to the baby when it cries because it’s hardwired into humans is making an appeal to tradition fallacy. As a new dad, The Happiest Baby has been a godsend. It makes great sense; it’s intuitive; it’s empirical; and, like my theme, it grasps the nature of humans. It tells of the rudimentary language of babies which is no different now than it was 10,000 years ago, despite what the sciolist Eliason claims. If you’re a dad-to-be soon, or just are now, Happiest Baby is fantastic. It’s working for me and my wife; I can calm my daughter in an instant, and the methods are working at helping my daughter become a great sleeper. I know every baby is different, but the methods in the book work, and it helped me understand newborns.

Raising Mentally Strong Kids: How to Combine the Power of Neuroscience with Love and Logic® to Grow Confident, Kind, Responsible, and Resilient Children and Young Adults, Daniel G. Amen, M.D., and Charles Fay, PhD

My wife and I welcomed our daughter into the world on December 5, 2025. When we found out we were pregnant, I had a list of parenting books that were must-reads, all recommended by people I respect and who I observed had great kids. The kids were conscientious, well-behaved, happy, and confident. The Love and Logic® method has long been recommended to me and my wife, and we each came across it serendipitously: a good friend of mine was raised with its principles, and a friend of my wife raised her twin daughters with it. My good friend, writer and esteemed psychologist, Dr. Shawn Smith, also recommended Love and Logic®. The more I looked into it, the more my wife looked into it, we decided its principles are what we’re using as our North Star to raise our daughter.

Raising Mentally Strong Kids is from the Love and Logic® school. This book was cowritten by neuroscientist Daniel Amen and Love and Logic® head Charles Fay. Amen offers empirical backing to the Love and Logic principles. When I first looked at Love and Logic® it made crystal-clear sense to me, not on a common-sense level, but on an intuitive level. The basic principle is a loving and firm style of parenting, that of a consultant. You provide boundaries and standards for your kids, yet you also let them take risks, make mistakes, and offer guidance in the form of letting them make choices to help them sort through life. My dad did a lot of this style of parenting. For instance, if I was upset at something, he would say, “That’s too bad. It must stink, huh? Well you’re my kid; you’ll figure it out. Any idea what you’re gonna do?” Little did my dad know he was fathering me with principles which neuroscience backs up. This book is for parents, yet it’s a captivating look into brain psychology and human wiring.

The Collapse of Parenting; Girls on the Edge; Why Gender Matters, Leonard Sax, PhD

The Collapse of Parenting could be enjoyed by anyone, not just parents. Sax illuminates the rising anxiety, the transgender nonsense, and the rising depression among Gen Z and the younger millennials. But he goes back far on parenting to give us a broad look. He, like Love and Logic®, recommends authoritative parenting (loving and firm) and shows why authoritarian, helicopter, and passive parenting are detrimental. Authoritative parenting: kids need structure, standards, accountability, and a balance with free play. He is adamant against screens and gives eye-opening evidence on the danger of screens, in sum they’re abhorrent for children and teens. Combined with either helicopter parenting (or sometimes therapeutic parenting) or authoritarian parenting, screens are a recipe for disaster. Sax’s book reveals a lot of what’s going on in our modern culture. For instance, why did many young voters in New York City go for socialist Zohran Mamdani? Many were raised in a therapeutic helicopter parent or daycare environment, combined with a phone-based childhood instead of what we used to have for thousands of years, a play-based childhood, and the results are catastrophic. Sax at times can get sweeping with his style, yet he’s passionate and right. He, I say, offers the big picture while Love and Logic® gives the granular steps.

Why Gender Matters and Girls on the Edge went more into the specifics on human wiring. Sax shows us that despite what leftists claim, girls and boys are wired differently. That girls’ psychology is different than boys’ psychology, coinciding with the biological differences. Why Gender Matters covers this reality in detail. Girls on the Edge focuses on girls and a lot of the how-to of how to raise a resilient girl with a strong sense of self. A huge key: keep her off social media and iPhones, Androids, or what have you. What I also appreciated is how a father needs to chat with his daughter with honesty. For instance, the “talk” isn’t a one-time thing, nor is it a “don’t let boys touch you” as that only sets her up for failure. With anything, you need to as a father (and mother) articulate why, articulate your positions, principles, in a clear manner. And the big thing is, regardless of what she does, she needs to know she is loved. That if a mistake happens, you might be upset, but she knows she is loved. Sax is a much-needed voice countering the racket of terrible parenting advice out there.

Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters: 10 Secrets Every Father Should Know, Meg Meeker, MD

Not as principled or empirical as Sax or Love and Logic®, and at times a bit moralizing. Yet the core message: love your daughter, show up for her, and be involved in her life. When I attended my uncle’s funeral in Florida, my cousin, his daughter, got up and gave a touching eulogy. Her core theme: he showed up. My cousin is a testimonial of good parenting and solid fathering. Most assign qualities like “smart” and “successful” as a way of saying someone is a good person. But those, while well-intentioned, are shallow physical descriptions. My cousin is both of those things, but most important, the good fathering showed up in the metaphysical, she’s conscientious, has a strong sense of self, she’s resilient, and is a great mother of three boys and a great wife; her values are clear, on her sleeve, and she lives them. As she gave her touching eulogy of how her dad showed up and was always there, Meeker’s book surfaced in my mind. Meeker says that the most important man in a woman’s life is her father. That at the end of a daughter’s life, she will think of her father. That resonated. Despite some of the moralizing, the overall message to show up for your daughter, to have standards, to even be a little crazy and interview her suitors, stood out to me.

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Reflecting on 2025

Goals like reading seventy-five books I reject. I find those goals cynical, signaling, and arbitrary. It’s hitting a number to hit a number in order to get some kind of validation. I want to read each book well. That’s my reading compass, and the compass with my site.

Inspired by a Ted Gioia piece I worked on engaging more in the marginalia, and it paid off. I tried his essay part, but it took too long between books. When I got my CPAP and my apnea sorted, it felt like my reading boosted.

My aim with subscribers and paid members is to inspire better reading. Better reading comes from enjoyment, a willingness to engage which comes from asking questions and articulating impressions in the margins, and a willingness to reflect a little. Reading to seek “insight” or “lessons” to better yourself, while well-intentioned, dulls comprehension. It dulls it by killing enjoyment, and it dulls it by leading the reader to commit a motivational exegesis of the book. In other words, coming in with preconceived notions of what lessons to seek, the lessons adhering to self-development clichés, then forcing sentences to fit the preconceived lessons to feel as if you’re gaining insight or to tell yourself you’re reading correctly. This is done as a result of mirroring other “successful people reading for insight.” It’s done to associate oneself with someone successful and by doing so hoping to raise one’s own prestige. There’s a name for it, and it’s a natural human impulse: prestige bias.

That I mention because as I continue my journey into a one-man review of books, I still get copywriters and people from internet marketing asking for the pop self-help and biz development styled tips, tricks, and methods. I still piss off hustletards when I relay my dislike of Atomic Habits. Not that the advice in it is bad, but the advice is nothing new, and I found the prose like all self-development prose: stilted, boring, and insufferable. My lane is not find the best lessons from a book for B2B sales or how to extract secret wisdom from a book to become an ubermensch. Both of those concepts are fantasies. My goal is better reading.

I moved to Substack in 2025, and it was the right move. I’m still figuring it out, but I enjoy it over here; it gave clarity to my one-man review of books angle.

What’s Ahead for 2026

My book club will be properly launched. The first big official topic: Niccolò Machiavelli. I’m going to read both The Prince and The Discourses. And I will likely follow it up with the famous work of political theory: The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom by James Burnham. More on that later.

The book club will venture into classics, topics, themes, authors, and modern works. I like clusters; many authors or themes will be done in clusters. But this coming year I’m eyeing for the book club:

• Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville

• The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell

• Defenders of the West; Sword and Scimitar; The Two Swords of Christ, Raymond Ibrahim (trilogy of his work)

• Andrew Roberts, which biography I’m unsure, but I’m eyeing him

• Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

• The Children of Men, P. D. James

• Scoop, Evelyn Waugh

It’s not set in stone. I read a lot by feel. But those are the ones I’m eyeing. And with America’s 250th anniversary, some American-themed books might take precedence:

• A Patriot’s History of the United States, Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen (with the complementary reader book)

• A History of the American People, Paul Johnson

• The Good Country, Jon K. Lauck

• The Last King of America, Andrew Roberts

• Ethnic America, Thomas Sowell

I did do some livestreams on Substack. My first was, well, terrible, but I loved it. I’ve been teasing video now for a long time. I was directionless at first when I had the videographer here last year. I didn’t like what I cut. But after doing the livestreams and being on Substack I have direction. My YouTube page will go up this year. And I will do more livestreams with my subscribers.

I’m also going to release some articles, inspired by what I read, that touch upon modern culture. Since I want to grow and reach deep thinkers, and since I’m unapologetically conservative/right-wing, I’m hoping to be a one-man review of books for conservatives, as there are not many sources out there. I don’t speak much on politics, but it does come out. And on the right, there is a rich intellectual history. I’m not an intellectual, yet I hope to be a conduit into some great reads for my right-wing brethren.

I will also have a new series for paid members, Letters to my Daughter. These will be personal memoir type pieces. They will entail my reflections, observations, and perspectives of life, and are intended to be read by my daughter when she’s an adult.

And since I’m working on growing on Substack, a large majority of my culture articles will be free, and the bookclub will be for the paid members.

I wish you a great 2026 and a great year of reading in 2026. If you’d like to be a part of the book club, then upgrade your membership. The more involvement the more I will open up to discuss whatever I’m reading.

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Victor Davis Hanson had David Mamet on his podcast, and they spoke of his new book, The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment. The show embarrassed me. I never knew that David Mamet was behind some movies I loved: The Untouchables, The Edge, Glengarry Glenross and American Buffalo. I loved their discussion, and Victor Davis Hanson mentioned that Mamet is one of the best writers of our time, and one of his favorites. That perked my interest, since VDH rarely drops a comment like that.

I looked for The Disenlightenment on the shelves of Barnes and Noble and yielded nothing. I spotted an employee doing her checklist to close the store. I walked over, my soaked shoes making that squish-fart sound and asked if they had Mamet’s book. She said they had it. We went over to the shelf and couldn’t find it. She said it should be here and that they have a few copies. We hunted for it, the store closed in two minutes, and she said maybe they were all sold and the system hadn’t updated it yet. I moved a book that looked out of place, and there behind it were the copies of The Disenlightenment.

So began my summer of Mamet.

Sometimes an author hooks you. A line, a paragraph, a chapter, or an essay, hits you. I had expected a solid cultural and political critique from Mamet. I expected to read only The Disenlightenment and then move on. I did not expect to end up reading him all summer. I did not expect to get closer to my Christian faith (Mamet is Jewish). I did not expect a master class into the arts, nor did I expect to walk away with deeper understandings of human nature, including the nature of myself, my loved ones, and basic truths of humans.

Mamet’s first few passages hooked me. After the first passage, I knew I was only going to read Mamet for most of the summer. It made for a great summer. The books read:

• The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment

• Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch

• Everywhere an Oink Oink: An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood

• The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture

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Background

David Mamet is an iconic playwright, screenwriter, and producer.

Hollywood is a leftist world. It has been for decades. Those in it, like Mamet, are considered the liberal Elite, like the George Clooneys of the world. Mamet is Jewish, and most Jews are liberals. Most Jews in Hollywood are far left-liberals. Mamet grew up liberal. Yet sometime during the late 1990s Mamet began wrangling with his liberal worldview due to his personal observations of human nature, of modern media, and of the truths he felt he conveyed in his plays and movies.

His wrangling turned to rumination, and when rumination reaches a boiling point in the mind, it surfaces in conversation. Somewhere along the line he ruminated aloud to someone, and that someone recommended he check out White Guilt by Shelby Steele.

Mamet did not have a Road to Damascus moment. Shelby Steele did not convince him with the raw power of his arguments. Rather, Mamet came home to his values. He sought answers to questions and discovered he was a conservative.1 Upon realizing this, he decided to learn his worldview to understand his nature, what existed behind his observations of human nature, and to understand the world he lived in. He read Thomas Sowell, Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, John Locke, and more Shelby Steele.

I read his works from the latest, The Disenlightenment back to his first political book The Secret Knowledge. One work, Everywhere an Oink Oink was more on Hollywood, the creative process, and spilling dirt and truths on Hollywood.

Each book is at one end a collection of essays, yet they all work as a book from start to finish. The themes and pacing are connected. And what makes them special are the authentic memoir pieces, which convey the human experience. Mamet doesn’t just cover politics or political philosophy; he takes turns into human nature, interpretations of the Bible, writing a story, memoirs of his life, his love of his Jewish faith, and what faith from Christian and Jewish perspectives teaches and means for us. Each book is relatively short but demands time, as he inspires reflection and consideration.

Politics 

Why do Denver constituents keep voting for policies that fail? And when they fail, why is it they can’t see it was the policy they voted for? Why is it for any failure they always blame a marginal minority in Denver, a minority without any influence or power, the Republicans? Why is it these constituents embrace the decline, seeing it as a means to an end to birth a city that will be a jewel on the world stage?

The list of personal questions goes on. Progressive politics marinates Denver and much of Colorado. When I moved to Boise, Idaho, and lived in a model of good governance, my questions of Denver constituents increased.

Mamet provided the answers. When I moved back to Colorado to be closer to family, I came back with far more understanding and far more pain from the knowledge.

Mamet does not castigate liberals like most political books. Nor does he do pop-psychoanalysis of liberals that you often find in podcasts or social media. Instead, he looks at human nature and the nature of the worldview of liberals, a worldview he once held.

His view complements and expands Thomas Sowell’s iconic Conflict of Visions. In that work, Sowell lays out the differences between the Constrained and the Unconstrained. The Constrained is on the right wing spectrum; it’s people who believe in the tragic view of human nature. That we’re all broken, full of contradictions, and we need to recognize this truth of our nature. That laws and government work best when they recognize human nature, that disparities of outcomes are innate to man and societies, and also recognize that bad apples exist and that it’s better to call it as it is, that they’re bad apples. The Unconstrained is the left spectrum, and it rejects that we’re broken and full of contradictions, and believes that we can escape our foibles and live as an ultimate being. The Unconstrained sees man as a chess piece on a chessboard, and a move can be made without consequences or trade-offs. They reject disparity of outcomes and believe equality of outcomes must be the goal for all; they do not recognize that bad apples exist, but instead those apples are victims of a system and the system must be changed. And they believe that changes to the system can be done without consequences, tradeoffs, or costs.

No person is 100 percent one or the other.

Mamet dissects the nature of both sides. His conviction, one I share with him, is that the conservative side of the spectrum is the organ of truth, the organ of reality. And the left tries to escape truth and alter reality to feelings, like the “Joy” campaign of Kamala Harris. Or as Mamet said on the Mike Rowe podcast, that those on the right, have sat down with a legal pad, looked at the costs, and had to become reasonable and reason with reality. While the left trashes the legal pad and believes feelings can evade reality.2

That trying to reject reality, to reject our nature, Mamet shows how liberal media or institutions will lie with word games in an attempt to feed that rejection in hopes of altering our reality. As he says it, they try to put a phrase out there where if you believe it, then you’ll believe anything. An example from my life recently: the midwifery center where my wife delivered our daughter, on its forms, pamphlets, and updates on the wall, the term “birthing person” is used. Used as if saying anything otherwise is anachronistic, backward, or, in other words, not reality. That it’s not a woman who gives birth; rather it is a birthing person. If someone believes that, then they will believe anything.

How Mamet captures human nature is compelling. If you’re a conservative, in Mamet he will give color, depth, and meaning to your worldview: why it is you have certain opinions, beliefs, and convictions. He doesn’t “own the libs” or throw red meat; he paints it into the human experience.

I could go on, like how he dissects Trump Derangement Syndrome on both sides, or why the virtue signaling, the moralizing behavior from the left, or why blue elite voters keep voting in policies that ruin their cities, among others.

Mamet delivers political analysis and dissection unlike anyone else I’ve read; his capability to bring it to the human level makes it compelling, engaging, and real.

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Hollywood & Story

Even the books on politics wade deep into wisdom on Hollywood, writing, art, the art of critique, and more.

What struck me most was Mamet masterfully kneecapping modern story formulas, particularly the backstory formula we find ubiquitous in novels and movies. Mamet details how it’s a Freudian concept that seeped into story telling. The backstory formula proclaims that stories, in particular the characters, need emotional backstory, like a character bible, in order to tell us what motivates the character. The concept that some emotional incident tells us why the person does what he does and why he makes his choices. Mamet explains how this concept has ruined acting schools, actors, and writers of all sorts. He hilariously tells us why the writing gurus teaching this formula, the acting schools telling actors to come up with an emotional backstory, and movies and novels featuring it are nonsensical dross.

It’s not that the backstory is always bad, but it’s often overplayed or wholly unnecessary. For instance, in Mamet’s famous Glengarry Glenross we don’t get the backstory of the sales expert brought in with the leads. We don’t see that he was poor or that his mother hated him, or that he got ripped off at the lemonade stand; or in modern stories, that he’s Republican and a capitalist and that’s why he’s mean, and the backstory to that is a Native American trans woman beat him at basketball at age five, embarrassing him in front of his Christian parents, and since he had Christian parents, that means he had an abusive father who oppressed his wife and his wife’s potential, and it turned him into a capitalist, or something like that.

Or take the Old Man in the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. We don’t get an emotional backstory as to what motivates the old man. We instead get to know who he is by his choices and actions. We don’t read pages of him enduring the loss of his father at sea, or that his father was a drunk and that forced the main character to fish to feed his mother. We see words on a page; we meet the character where he is at. And in that novella, without emotional backstory, we get one of the richest stories ever written.

Mamet makes story, makes drama, human and real. And that is, we understand the character by the choices he makes, his actions, his decisions.

How he extrapolates, articulates, and details what drama is and how it’s real life, colored my understanding of story and characters, along with real life. Drama, says Mamet, is about repression. That repression is not in the Freudian sense, or the sense of a character repressing a memory or incident, or in the pervasive and now nearly meaningless concept of trauma. Mamet says those definitions are postmodern gobbledygook. Repression, rather, is not looking squarely at something, not seeing something for what it is.

For characters, it could be a person’s self-deception about themselves. Perhaps they are driven by a vice, say greed, and they do so at a moral cost, yet they believe they’re doing the right thing. So they maintain a pretense. As they maintain this pretense, their inability to see the hard truth about themselves often blocks what they want, or it makes them more chaotic, or however else it manifests.

He goes further: that, just like in real life, in what a character doesn’t say, if he evades a question, or deflects, or buries, or scrambles after a pretended a self-image versus the truth, this reveals to us, the audience, the repression.

As for the audience, what makes drama great is that we learn something about ourselves, as Mamet says. And it’s not the movie educating us, movies doing that are awful. Rather, it’s facing our inability to see something as it is, to face a hard truth of ourselves. For instance, in Mamet’s movie The Edge we face a reality that we would hate being lost in the wilderness and dealing with a rogue Kodiak bear. We, like the characters, would perhaps act rash, come up with similar ideas to survive that we see fail in the movie. And we would have a hard time of who do we trust to survive if we ourselves are incapable of it. And if we do have some wisdom, like Anthony Hopkin’s character of how to survive, what do we do if the others are not trusting us to lead them due to their perceptions of us. We face this truth as we watch it on screen.

We see how characters need to work together and how they clash. It is all too real. And to get back to the backstory, in a movie like The Edge we don’t get the backstory to what drives the character. A subplot exists in that movie, and Anthony Hopkin’s character is working to draw out information from Alec Baldwin, which requires some questions and carrots dangled to see if the truth comes out. This is also a truth: when we suspect someone lying to us, or evading something, we see the disconnect, and we want sunlight on it for whatever reason.

I could go on. Mamet, in each of the books, delivers a masterclass in story, understanding story, and what makes for good story. The same for character. And how real he makes it, how he brings it to the human element, it colors perspective on story.

Human Nature

To understand what someone means, you have to look at the choices. To expand, the actions, decisions, and choices someone makes tells us what they mean. The same goes for us as an individual. For you, to understand what you mean, look at your choices, the decisions, your actions. And the less we call our choice what it is, or the less we see it for what it is, the more repression we have.

It’s the same as the drama above. How Mamet laid it out in his books was a profound insight for me. It’s simple, sure, yet how he articulated it sharpened the colors of my world. It inspired a lot of ruminating walks around my old neighborhood in the Boise foothills.

Mamet further goes on to detail that we, us humans, are all full of contradictions, foibles, irrationality, and folly. That folly is what makes us human, and it adds to the color of life, and not always negatively.

Wisdom or knowledge is often painful, as Mamet argues. That does not mean we wallow neurotically over regrets or past decisions; rather, it’s perspective. Consider our personal past. We all have regret: a night we’d like to take back; a yes we said when we should have said no. That’s the human experience. Yet our therapeutic culture is steeped in Freudian claptrap, “you can do anything” self-development chestnuts, a bogeyman to conveniently blame, and shallow self-actualization tropes of “that was the old me this is the new me” used to bury, justify, or rationalize a past event. All that is fueled by a marketplace of gurus, methods, ideology, tips, and formulas selling a sexier self-image. That we can buy a method, “do the work” and morph into a new self-image, thus escaping any accountability of our past, since all of that is conveniently labeled as baggage or toxic or old stories we told ourselves which held us back. That’s what caused bad relationships, bad hookups, bad jobs, so on and so forth with most anything we regret. All of it tries to absolve our responsibility in that regrettable yes, absolve our agency in our past choice, and abdicate our accountability in outcomes. It’s all repression.

For instance, blaming being drunk for hooking up with someone, or blaming parents to explain a negative behavior, or the easiest out, blaming some version of yourself with, “I was a different person back then.” Like the esteemed, and refreshingly no-bullshit, psychologist, Shawn Smith says, unless there was a life-altering medical event that changed the person’s personality, you are the same person.3 Anyone, and all of us, have made dumb decisions. We’ve all made youthful indiscretions. And sure, maybe our parents didn’t give us enough guidance, or perhaps we were young and didn’t know any better. Sure, someone may have manipulated us. Still, unless you had a gun to your head, you made the decision. And when any of us make a choice we believe we’re doing the right thing.

Maturity often comes from the pain of us knowing more. A result of maturity is wisdom. And that’s a result from the ability and willingness to shine sunlight on an event, as painful as the event was, without deflections, without evasion, without pretenses, or in other words, without absolving our responsibility in the matter. And we call it what it is; we come in with the truth. This allows us to move on from it, because whatever it was, we gain wisdom from it. The more we repress it, say it was something else, the more we stay stuck in immaturity, the more control that bad choice has over our life, and the more prone we are to make a choice like it again.

We can’t escape our human condition. The more we call our choices for what they are, the less bullshit we tell ourselves. We’ll still lie to ourselves. It’s impossible not to. But maturity comes from calling it out for what it is, and when we do, we’re going to have regret, painful regret sometimes, but we’re also going to gain perspective, wisdom, and convictions.

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Faith

Mamet moved me much closer to my faith. He’s Jewish; I’m Christian. But how he dissects the Torah, the New Testament, and what faith means rooted me further into faith.

My summer of Mamet started fairly soon after reading The Praise of Folly by Erasmus. The Praise of Folly gifted me theological considerations of Christianity I needed and gave me a pragmatic understanding of my belief, the Church, and gave perspective on certain theological wrangling.

To get personal, I grew up Catholic, or Irish Catholic as I call it. When my dad died, the priest hit me up for $500,000 as the rate to get my dad into heaven; that combined with the child sex abuse scandal and how one of the worst offenders was the head priest of my grandmother’s church, seeing how that crushed her, I reflexively went atheist.

And I went full smug atheist. Yet, me being me, I wanted to explore my smug atheist view. So I read a number of famous atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, A.C. Grayling, Jean-Paul Sarte, and Friedrich Nietzsche. The odd thing is, when I dove full in and even used the clever arguments from Dennett and Grayling against believers, I, in the spirit of this article, repressed the idea that you can’t disprove God. I also repressed that professionally while finding wild financial success in internet marketing, I felt empty and lost. I knew, too, despite the amazing money, it was all unethical. Deeply unethical. And that journey into that unethical world stemmed a lot from repressing the loss of Clair Motors, repressing my rejection of the auto business, repressing my yearning ambition in the auto business, and repressing my vast inheritance via telling myself that the fortune I inherited was a curse versus a gift. All that repression had me in limbo.

At some point, the more I dug into those famed atheists, the less it swayed me. In fact, it started making me believe in a creator. Then while reading Edward Gibbon’s iconic The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, along with my wife’s faith, I said to myself while reading on a balcony overlooking the Rockies on a gorgeous spring day, “Ok, enough messing around. I believe in Jesus Christ as my lord and savior.”

My coming back is more cerebral. The more I grip with the unknowns of life, the more the truth of Christianity spoke to me. Yet pragmatism and wisdom had me questioning the more rigid elements of Christianity. In fact, I found much of that green and naive. I also questioned some of the miracles in the Bible against the historical context that I knew of that time. Mamet brought me home though; Mamet brought me closer to my faith. He unlocked much of the Bible for me.

Mamet is what one would call a biblical conservative, but, he doesn’t believe the bible was written by God. He believes it was divinely inspired. And that, which aligned with my then secret belief after my own reading of the Bible and The History of the Bible by John Barton, that some of the stories are possible metaphors. To get simple, what connected the most, and what freed me to get closer to my faith, was that the Bible offers us truth on the human condition. It offers us divinely inspired wisdom on how to live, how to understand human nature, ourselves, and our world. And, like the human condition, the Bible has contradictions. Mamet, while Jewish, knows the New Testament inside and out and grasps what is called Pauline Psychology. I found Mamet pragmatic without going into the relativist nonsense, or the let-me-morph-faith-to-fit-my-views from a figure like Diarmaid MacCulloch. It opened up new doors for me, and I’m forever grateful.

Approaching Each Book

Each book looks like a curated collection of essays. Each chapter stands alone. Yet a thematic through line connects it all. Each book is relatively short, but you will need a dictionary. Mamet is a wordsmith and a word lover. He carefully picks the right word, and many of them require a dictionary. It’s not all big words either, like the word bumf.

And how he writes some of the passages, the beautiful yet razor-sharp rhetoric, it needs deliberation.

While serious, each book is filled with humor. Mamet is heady but his head isn’t stuffed up his ass; he has a street sense. That mixed with the wordsmithing makes for interesting reading.

It’s accessible to the more cerebral person. You will need a dictionary; you will need to look up certain philosophical or theological or artistic themes, but Mamet is clear. You will learn a lot of the world and of yourself through reading him.

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Who Would Like It

As I said, the more cerebral thinker will like it. If you’re interested in human nature, why we do the things we do, it’s a masterclass.

If you’re a conservative or right wing, right-leaning, whatever the definition on the right side of the scale, any of the works listed will offer depth to your worldview and will articulate certain convictions you hold of the world.

If you’re a liberal, and wish to know the worldview of those on the right, and what we believe, any of these works will give you an understanding. Mamet will offend you, likely. Yet if you wish to have an idea of our convictions and beliefs and why, you will not go wrong with Mamet.

Anyone interested in story, whether you’re writing stories, want to grasp the creative beats of movies better, Mamet will turn your world inside out. Especially if you’re familiar with “emotional backstory” or “method acting” concepts or the current tropish version of the “hero’s journey.” He will give insights that seem painfully obvious yet we never really noticed it before. He brings real life into viewing drama and somehow gives us a greater understanding and even enjoyment of story.

I mentioned human nature, but if you’re interested in human psychology, the human condition, why we do the things we do, or why others do the things they do, Mamet is going to open your eyes, and with it will come pain.

A Personal Aside

The last two decades I’ve wrangled with my Clair Motors and my car business identity. I buried it down for years and refused to look at it. That burying, I know, led to certain choices that were not great. And I, my agency, made those choices. Those choices led to regret I eschewed confronting. I read Mamet at the right time. On my walks in the Boise foothills, in the oppressive high desert heat, Mamet inspired me to put sunshine on past choices going back all the way to high school even like when I quit hockey.4 And it gave my regrets perspective, which didn’t provide closure but instead provided a sense of grounding. I used to not tell people about my car business background, or that Clair Motors was a behemoth of a business, yet I’ve now opened up on it. When, with my wife while visiting Boston in August of 2025, I pulled into the old Clair Motors headquarters on the VFW Parkway in West Roxbury. As we sat in the car, I could see my old visions and dreams hanging above the Toyota building. Regret, what-ifs, and questions were all ruminating in my mind. I recognized the choices, the perspective, what my wife learned of me (she said I’m a car biz guy, way more than an internet marketer, and this she said after meeting a few of my old car biz colleagues). It hit in a way that maybe I’ll never be able to describe clearly. Yet it gave a sense of pride to my last name, to my family, and to see how blessed I am in life, even with the pain and the regrets. This personal aside may not offer anything to you, but if you have some nagging what-ifs in your life, Mamet may offer some insight.

Recommended

Mamet hit me like a train. I could go on and on about the choice thing.

While I laid out categorical themes here, Mamet blends it all together. His writing is powerful, poignant, salty, and beautiful. I recommend any of the works listed. His works will certainly be in the running for best non-fiction I read in 2025.

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The Roman Empire is romanticized through a modern Judeo-Christian Western lens. It’s seen as a time of noble senators, a culture akin to the Victorian era, and a warrior code instilling men with a profound sense of patriotic duty to defend Rome against foreign invaders and tyrannical emperors. In that fight against tyranny, we envision Ridley Scott’s, Gladiator, where a family man vows vengeance on a tyrannical emperor and hopes to return Rome to the people by turning it over to the experts because Rome was an idea once. And it’s fall? Well, it’s simple: insert a modern gripe like inflation, Christians, Onlyfans, bikinis,1 and that modern gripe caused the fall.

That romanticized lens conflates Hellenistic politics and culture, Hollywood comic book depictions of Rome, and blissful historical ignorance.

The reality of the Roman Empire was much different. America’s Founding Father’s studied the Roman Empire exhaustively. They did see the beneficial elements of that once mighty empire, such as the concept of the Senate, certain concepts of Roman law, and its infrastructure. But the Roman Empire, to the Founders, was largely a study in what not to do. The Roman Empire is a study in human nature, and a sobering account of human nature run amok.

The Lives of the Caesars by Suetonius, was written during the reign of Hadrian. Suetonius wrote twelve biographical vignettes starting with Julius Caesar and going chronologically up to Domitian. He gave posterity a window into Roman times and its disturbing revelations on human nature, and why the Roman Empire was doomed to fail from the moment it started.

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Background Suetonius

We’re lucky to have this work by Suetonius, just like we’re lucky to have The Satyricon by Petronius. The latter was executed by Nero for his satire of Roman life. Christian monks, shockingly, saved Petronius’s work despite Satyricon’s pornographic nature, recognizing its wisdom and lessons for posterity. Suetonius, however, was not executed but got banned for sleeping with Hadrian’s wife. Despite the affair, Hadrian admired Lives of the Caesars and that admiration saved the work from being lost to history.

Suetonius was regarded early on in his life as a scholar. His drive for history, and rigorous history, stood out so much that Hadrian placed Suetonius into his innermost circle. And Hadrian wanted Suetonius to do what he did best: history.

Suetonius took up the task of wanting to write biographies of the Caesars. Yet what made Suetonius distinct is that, one, he wanted to not slant the biographies to favor Hadrian. And two, he wanted to focus on the character of each emperor — their dispositional makeup — rather than the then-typical achievements and victories.

The time Suetonius wrote was precarious. As we learned with Petronius, who was Nero’s cultural advisor Satyricon got Petronius executed.2 It was common for historians, play writes, and cultural advisors to face execution. Whether it was the work not being slanted enough in one way, overly obsequious, or perhaps hitting too close to home, at the emperor’s whim the creator could get executed. Execution in those days also meant, likely, that friends, family, and associates of that person would also face execution or, if shown some mercy, banishments and impoverishment. And execution was not swift in those days; it almost always included abhorrent forms of torture.

Yet Suetonius was given free rein. He had access to firsthand accounts since lost to history, eyewitness accounts, and his own firsthand accounts. He also dissected the blatant partisanship to try to extract truth, or simply discard if too fabulist. For instance, some sides, in a want of a coup, would demonize an emperor to the point of absurdity, whereas, the other side would praise the emperor to the point of absurdity. He ignored that noise and offered us a window closer to the truth or at least, if not fact, we brush against truth and reality of the times.

The focus on character, on the disposition of each Caesar, gives us the glimpse into Roman culture and politics. Each Caesar is a product of their culture. His political style and actions were forged in the political culture of Rome. And with perspective, like the Founding Fathers, we extract truths of human nature from The Lives of the Caesars, and how a world void of Judeo-Christian values yet full of secular decadence can slide into depravity, degeneracy, and tyranny.

While Suetonius wrote twelve biographical vignettes, he focuses primarily on:

• Julius Caesar

• Augustus

• Tiberius

• Gaius (Caligula)

• Claudius

• Nero

Each of them gets the longer vignettes. Augustus gets the longest vignette. It’s arguable that Suetonius focuses mainly on Augustus, Tiberius, and Nero.

The content of each vignette, especially when it gets into Tiberius, is graphic, in fact, it’s disturbing. And translator Tom Holland is not shy about using the crude language that previous translators watered down.

Some of what Suetonius covers, or claims, is debated as to whether it was rumor. Rumor or not, as Holland tells us, given that Suetonius was free to do what he wanted, and his desire for truth, we get honest looks of Roman culture, and close enough to the lives of the Caesars. And if you’ve read works like The Satyricon or Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, then it seems likely that while Suetonius might tell of a salacious rumor, the abhorrent act detailed in the pages probably occurred somewhere.

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Why Read It

The cultural life of Rome had moral norms that are nearly unimaginable to us today. The human condition is the same, but we see the human condition play out in a vastly different dynamic. The Roman Empire was a product of warlords, and while it copied elements of Greek virtue, an ethical regression happened. Or perhaps, an ethical and moral norm never took root. Affluence and decadence seem to have fueled behavior that led to an obsession with sex. And that sexual obsession, as it often does, bred a boredom with it, which led to a jadedness, thus opening the door to depraved degeneracy.

Upstream from culture are political norms. And the emperors were above the law. They had no law. Their character, their disposition, their whims, were the constitution of Rome. They had little to no checks and balances. As one reads Augustus, Suetonius seduces us with how he ruled. It sounds great, like taking action, that he’s bringing solutions. But then reality hits. Augustus gets paranoid of someone taking notes, and out of that paranoia gouges the man’s eyeballs out with his thumbs. Then we see that he sleeps with his colleagues’ wives to get information on their husbands. And the marriage norms of the elite — divorce, remarriage, where kids get sent to, who gets remarried — are manic, and near impossible to follow. The reader may grant some forgiveness to the emperors, saying it was the time, but look at what they got done! But reality hits when we read of Tiberius, Nero, and Caligula. Then the jarring political oscillation between emperors becomes apparent. And within that oscillation are immense corruptions. On top of the corruptions, wild whims such as a dream an emperor had could alter massive policy decisions, like whether to invade a country. Executions were rife. And how emperors executed people at a whim was abhorrent, from sawing men in half to having a senator perform fellatio on the emperor and, once finished, having that senator beheaded right there on the spot. That kind of behavior was a feature of the empire. That doesn’t even touch upon how the lower classes were subsidized and dependent on the emperor, and that emperor was dependent upon pure economic exploitation of the countries Rome invaded. It all created an enormous bloat that was doomed to fail.

The Lives of the Caesars is a sobering account of the Roman Empire. Some claim that much of the depravity depicted during that time is overblown. Even if that is the case, one can’t get around how in Suetonius the behavior is constant. And if one reads The Satyricon, we see the same depravity, excess, and affluence depicted by Suetonius. The same goes for other firsthand accounts like Tacitus and Livy.

We read this work as a warning. Comparisons to the Roman Empire are difficult. Our culture is vastly different, yet our human condition is the same. We’ll never escape our condition. Since escape is impossible, history does not repeat but it does rhyme. And we have our rhymes today: an increasing obsession with sex, garishness becoming the norm, an elite wealthy class subsidizing the poor, punishing the wealthy, a harder time to rise up in classes, a denigration of family, and excess. Suetonius gives us a look into what can happen when human nature runs amok. We read Suetonius to gain an understanding, perhaps an appreciation, for the importance of Judeo-Christian values.

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Approaching It

I read the Tom Holland translation. Tom Holland is a revered historical writer. His book Dominion is a best seller many times over, his translation of The Histories by Herodotus is widely acclaimed, and he runs the popular podcast The Rest is History.

His translation is superb. He makes it accessible yet he sticks to the meaning. He could have easily watered down the crude and disturbing parts, yet he does not. He delivers an honest translation.

It is readable. But keep in mind, Suetonius wrote for a small audience. He did not write for a mass audience like ours today. Only a small amount of people were literate. You will not get background, context, or other modern features to catch the reader up. Certain information was known to its audience then. Which means, at first, the names mentioned feels overwhelming. And trying to get more background can feel overwhelming.

But Holland lays out great guidance in the introduction. That guidance: Suetonius focused on the character of each emperor. That we need to get over our fretting about remembering dates, events, and names, and focus on the bigger picture of character elements.

The book is readable, but if you’re used to lesson culture reading — that you need to be a cynical reader, extracting insight and lessons from everything you read — you’ll struggle with this book. Once you arrive at Tiberius, it will put you in a conundrum. Your distaste and disgust at the then world’s most powerful man will make you question what kind of “lessons” you should be extracting.

You need to go in with Holland’s guidance, focusing on the bigger picture. You don’t need to remember every name and date. That’s not important. Instead, approach it with questions about Roman culture and curiosity about its political style.

If you’ve never read a firsthand Roman Empire account, you might want a modern primer.

I recommend:

• Ten Caesars: Roman Emperors from Augustus to Constantine, Barry Strauss

• The War that Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium, Barry Strauss

• Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity, Walter Scheidel

A note on Scheidel, it’s more academic, but it will deliver the greatest meta view analysis of the fall of Rome.

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Swim Upstreams

My swim upstream3 recommendation: Choose either of the Barry Strauss books, then read Suetonius right after. This will help you grasp themes, elements, and offer some understanding.

If you want to go more advanced, try this and in this order:

1. Read either of the Strauss books

2. Lives of the Caesars, Suetonius (Tom Holland Translation)

3. The Satyricon, Petronius (the Penguin Classics translation by J.P. Sullivan)

4. Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity, Walter Scheidel

If you read those four books, you will have enormous wisdom, insight, and understanding of the Roman Empire.

Book Club

Lives of The Caesars was chosen for the test launch of my book club. If you’d like to read it, and want to ask me questions, then upgrade to a paid subscriber, find the thread in the chat, and ask away.

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The choices and actions of Jews, and later Jewish Christ Followers — the Roman label for early Christians — influenced the decisions of a Roman Emperor we still experience. And they were not a collective unit. It was a complex myriad of choices and actions made by a diverse group comprising Roman Jews, Jewish rebels, rabbinic Jews, elite Jews, the Sicarii, Jewish Christ Followers, Parthian Jews, poor Jews, Jewish warriors, and other factions. This group fought, often violently, among themselves over how to handle the Roman Empire. Their choices and actions influenced the decisions of Roman emperors, feeding that eternal ripple effect.

Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire by Barry Strauss delivers a compelling and engaging look into the beginning of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the quagmires of the middle east, and fomentation of the Judeo-Christian West.

Background

Barry Strauss is a revered military historian, a classicist, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Fellow Institute.1

Jews vs. Rome focuses on 63 BCE to 136 CE. It looks primarily at Israel2 along with Parthia.3 Israel is a term dating back to the thirteenth century BCE; it derives from the Jewish patriots of that era who preferred it over the label Judea.

Strauss uses firsthand ancient sources and archaeological evidence for this work. A major primary source is Josephus’s The Life, The Jewish War, and Antiquities of the Jews; he also uses biblical accounts from both Jewish and Christian sources like Old and New Testaments and the Talmud; along with other ancient sources like Suetonius and Tacitus; and, perhaps most fascinating, recently unearthed letters of people who lived during and were directly affected from the ongoings of that time.

To generalize, the core of the conflict stems from the Jews’ refusal to worship the polytheistic deities of the Roman Empire. Also contributing was their disdain for Rome’s pagan and hedonistic culture. The former upset the Roman elite and certain emperors, but the bigger worry came from Israel’s location on the eastern edges of the empire near Parthia, Rome’s chief rival, which was friendlier to the Jews and Israel. Among the Jews, as mentioned, division existed. Certain Jews, like Josephus, aligned with Roman interests. They did not want rebellion; they wanted to practice their faith without Roman overreach while enjoying Roman protection. Then you had a group like the Sicarii, hardcore revolutionaries with a flair for assassinating Romans, Roman Jews, and Jews showing any favorability towards Rome.

Certain emperors had a live-and-let-live attitude: let the Jews practice their faith, as long as they paid the tribute and swore loyalty to Rome over Parthia. Other emperors demanded that the Jews reject their one God and worship the gods of the Roman Empire or even went so far as to try to place statues of themselves inside the holiest areas of Jewish worship.

Those tensions ignited regional wars, a notable one being the fall of Jerusalem, still lamented today by Jews, at the hands of Titus. Yet despite Rome’s best efforts to erase the Jews from the earth, those efforts only solidified Jewish convictions and faith.

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Readability

Strauss commands a rare talent among historians; he writes compelling, readable, and deeply engaging books while upholding rigor and depth. Pop history books such as Salt: A World History or The 48 Laws of Power deliver fungible factoids yet lack substance. Meanwhile, many rigorous histories can be dry. Strauss meshes rigor and readability to make for engaging reading.

The other element making Strauss special: he teaches perspective. Part of that perspective is how he treats the lens of a historian or biographer. He gives us grains of salt. For instance, when Josephus claims the number of soldiers at a battle, or the number of deaths, we learn that at times he’s either accurate, wildly inaccurate, or a plausible middle ground. The other part of that perspective emerges when Strauss details the recently unearthed letters of those living and affected during those periods. Some letters give pause — young lives brutally lost, or tidbits of a random person lost to the time of history, leaving us wondering, “What happened to him or her?”

Strauss is honest about his work. He leans on his strength in military history, his expertise of deciphering archaeological evidence to recreate battles, and his study of firsthand accounts, whether it is Josephus or the letter of a woman written before she was slaughtered. That he uses to paint a possible picture of what happened. Yet he’s careful to note that he’s giving perspective and not fact. That honesty draws the reader to engage with the book.

Who Would Like It - Why Read It

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

The conflict is polarizing, complex, and confusing. Jews vs. Rome offers a framework to grasp key elements.

A large and vocal portion of the Left shouts “Free Palestine,” demands an end to genocide (while remaining noticeably silent when the man they hate most, Donald Trump, negotiated the ceasefire they demanded), and chants “From the River to the Sea!” Their position, beyond shouting downloaded Leftist talking points, are standard anti-Western tropes: the Israelis (a euphemism for Jewish whites) were colonizers who, for racist reasons, sought to displace, oppress, and commit genocide against Palestinians (a euphemism for brown people), and impose the wicked values of the West. When pressed for details for this imperialistic, racist, colonial assault on the indigenous people of color in Palestine, the position is often vague, ambiguous, and murky.

The Right is more divided on the issue. Some fear a forever war. Others, especially the more online Right, are bedfellows of the progressive Left conclusions. They espouse a conspiratorial paranoia about Zionism, deep-state Israeli actors funded by AIPAC,4 and view Israel as an evil aggressor against Palestine. The source of their position is less ambiguous than their progressive bedfellows; they tend to point to the post-World War II order or to nineteenth-century Zionism.

Antisemitism is found on both sides, particularly among the progressives and those on the Right blathering conspiracies about an Israeli deep state. Each side proffers profound misunderstandings and has a bent of Howard Zinn-style history where anything Western or American is evil.

The conflict is complex. It is not a result of a group of Jews who out of innate racist motivation and conniving, sought to displace, oppress, and commit genocide against brown people. Nor does the conflict stem from a nineteenth-century group of Zionists or Mossad agents attempting world domination.

The conflict spans three thousand years. Jerusalem was the ancient home of the Jews, and constant strife has been a feature of the area, particularly during the period Strauss covers. The conflict helped fuel antisemitism, arguably contributed to what David Mamet, among others, has called a Jewish Guilt, and directly shaped the West we live in. Understanding it is tough, yet Strauss offers accessible clarity on the matter.

If You Think of the Roman Empire

If you’re the kind of guy who always backs a vehicle into a parking space, then it’s innate that you think of the Roman Empire.

If you’re a woman married to a man who backs his vehicle into a parking space, then you likely want to know why he is preoccupied with the Roman Empire. Or if you wish to find a man who backs his car into a parking space, brushing up on the Roman Empire will boost your chances.

In all seriousness, if you wonder about the Roman Empire and wish to learn more, then anything by Barry Strauss is great. You will not go wrong with Jews vs. Rome, as it shows the ripple effects of that empire.

Faith

If you’re a Christian (like me) and wish to learn more about early Christianity, the time of Jesus, and the culture and environment he lived in, Jews vs. Rome is excellent. It includes plenty of names, battles, and places, providing rich context for biblical history.

I’m not Jewish, yet I imagine the history Strauss details will resonate with Jewish readers. The fall of Jerusalem, its causes, the early Jewish rebels and later the rabbi’s who saved Judaism against Rome’s attempt to eradicate it — Strauss delivers a wonderful history.

Strongly Recommended

This work was my second time with Strauss, and now I want to read everything by Barry Strauss. He’s engaging and he leaves you with a deep understanding. When most of us read history, months later, we forget the names and dates. That’s natural. Yet great historians have a way of making the gist stand out. Strauss has that knack. How he engages the reader, he gives you a vivid picture to remember.

I strongly recommend this work.

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A good friend of mine recommended me to read Dashiell Hammett. In fact, he gifted me the the gorgeous Library of America Edition of Hammett I read.

Before I upended my life to move back to Colorado, while closing on the house and getting my house in Boise ready to list, and while going to Boston and Maine for about a week so that my wife could finally see where I grew up, I posted on social media that I was trying to find an easier book to read during that chaos. My friend nudged me to read the gift he gave me, and I’m glad for that nudge.

In toto, I read three Hammett novels: The Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, and The Maltese Falcon. My focus was scattered due to all the chaos of buying a house, moving to that house, and listing the house we moved out of, but during all that I enjoyed all three stories.

Background

Dashiell Hammett is one of the early originators of the hard-boiled detective novel. The style of that genre, the pace, the themes, the beats, the familiar Gordian knot of who did it, Hammett played a key hand in shaping. Also memorable, the main character avatar: a grizzled detective with a sharp tongue. And we cannot forget the sultry dame who ends up throwing herself at the detective, nor the vaudevillian-esque bad guys.

Those familiar elements are all in Hammett’s work. Two of them stood out: one, the Gordian knot of whodunnit, and two, a theme of the person who sought the detective, or is somehow close to the detective, ends up complicit in the case. That closeness complements the formula of the detective wrangling with his own sense of morals, purpose, and ethics.

And ingrained into Hammett’s stories is an element I want to come back in modern stories: the complete ignoring of modern therapeutic formulas of “needing emotional backstories” that write-a-best-seller grifters sell to the biddable. The overplayed concept that somehow we need to know what the character went through as a child in order to grasp why he does what he does now. Not all stories need this beat. We have no idea what Sheriff Brodie in Jaws underwent as a child, nor do we have montages in Rocky of Rocky Balboa getting rejected by the prom queen. Good stories paint the actions — the decisions and the choices — of the character to reveal their nature, morals, and beliefs. We, the reader, understand what they’re like, we get a sense of their background because we see their choices depicted. That makes the characters real because, like in real life, the only way we can know, judge, or understand what someones means is to look at their decisions, choices, and actions. This Hammett is an expert at.

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That Comparison Part

Hammett influenced principles of hard-boiled detective stories, but Raymond Chandler took it to sonic heights.

Hammett finds his footing in his third novel, The Maltese Falcon. The biggest thing he does to find his footing: he injects more detail. Detail meaning a simple descriptive word or two about a piece of furniture, the weather of the city, or a detail of someone’s clothing, that suddenly makes the scene or atmosphere vivid. The first two novels, Red Harvest and The Dain Curse lacked detail. It’s not a knock. Not every author, even good ones, is a master of detail like Chandler.

Hammett is like Chuck Berry and Chandler is like AC/DC. Berry laid out foundational riffs, solos, and so forth. AC/DC took those elements to another level; the riffs, the lyrics (with Bon Scott), the tribal 4/4 beat of Phil Rudd, accompanied by Cliff Williams hammering a backbeat that makes a whomp sound with the drums, the it-rocks-where-it-stops rhythm of Malcom Young, the vibrato snarl of Angus Young, and, one must include, Brian Johnson’s primal yet stratospheric vocal delivery. Chuck Berry is great; AC/DC is on another level.

I’m a massive Chandler fan. I’ve read his novels a number of times, even though I know what’s going to happen, I never get sick of them, and I’ll read them again. You could accuse me of being unfair to compare. And that’s fine. But with Chandler’s sonic level I kept looking for the same in Hammett. I kept looking for it in the character, the atmosphere, the one word detail of an object in a room that suddenly made the scene vivid, and I never found it.

And I noticed another gap existing between the two.

What makes Chandler goes to sonic heights, I perceive, is that he injected classical elements into his story and into his characters. Those classical elements paint human nature, it yanks the reader into the scene.

Chandler was classically educated. He loved and admired Homer, among other classic works. His famous character, Philip Marlowe, is imbued with traditional masculine traits depicted in Homer’s stories: courage, wisdom, and skill. Marlowe’s physical strength, another masculine trait, is in large part driven by his sense of right and wrong and determination.

Both Sam Spade, Hammett’s famous character from The Maltese Falcon, and Philip Marlowe operate with street sense. But Spade sleeps with his partner’s wife, and while he does right by his partner later, he does right by him cynically. I couldn’t imagine Marlowe seducing his partner’s gal. How I know Marlowe, that would cross all sorts of innate moral codes. Spade, however, sleeps with his partner’s wife but goes even further by sinking the hooks into her emotionally. To me, that says a lot of his moral code. Marlowe is choosy with women. He doesn’t want a nun, nor does he reject women of easy virtues, rather, he is choosy to who he wants — he sees the nuance, the character of a woman, he has his standards. Whereas Spade will seemingly sleep with whoever gives him a signal, and likes to sink the hooks emotionally into that woman. And it’s unclear whether Spade is shagging his secretary, or they flirt with that temptation. Spade also sleeps with one of the protagonists who uses her sexuality as a ploy to get what she wants from men. He happily indulges. Women like that try to seduce Marlowe, but he sees through the cheap ploy, as I believe Spade does, but Marlowe never takes the bait. Spade, in short, is more cynical, indulgent around women, and maintains pretenses around women, in other words, he loves stringing them along.

While we could call Spade a tragic figure for his lechery, yet something about it, to me, enervates his moral code. I get the feeling if a husband came to Spade to find out if his wife was cheating, Spade would see it as invitation that the girl puts out.

Marlowe is no boy scout. He’s not “sober and judicious.” He has many of the tragic figure elements found in classical characters and found in memorable figures in real life, but Marlowe’s sense of justice, sense of self, and sense of experience, refrains lustful indulgence.

I Recommend Hammett

My comparison to Chandler didn’t take away from Hammett. Rather, it boosted my admiration and respect of how great and talented Chandler was, and I came to highly respect Hammett’s style.

I enjoyed reading Hammett. I recommend him.

I’d say, if you like mysteries, go with The Maltese Falcon.

If you’re a hard-boiled mystery fan, then dig right into the Hammett canon. You’ll recognize familiar themes, beats, and story tricks familiar in stories today both in print and on screen. I plan to watch The Maltese Falcon starring Humphrey Bogart. The trailer makes me question my observation written here of Spade, perhaps I got it wrong.

In the end, Hammett’s work is important in the mystery canon. He’s fun to read. And I definitely recommend him.

And thank you to my friend who nudged me to read him.

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Hunger by Knut Hamsun is the novel that kicked off the literary tone of the 20th century. It was first published in 1888. Hamsun, tired with the familiar story narratives of his time, believed that stories needed to be psychological, he believed that the irrationality of man needed portrayal. After his travels through America, which left him with a pathological hatred of America and Americans, and previous failed dabbles at writing, he wrote Hunger. Its literary success catapulted him into fame and into esteemed literary circles. It’s a wild and manic read. It’s a stream of consciousness from the main character, who is a starving, neurotic, manic, vagrant wandering the streets of the city Kristiania (now Oslo) between writing projects.

Background

The story is loosely inspired by Knut Hamsun’s time in America. He came to America two separate times, spending a total of two and a half years. He was impoverished the entire time, and that experience of impoverishment, the edges it pushed him to psychologically, combined with his dislike of familiar literary styles (his dislike for Realism and Naturalism styles in particular), the literary currents undergoing a growing curiosity with The Book of Job and Oedipus Rex, and the influence of Dostoyevski’s psychological themes, all inspired Hamsun to write what he felt stories needed to be, deeply psychological.

Story Background

Hamsun broke new ground with his stream of consciousness style (a style later tried and imitated by Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, among others). That stream of consciousness spills out from the main character, manically. Hamsun wished to show a general truth of the human psyche — that we’re all irrational. He conveys this irrationality via a character on the verge of starvation, and that starvation pulling the character deeper into the darker parts of his psyche. It’s tough to psychoanalyze a character, just as it’s tough to accurately psychoanalyze a person, but Hamsun offers the reader a character impossible not to psychoanalyze. The character in one moment has delusions of grandeur, in another he tries to psychologically intimidate men or women, in another he’s neurotically spinning on a topic, and in another he’s insanely sanctimonious with his belief of his moral perfection. He also owns a modicum of writing talent. Here and there he gets articles and essays published, but his manic state and delusions of grandeur make for a humorous writing process. It all allures the reader to analyze the character’s psychology.

A consistent underlying theme of the character is the belief that God specifically chose him like how God chose Job. The character is insistent that God is giving him hardships so he can attain a higher purpose that will lift mankind and himself to otherworldly heights. And the character, despite doing acts like robbing a store, lying, attempting psychological warfare on someone, and harshly judging others, full on believes he is an exemplar of Christian morality. And the tribulations he faces — all at the hand of his agency — he believes are specific challenges given to him by God. When the main character talks to God about his tribulations or self-aggrandizes his morals, this is where Hamsun plays on the Book of Job from the Old Testament.1

That inspiration from the Book of Job also wields the destiny theme. According to the introduction (Penguin Classics) Hamsun was also inspired by the destiny theme in Oedipus Rex. And one, arguably, could toss in Achilles from The Iliad. Oedipus and Achilles both have their fates sealed, whereas Job’s fate depends upon either accepting or rejecting God. The main character in Hunger believes his destiny is set, that he’s a chosen one. Since he lacks any sort of self-reflection, perspective, or conscientiousness, we the reader, can diagnose him, perhaps accurately, a narcissist, bipolar, and maybe even a schizophrenic. Yet it’s these absurd extremes, the humor of it, that portrays our irrationality. It’s not that we’re all on the edges of irrationality as Hamsun’s character, but folly, foibles, irrationality are all innate to us. And how Hamsun portrays it, makes our irrationality accessible and not something to be damned, it’s just a part of being human. Hamsun shows the benefits of our irrationality when he has other characters offer empathy, kindness, and even romantic attraction to the main character. They offered him these sentiments knowing he was off his rocker, or for the woman who offered him romantic attraction upon finding out he was undateable because he was nuts, offered him pity. And another moment where a woman had a gut instinct — a factor many claim as irrational, biased, or a foolish notion — that the main character was off, so she kept him at a distance. Those small moments from the other characters reveal why irrationality isn’t all that bad.

Who Would Enjoy Reading It

It’s manic, wild, and funny. That makes for fast reading.

If you like more psychological reads, are into the psychology of people, this is a phenomenal read.

Nothing in the story is resolved. No satisfying endings, no satisfying character arcs. Hamsun breaks the modern rule of character development popular and familiar today: each character must have an arc and each character develops in some fashion. None of Hamsun’s characters develop in the story.

Some people have a notion that irrationality leads to unpredictable chaos. True, it can harbor erratic behavior, like the main character. But the main character repeats his patterns of behavior, he’s stuck in various cycles. This is a feature of irrationality and human psychology. We all have our patterns of behaviors, and some can glue us to certain cycles. Like telling yourself your going to be better with money, but then months later, find yourself saying it again. That’s reality. That’s what Hamsun conveys.

Character development in the real world is not always guaranteed. Granted, some people are conscientious, and develop through the seasons of life, and yes, a smaller handful work to dull their adverse patterns of behavior, but how a person develops is on a spectrum. Self-development depends on the individual, it can take years, and it’s nuanced to each person. Some people are inquisitive, and understand they’re the pilot picking their flight plans. Others, while inquisitive, due to our current cultures obsession with casting blame on some bogeyman — trauma, patriarchy, Feminism, parents, the past, racism — dull their inquisitiveness of their accountability of their situation. That in itself, could be a choice from fear or who knows what else. And many people simply refuse to change, they may say they’re a different person, and are doing things differently, yet when we observe the actions, it’s all the same flight paths despite the new paint color of the plane. That’s natural. That’s life. We’re all prone to this and we’ve seen it in others. Hunger captures this irrationality, makes it accessible, humorous, and offers us perspective. Sometimes, oftentimes in fact, our irrationality is what moves society, it’s what takes risks, it’s what creates art, it’s what starts a loyal, fruitful, and amazing marriage. A perfectly rational being, like the Terminator, would be dull, frightening, and colorless.

Approaching It

Translation matters.

Translation matters.

Translation matters.

Hamsun deployed an old Norwegian style that even his famous work, Growth of the Soil required Norwegian translators to translate it into modern Norwegian. That old style is difficult to translate to English. Penguin Classics is generally a trustworthy source. Do not skimp on getting a good translation.

The translator in the introduction of the Penguin Classics version says other translations water down and even strip out parts of Hunger. Again, don’t skimp, invest in a good translation.

Hunger is readable. It’s an accessible book. You don’t need a background in The Book of Job or Oedipus Rex. It may help to look up either to get a grasp of the destiny theme, which I suggest, but it’s not necessary.

It’s a fast-paced book, it reads manic, but it packs a lot of if you’re willing to chew on it.

A Note on Hamsun’s Legacy

Knut Hamsun won the Nobel Prize in Literature for The Growth of the Soil. Hunger catapulted him to literary fame. Some claim he was the greatest literary figure of the 20th century.

So why isn’t he as known as say, Ernest Hemingway?

Arguably, three reasons.

One, the work he wrote on America is appallingly bigoted and racist.

Two, Hamsun believed his daughter was too whimsical. Being a man of his time and believing in the bizarre human experiments of the Third Reich, he made his daughter undergo various lobotomy treatments to remove the whimsy. She ended up a vegetable for the rest of her life.

Three, the biggest, Hamsun’s undying love and admiration for Adolf Hitler. It’s a natural reflex to judge people in the past by today’s standard’s. And Hamsun was also, rightly, judged in his time by those who detested the evil incarnation that was Adolf Hitler.

I’ll state right now, I’m not attempting to rehabilitate Hitler, I find him evil incarnate. Yet Hitler is now waved around by the Left, and anything Right wing is Hitler. And often this sentiment comes with the belief that Hitler was some backwards, uneducated hillbilly who surrounded himself with a band of backwater idiots, and took Germany against the will of the people. In other words, no different than how Leftists view Donald Trump and the MAGA base.

The reality is, however, Hitler was revered by an overwhelming majority of Germans. He was also revered by intellectuals in America, many academics, even the New York Times hailed him.2 Across the globe, Hitler was revered.

And Knut Hamsun was one of those figures who gushed over Hitler. Hamsun met Hitler, and despite Hamsun making Hitler furious and Hitler making Hamsun cry, Hamsun, after Hitler’s death, wrote a groveling eulogy. Norway and Hamsun’s family tried to say Hamsun was insane, yet Hamsun doubled down, wrote works to prove he was sane, and praised Hitler for the rest of his life. He doubled down on this praise at the cost of his fortune and legacy.

And due to this doubling down, his works, his importance, was largely swept under the rug. Norway has a Hamsun center, but Hamsun is still a very complicated legacy for Norway and Norwegians.

Here’s the thing.

In his fiction works, he doesn’t hammer Nazi ideology or push for National Socialism. You can read it and not turn into Joseph Goebbels.

It’s natural to judge Hamsun, it’s right to judge Hamsun, and it’s a philosophical argument to how we treat Hamsun. He’s complicated. A lot of great thinkers, writers, philosophers, all praised Hitler. How we approach them takes perspective and honesty. To discount Hamsun’s work due to his affiliations is reflexive and fearful. His fiction is not like Mein Kampf, which Winston Churchill felt important to read to understand what drove that evil (I’ve read bits of Mein Kampf, it’s a lot of self-pitying crap, and convoluted theories). But zero Nazi propaganda is presented in Hamsun’s fiction (at least the two I’ve read, and from what I’ve researched).

I recommend reading Hamsun. My favorite story is The Growth of the Soil — I believe it’s the greatest fiction ever written. You can hate the man’s politics, but his fiction is worth reading. And Hunger is certainly worth it.

Background

From Dawn to Decadence examines the West, or, rather, what we consider the West. Some people tend to think of the West from the period of the early Greeks or from the Roman Empire, which would include the time of Jesus Christ. Yet the fall of the Roman Empire germinated the Judeo-Christian values which birthed the West. Barzun marks October 31st, 1517 A.D. as the day the Modern West was born. On that day Martin Luther posted his 95 propositions on the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, Germany. The start of Western decadence, or what you could arguably call cultural stagnation Barzun points to World War I.

Barzun delineates the West into 4 key cultural revolutions and these comprise the 4 sections of his book:

1. Religion

2. Monarchy

3. Liberal (not in the sense of left-leaning politics)

4. Social

Each section does not merely focus on one element. Rather each section title Barzun postulates as the key factor wielding the strongest cultural influence of a timeframe. For instance in part 1, Religion, Luther’s propositions in 1517 wielded the most effects and influence until the French Monarchy took the reign in the late 16th century.

Barzun dives into each time period looking at the philosophies, art, sexual mores, literature, and social fashions of that period. Since he analyzes cultural currents, he often takes the reader upstream to show the background of those currents such as portraying the influences and effects of Plato.

If you’ve ever heard of the Great Books and have wondered what the list is, why those old books matter, and why do some schools and colleges base a curriculum around them — Barzun’s work is like a tour through the Great Books. He exemplifies how certain ideas worked like a stone tossed into a pond and then ripples of the ideas, the cause and effect, then prompted another thinker or painter to toss another stone creating more cause and effect ripples. In other words, Barzun details the consequences, tradeoffs, and effects of ideas, and how all that influenced and imbued the culture of certain periods and how it molded the era we know and live in today. You can follow those currents right down to the culture of disrespect you come across in your regular living, like the current experience of air travel.

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Deeper Background: Why From Dawn To Decadence Is Different Than You May Expect

People may jump into a book like this expecting a neat, concise this-then-that chronological formula coinciding with ample war coverage. Barzun does no such thing. He analyzes the culture of each period delineated and dissects the currents comprising the culture of each period. The influences shaping the currents of culture are vast, various, and variegated. Barzun forensically and conscientiously guides the reader to evaluate those influences; he takes the reader upstream to show where those currents come from and how those currents flow.

As mentioned, he covers the consequences, tradeoffs, and mingling of ideas and philosophies. For instance, Religious legalism coming up against liberalism (as far as loosening theocratic restrictions). Barzun peers into what elements of liberalism countered overt religious legalism, what led to those elements, and the result of religious legalism falling. On the flip side, Barzun gives light to the religious factions tired of the legalism, and embracing science, believing that science breathed depth, substance, and more proof into God. Naturally ideas like this clashing and aligning, shaped literature, art, politics, and worldviews.

Sex & Culture

The sexual mores throughout the last five hundred years is, as the kids say, juicy, but it’s illuminating into our culture and past cultures. Most authors would either shy away from the topic or inject their ideological views into it. Barzun, instead, details sexuality’s influence over culture and how it shows if a culture is healthy, conflicted, or flailing.

Our era has a recency bias with sexual mores. We believe that since we have things like widespread pornography, the 1960 sexual revolution, and how sex is now overwhelmingly permeating the public marketplace, that this means our ancestors and the preceding eras were fuddy duddies. That sex and sexual expression before us was boring, brief, stifling, and unsatisfying; that men were clueless on how to make a woman orgasm; that the primal and cerebral elements of our sexual expression were somehow inaccessible to our ancestors.

Sexuality is a part of human nature.

It’s innate.

We didn’t suddenly stumble upon new tricks and expressions in 1960.

Only man is capable of adding in the cerebral colors of sexual expression, whereas animals are not. Since sexuality constitutes a massive part of human nature it naturally influences culture. That reality, Barzun provides beautiful insight into, and insight into why our modern era looks grim due to the over commodification of sexuality, particularly the over commodification of lust.

Here’s a small taste of what he reveals.

As mentioned, most people believe the Sexual Revolution is relatively recent, that it occurred in 1960 with the advent of the pill, Playboy, sexual liberation movements, and feminism. Barzun shows that our chronological snobbery results from modern media and platforms like social media deluging sexuality into our culture. Barzun argues that the modern deluge — and all forms of its messaging from Manosphere to Onlyfans to academics — makes us believe that the 1960s was the true Sexual Revolution; the 1960s was not in fact the true Sexual Revolution. He pegs the true Sexual Revolution in 1895. Sexual liberation and pornography were becoming more of a thing beginning around the late 1800s, yet that wasn’t the cause of the Sexual Revolution. Rather, a group of women were reacting against a group of Victorian Era men.

The Victorian era was an era of morals and ideals steeped in classical and religious traditions. The relationship norms put a high value on both men and women’s chastity. Chastity, here, is in the classic definition: that it represents modesty and choosiness. And both signal self-respect, intelligence, virtuous behavior, and respecting the gravity of sex. It was not chastity in the modern cynical definition: prudish behavior forced upon us by the patriarchy resulting in an orgasm-less bedroom, where the woman is bound by duty to endure mindblowingly awful sex; nor the Manosphere definition of a trad woman who is not only a debt-free virgin but has never even come near a man and when married becomes a voracious porn star and an opinion-less mother to her husband. Also she gets violently ill when any other man comes near her.

Despite modern notions of Victorian era sexual mores, it was not a prude era. Plenty of physical intimacy with all the accruements of primal expression happened just as it happens today. Despite the Victorian emphasis on the classic Christian morals and the notion that a man should work to embody masculine and Godly virtues, a fringe group of insecure men would court women leveraging classic values, then due to sexual insecurities or some other issue, would moralize, shame, and demonize women for their sexual expression. And these men were like the current Manosphere, bombastic, hyperbolic, projecting (often always projecting their psycho-sexual fantasies) and dramatic with their cynical and deterministic theories on women. Tired of this group’s hypocritical bloviating, it, naturally, fueled bitter and jaded women. It fueled the women who had the unfortunate experience of being with these men. This group of bitter, resentful, and jaded women sowed the concepts of feminism we know today: monogamy as constraining, promiscuity as a pathway to self-actualization, and men are oppressive. Furthermore, as another reaction to that group of weak men, a group of both women and men wanted to show how hypocritical those moralizers were, and wanted to show that Victorian couples were in fact having sex and that it wasn’t fuddy duddy stuff. They reactively shoved the era’s pornography from the shadows into the public square to spotlight the sexual nature of even the most moral and pure couples.

Like all bad turns in our culture, weak, bitter, and insecure men are standing in the middle of it.

Barzun analyzes the cultural meaning of sexual expression via an eras art, literature, religious mores, and fashions. And when modern cameras thrust the erotic into the marketplace, Barzun dissects how the commodification of the erotic strangled us further and further into the cynical, where the focus is solely on the lustful parts of sexual expression. That fall into the cynical played a hand in cultural and societal enervation, contributing to our current state of decadence.

The Final Section

The final section is Barzun surveying our modern era. Nearly 25 years or more after From Dawn to Decadence was published, Barzun proves prescient. He gives no predictions, but he does survey the cultural landscape, he even surveys the over reliance on technology to handle our creativity and education, and his survey reveals how we’re wallowing in recycled ideas.

Barzun seemingly hails secular humanism through the first three parts of the book. Yet in the moments when he seems to nearly accuse faith of cultural suffocation, he makes sharp turns, explicitly and implicitly, to the teachings and sentiments of Blaise Pascal. Pascal, to Barzun, bridges a gap between God and science and reason. Pascal was of the sentiment that the more man empirically discovers truths along with what man disproves, combined with unknowns that will always exist, reveal the truth of God and Jesus Christ. Once Barzun introduces Pascal, the secular humanistic positions of Barzun untether.

Barzun in the final pages takes a turn, not explicitly towards Christianity, but towards a position of how a society denigrating the Judeo-Christian values, its norms, and its traditions, enervates cultural robustness and creative virility. That cultural enervation, Barzun keeps the sentiment of Edmund Burke’s concept of the Sublime and the Beautiful in the mind of the reader. The sublime meaning something evoking awe, terror, and distress, and it’s big, vast, and overwhelming. That sublime is a part of nature and human nature, yet, as Barzun postulates, a culture constantly cultivating from the cynical corners of the sublime becomes jaded and creatively impotent.

Barzun, as mentioned, argues that World War I brutally blunted creative fertilization, and stilled the beautiful ripple of ideas against ripples of other ideas. A few flickers occurred after World War I, but it was carry over from the momentum of concepts preceding the war. He explicitly calls out the deconstructionist movements, like the Cubist painters, the Dadaists, the postmodernists, and philosophers like, Simon de Beauvoir, and John Paul Sartre, among others. He also calls out novelists, bureaucracy, regulations, and philosophies of egregious solipsism. All of it, again, he puts on World War I, a war he sees as unnecessary, and he sees World War II more or less a result of World War I, and exemplified by Hitler’s influences, (eugenics, the edges of Darwinism, over-the-top Ubermensch concepts, and so forth).

It’s here in final sections when he turns his back to secular humanism and calls for the injection of Judeo-Christian values, mores, and norms. It’s not an outright proclamation, his ruminating style doesn’t explicitly call for a return to the past, but it’s clear in his rumination and sentiments that he laments for what Judeo-Christian values do for a society. That it pushes us towards truth and beauty.

Possible Reasons for You to Read From Dawn to Decadence

This is a beast of book, it’s THICC.

Thicc books tend to intimidate, and this one hits all the insecurities for reading: a lot of names and dates, various philosophies, literary analysis, metaphysical concepts, and cultural critiques — all written in the french style.

Who would enjoy it?

Or why should you commit to this book?

The easiest reason, if you’ve long been curious about reading The Great Books or at least, if you’ve long been curious about what makes the Great Books so great and so important From Dawn to Decadence is a superb primer, an analysis, and a substantive summary of the Great Books. 

Barzun carefully and warmly guides you through thinkers, philosophers, art, literature, theology, and music. Everything from Aristotle, the Stoics, Dostoyevski, Erasmus, Thomas More, Hemingway, Sartre, Schopenhauer, Machiavelli, Thoreau, Hardy, Montaigne, Tolstoy, Twain, Rousseau, Bacon, Gibbon, Faust, Shakespeare, Solzhenitsyn, Nietzsche, Freud, Camus, Cervantes, Milton, Locke, Burke, Yeats, Kant, and more are covered. All are names on the Great Books. All are analyzed in this work.

Along with the Great Books you may have heard of the following:

• The Enlightenment

• Impressionism

• Neo-classicalism

• Romanticism

• Realism

• Darwinism

• Humanism

• Stoicism

If you’ve ever had serious curiosity what those mean, and what makes Thomas Hardy a Victorian Realist and not a Romanticist, then this book will give wisdom. I doubt you were losing sleep over why Hardy is a Victorian Realist and not a Romanticist, but Thomas Hardy is great, his realist prose style is akin to the great oil painters of his time, and it’s a distinct style in time that Barzun’s analysis gifts more enjoyment if you do read Hardy.

You’re not going to walk away from this book and remember who is a Naturalist and who is a Realist or the concise differences between each. That’s not the point to read a book like this. But Barzun will have you understanding enough of the concepts that when you read a book or watch a movie or go to an art museum, having read this book will add sharper colors to the experience.

Last, if you’re seriously wondering what influenced our culture today, from the political correctness to the culture of disrespect, or why the Manosphere rants against women and why feminism has turned out so poorly, it’s in From Dawn to Decadence. But this isn’t a standard 250 page journalistic analysis, it goes back to 1500 A.D. I would not read this if you want to get a theory as to why we’re fallen. If you want a comprehensive analysis of the last 500 years, to better grasp literature, arts, mores and fashions, philosophical and theological influences, that’s the reason to read this book; if you want a deep cultural perspective, this is the book.

How To Read From Dawn to Decadence

It’s got a ton of names, a ton of dates, a ton of philosophies, a ton of literary analysis, and a ton of cultural analysis. Some concepts Barzun expects his target reader to at least have a passing understanding or a recognition, and it’s almost certain you will run into topics or names you at least recognize. But due to the scope of the work and how much is in it, at times From Dawn to Decadence will overwhelm you. That’s natural. That’s ok. That doesn’t make you dumb.

Regarding the names and dates, people fret too much over remembering names and dates. They think in order have read a book well, they need to remember every name and every date as if they’re going on Jeopardy tomorrow and any wrong answer results in death.

This book has too many names and dates to remember, so forget trying.

Barzun, however, deploys a unique call back and call forward tactic. He introduces a name or a topic, then points to a page where more can be found or as a refresher, which helps immensely.

My advice: if you come across something you recognize, and it will be hard not to, then spend time on it, especially if you’re curious.

For instance, Stoicism. Most people have heard of it, quite a few have read the Stoics or books mentioning Stoicism. Barzun mentions Stoicism a few times. He’s critical of Stoicism, not of its beneficial source of moral guidelines and psychological resiliency, but of how Stoicism sometimes rears its head in mass culture. Which it does from time to time. And it has a bit of a bad habit of morphing into doctrinaire posturing from those who view themselves as morally superior. It also supplants God and Faith for secularists who anoint themselves as having a better vision for society. That morphing Barzun argues, points to issues in the culture. And that’s intriguing. Many of you may remember how wildly popular Stoicism became around 2015, give or take. Ryan Holiday, Tim Ferris, statue accounts on Twitter, Stoic Silicon Valley bros, LinkedIn humblebrags, were all the rage until Covid hit. When Covid hit the Stoic personalities like Ryan Holiday, Massimo Pagliucci, and Donald Robertson became tinny for various reasons, and Stoicism’s popularity soured.1 Barzun shows how this isn’t the first time that has happened, and how the popularizers signal a cultural smugness resentful of any form of creativity seeking the beautiful.

I mentioned the Victorian period, that’s a name of a period most people have heard of and have notions — true or false — of. You likely have heard of the debates between Protestantism and Catholicism and its profound consequences, Barzun covers it.

You may have heard of Kant, but are not familiar with his philosophy or the profound influence he has — yes still has — over our culture.

The list goes on.

Another tip, if you decide to read From Dawn to Decadence, it’s ok to look things up as you’re reading if you want to know more. Ask Grok, go on Wikipedia, whatever it is, it’s ok to look up something. Doing so will help you retain more.

My top suggestion to better retain From Dawn to Decadence: pick up and read one of the books or authors or thinkers Barzun mentions. Also sit with a few of the art pieces or musical pieces or composers he mentions. You can do the art and music when you come across the passage. The reading of a book or figure he mentions, I recommend doing that sometime soon after finishing From Dawn to Decadence. It doesn’t need to be right away, since you might need a few easy reads after this book to avoid burnout, but don’t wait years. For instance, soon after finishing, pick up Thomas Hardy or C.S. Lewis or Erasmus — in short pick up a book from a section that resonated most with you.

I read Hunger by Knut Hamsun after reading From Dawn to Decadence. Hunger is not mentioned by Barzun, nor his Hamsun. But Hunger is the book that kicked off the 20th century with a topic Barzun covers, psychological literature.2 As of this writing, I just started Praise of Folly by Erasmus. Erasmus, as Barzun shows, is a figure who wielded enormous influence over the West.

So you can either pick up a book or an author he explicitly mentions (my suggestion), or you can try a book of a time period (my alternate suggestion) and reference Barzun to deeper understand the influences of the book you chose. Either will help you retain From Dawn to Decadence. 

Another suggestion: read a history of the time period he mentions, or something specific from a time period, or a biography of someone he mentions. For instance, you can read Andrew Robert’s biography of Napoleon. You can read Victor Davis Hanson’s book on World War II. Plenty of solid books exist that directly focus on time or a figure Barzun covers.

I’ll repeat my preference: go with a book or figure he mentions. Immersing in the topic or author will bring Barzun’s analysis to life.

Approaching Barzun’s Style of Writing

Barzun writes in the french style. It’s a gorgeous style. Like the title of his book on better writing, it’s simple and direct. But it’s not simple and direct in the style of the writing you’re familiar with: short sentences with Anglo words. His book Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers teaches how to convey concepts clearly through grammar, style, rhetoric, and word choice.

The french style works like tumbling ruminations. Or, as I opened with the first sentence, it’s like a river winding and twisting through a beautiful landscape. Like a winding and twisting river, it has eddies, fast flowing sections, sections that come to a near rest before flowing onwards. That’s how the french style works. The style ruminates, it “weaves” as Donald Trump calls his rambling style, but it always comes back to its point. It’s a gorgeous style. It takes a little getting used to if you’ve never read it. It can come across as rambling. But it’s an intimate style, it’s like you’re walking alongside Barzun’s ruminations and reflections. The style is unapologetic, it has no problems meandering, it has no problems using a big word, or a simple childlike word to describe something, yet in the end, it’s clear, beautiful, and gives an entire impression of what you’re reading.

Final Wisdom on Reading From Dawn to Decadence

Books of this size and substance require diligence and patience. You will feel overwhelmed in parts, you will feel like topics are flying over your head in other parts, and you’ll likely kick yourself for not remembering enough. You will feel like you’re not reading it fast enough, you will feel like it’s stopping you from reading an arbitrary number of books for the year. That’s all natural with a book of this nature. Have patience and be willing to forgive yourself if you don’t remember something. You will run into moments where you think you need to go faster and moments where you think reading it will hinder the goal of how many books you wanted to read for the year. This book is worthwhile. The number of books you read in a year is arbitrary. Take your time. It’s worth it.

You will not be an expert like Barzun on these topics. He spent the remaining years of his life, after a lifetime of study, exploring and writing about the West. Focus on the hits not the deep tracks. If you recognize names or themes, that’s a good place to engage. Just like if someone tells you to check out a band or artist, the easiest place to start is with the hits, and if you like the sound, you dig deeper. Let your curiosity act as a gauge. If you recognize a theme, and it intrigues you to a degree, that’s an easy area to spend a little time with the text. And spending time means, quickly reviewing some of the concepts preceding what you recognize, lingering a little with what you recognize, then paying attention to what follows. Barzun will often show what influenced the theme or person you recognize, then the counters or the influence left in the wake of that theme.

Again, forget worrying about reading speed or finishing fast enough. Reading Barzun is like a slow walk in nature along that beautiful winding river. Don’t rush it, enjoy it, and it’s ok to linger with his topics.

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Playback is worth it if you have studied Chandler and have an intimate knowledge of him. That intimacy would derive from reading Tom Hiney’s Raymond Chandler, Judith Freeman’s The Long Embrace, Chandler’s notebooks, and multiple readings of his stories and essays. Having this knowledge would make you keenly aware of Chandler’s state when he wrote Playback, and familiar with key details of his past that surface inside the story. Furthermore, you’d know that Chandler wrote the entirety of his Marlowe and hard-boiled canon while stone-cold sober, and often wrote those stories in a state where he was working to get his life back together. Playback is the only story he wrote drunk, and he never intended to write it. He meant for The Long Goodbye to be the last of the series, and he wrote that while his wife, Cissy, was dying in the next room.

He and Cissy enjoyed an odd marriage but a marriage with a rich and distinct bond. Cissy herself is a mystery. She was a nude model, and a painting of her, now since lost, once hung in a famous New York City hotel. Little is known of her family, other than she was married twice before, and her name kept changing. Changing like an alias and not due to marriage. It is suspected she grew up poor, but her intelligence, sensual expression, and her love of art, she saw as her ticket to something better. Or so it is believed. She was married to Chandler’s friend. It is unclear if the relationship started as an affair, or that Cissy was in a more open relationship at the time due to her second husband barely being around. Cissy had an odd thing with the name changes, but even odder and more mysterious, she was twenty years older, a great possibility even more than that, than Chandler when they met. Yet due to her beauty, and perhaps some of his innocence and shyness around women at the time, he thought she was the same age. She was also known to have an insatiable sexual appetite.

That last part matters because, for a bit, it looked like the dream marriage. Chandler was making a ton of money in the oil boom in California, and he had an intellectual and sexual dynamo at home. But then something happened. Either Cissy’s age came to light, although that didn’t seem to happen until much later, but it is believed an incident happened that sparked Chandler’s spiral into darkness. He had a pattern of this before, but this was the first time that we know of, where he spiraled in his marriage, or so it is believed. He began sleeping with his secretaries. He had the fortunate or unfortunate gene, depending on one’s appetite for libation, where he didn't get hangovers. So he would drink for days and days on end. And when he drank he turned into an impish, poorly behaved child. During this spiral, it looked like he fell in love with a secretary, and she knew he was married, yet that affair blew up in his face. The oil boom went bust, he got fired, his boss may have been a scammer, and he returned to Cissy. He sobered up, and the Chandlers went from wealthy to poor. During this time, however, he read hard-boiled detective novels, like those of Dashiell Hammett, and he believed he could write detective stories. Throughout his time writing the Marlowe series, and gaining fame, Chandler continued with his roller coaster of ups and downs. When Cissy’s age became apparent due to her health issues and her sudden drop in sexual appetite (it’s probable she developed or had some physical ailment) Chandler went on wilder sprees, months of endless inebriation, childlike behavior, sleeping with his secretaries, and threatening suicide for attention. Despite this, Chandler and Cissy were immensely devoted to each other. The surviving letters we have of each show them doting on each other, even during Chandler's egregious transgressions. They spent all their time with each other, but more as an unhealthy co-dependency, still they enjoyed this time. Even when their relationship became sexless due to her physical ailments and then later him drinking himself to permanent limpness, both of which flamed enormous self-doubt and insecurity for Chandler, they still deeply loved each other. Chandler was dependent on Cissy, and she was dependent on him. Without a doubt, they were each the other’s everything. All that history occurred before he wrote The Long Goodbye. Marlowe was the one who sobered Chandler up. Marlowe was the one who inspired Chandler to stop fooling around and to create. This created a relationship between the two. Marlowe was everything Chandler wanted to be but lacked either the capacity or the motivation to be. And when Chandler wrote The Long Goodbye Cissy was dying in the next room. And Chandler, perhaps, saw writing on the wall what his life would look like post Cissy. The final scene of The Long Goodbye is Marlowe saying goodbye to Chandler. And soon after he finished writing it, Cissy died.

Chandler then nosedived into his worst demons. As mentioned, when he was drunk, he behaved like a crazy child. He’d crawl on the floor, jump on furniture, cry and scream, and bust up rooms. This demented behavior got him kicked out of hotels, friend circles, and it isolated him (only a handful of people showed up to his funeral). He went spendthrift on women with his fortune. He’d fall in love, buy them a ton of jewelry (some of which they returned because they didn’t want anything to do with him), or he’d constantly try to marry them. When he could, he tried seducing certain women, usually big fans of his, but he only wanted to get them naked in a room just to just see a naked woman. Since he couldn’t reciprocate, and when these women picked up on his ploy, they berated him for it, for making them feel cheap and foolish. It was one of these women he was trying to see naked or get validation from that inspired him to write Playback. She quipped to him that wouldn’t it be funny if he married off Marlowe. Besotted, and plastered, he wrote Playback over a course of a few days. The book is dedicated to her, Jean.

In a rare sober moment, Chandler said Playback was complete garbage and that he didn’t remember writing it. This rare sober moment was when he was trying to straighten out his life to marry Helga, a Guinness heiress. She is the other name in the dedication. And Chandler is right, it is garbage. Garbage as far as a Marlowe book goes. It’s devoid of his atmospheric flourishes:

The house was on Dresden Avenue in the Oak Knoll section of Pasadena, a big solid cool-looking house with burgundy brick walls, a terra cotta tile roof, and a white stone trim. The front windows were leaded downstairs. Upstairs windows were of the cottage type and had a lot of rococo imitation stonework trimming around them.

- The High Window

It was one of those clear, bright summer mornings we get in the early spring in California before the high fog sets in. The rains are over. The hills are still green and in the valley across the hills you can see the snow on the high mountains. The fur stores are advertising their annual sales. The call houses that specialize in sixteen-year-old virgins are doing a land-office business. And in Beverly Hills the jacaranda trees are beginning to bloom.

- The Little Sister

Instead, we get a colorless version:

The entrance was on a balcony which looked down over the bar and a dining room on two levels. A curving carpeted staircase led down to the bar. Nobody was upstairs but the hat check girl and an elderly party in a phone booth whose expression suggested that nobody better fool with him.

- Playback

Close.

Still good.

Better than than most, but it lacks the detail that makes it come to life, and lacks his signature phrases that create mood, the feel of the room or environment.

Ian Fleming of James Bond fame tried to help Chandler late in his life. And a famous radio interview exists between them. In it, Chandler, fully marinated, rambled incoherently on how to pull off crimes. Chandler liked Ian Fleming’s work. He liked Casino Royale which introduces James Bond to the world. But Chandler never gave Marlowe gadgets like how Bond gets some. But in Playback Marlowe suddenly has gadgets, but more folksy gadgets, like using a stethoscope to listen into another room, or a flash pen to light up things or cause a distraction. If you know Marlowe, the gadgets in Playback are jarring, and if you don’t Marlow, they come across as corny.

In that interview with Ian Fleming, Chandler rambles about how to commit crimes. He deploys similar rambles in Playback:

"It’s as full of holes as a sink strainer. You’re being fed a line, Mr. Umney. Where would a man keep material like the important papers you mentioned — if you had to keep them at all? Certainly not where a secretary could get them. And unless he missed the stuff before she left, how did he get her followed to the train? Next, although she took a ticket to California, she could have got off anywhere. Therefore she would have to be watched on the train, and if that was done, why did someone need me to pick her up here? Next, this, as you tell it, would be a job for a large agency with nations-wide connections. It would be idiotic to take a chance on one man. I lost her yesterday. I could lose her again. It takes a bare minimum of six operatives to do a standard tail job in any sizable place, and that’s just what I mean — a bare minimum. In a really big city you’d need a dozen. An operative has to eat and sleep and change his shirt. If he’s tailing by car he has to be able to drop a man while he finds a place to park. Department stores and hotels may have half a dozen entrances. But all this girl does is hang around Union Station here for three hours in full view of everybody. And all your friends in Washington do is mail you a picture, call you on the phone, and then go back to watching television."

If you know Marlowe, this ramble is uncharacteristic. And these uncharacteristic elements permeate the novel. But the most uncharacteristic scenes are the most telling. One theme of those scenes is Marlowe sleeping with the female characters.

In the other novels, Marlowe is choosy. He’s a sensitive man, sensitive in the sense of empathy, aware of his feelings pertaining to the environment, and keen to pick up on the feelings of others. Marlowe is not a Boy Scout, it’s implied he’s a good lover, but he wants a type. Women make plenty of passes at Marlowe, but he turns them down. In Playback Marlowe beds all the main female characters. The scenes after Marlowe sleeps with someone are the most revealing of Chandler. It’s here Marlowe is gone, and we get a peek into Chandler.

And again in the darkness that muted cry, and then again the slow quiet peace.

“I hate you,” she said with her mouth against mine.

“Not for this, but because perfection never comes twice and with us it came to soon. And I’ll never see you again and I don't want to. It would have to be forever or not at all.”

"And you acted like a hardboiled pick-up who had seen too much of the wrong side of life.”

“So did you. And we were both wrong. And it’s useless. Kiss me harder."

Suddenly she was gone from the bed almost without a sound or movement.

After a little while the light went on in the hallway and she stood in the door in a long wrapper.

“Goodbye,” she said calmly. “I’m calling a taxi for you. Wait out in front for it. You won’t see me again.”

“What about Umney?”

“A poor frightened jerk. He needs someone to bolster his ego, to give him a feeling of power and conquest. I give it to him. A woman’s body is not so sacred that it can’t be used — especially when she has already failed at love.”

She disappeared. I got up and put my clothes on and listened before I went out. I heard nothing. I called out, but there was no answer. When I reached the sidewalk in front of the house the taxi was just pulling up.

I looked back. The house seemed completely dark.

No one lived there. It was all a dream. Except that someone had called the taxi. I got into it and was driven home.

Those last few lines struck me. The sadness, the sentiment, and its potential meaning. While I will never know, I boiled the meaning down to three guesses. One, Chandler could be reminiscing about his early days with Cissy. He could be sentimental about his past vigor and her insatiable sexual appetite. Two, he may be wondering about the secretary he fell in love with, the one he carried an affair with for quite some time, but then she vanished out of his life as he had to vanish out of hers. Or, three, maybe he’s dealing with his compunction over the handful of secretaries he had affairs with. And what those flings did not only to Cissy, but also to the many women he had them with, and perhaps wondering whatever became of those women, long since out of his life. It’s hard to tell if he’s roiling in guilt or if he’s waxing sentimental. But certainly, it’s Chandler wrangling with his past. He does it again with another bedded woman.

Then I got to thinking there are two kinds of women you can make love to. Those who give themselves so completely and with such utter abandonment that they don’t even think about their bodies. And there are those who are self-conscious and always want to cover up a little. I remembered a girl in a story by Anatole Franc who insisted on taking her stockings off. Keeping them on made her feel like a whore. She was right.

And this scene Chandler details post-coital regret from the woman’s perspective and Marlowe’s self-doubt, like Marlowe failed to impress. That they became strangers after the act. It’s all about Chandler here. He’s wrangling with something. My first guess is that he’s wrangling over Cissy. Apparently, Cissy used to clean or hang around the house either in the nude or in lingerie. This leads me to wonder if the stocking part could be some drunken yet sad outburst at Cissy he blurted onto the page. Chandler was an insecure and immature man. Letters and quips to friends reveal that when Chandler discussed Cissy’s past, he did what all insecure and immature men do, he compared himself obsessively to past lovers all while convincing himself that all the men she was with before him were better lovers, and then projecting this sophomoric obsession onto a sophomoric belief that women, in particular, Cissy, thought only in comparisons. Despite her always doting on him, never divorcing him, and staying faithful during times of penury and his blatant infidelity, his insecurity made him paranoid that she kept thinking other men were better.

My second theory regards Chandler’s desire to get a woman nude just to see her nude. As I mentioned, Chandler drank himself completely impotent. And he’d seduce eager and willing women, they’d get undressed, and he just wanted to look. Then they’d get mad since nothing could be reciprocated. They realized that it was just a ploy. So perhaps he is projecting his insecurities, his sadness, or who knows what else.

The other Chandler rambles seen on the pages are from random old men. They discuss God, women, death, life, and money, and all are sad, insecure, incoherent, and come out of nowhere and then vanish to nowhere. Through these rambles I find a sad, scared, and besotted Chandler. Another telling theme, a more self-doubtful and nearly groveling Marlowe when Marlowe deals with male authority figures in the novel. Marlowe is grounded in his convictions and his confidence, normally. But in Playback Marlowe is spiraling with doubt, insecurity, and random asides uncharacteristic of Marlowe. This could be his worry about impressing Helga Guinness's father, it could be some form of drunken guilt or victimhood, or maybe it's a Chandler desperate for validation. Whatever it is, it says volumes of Chandler and says nothing of Marlowe.

Playback is Chandler’s drunken self-reflections. They are sad, pathetic, and revealing. And personally, it's challenging to see one of my heroes, a man who created an iconic figure, the man who depicted Los Angeles and its emotions and feelings and sense in a timeless manner, a man who took the genre of hard-boiled detective stories to sonic heights, seeing that man spiral into his worst demons. But it's undoubtedly honest. And for Chandler fans, that makes it worth reading. Maybe it’s reading it for sympathy, or maybe understanding of him. It’s a terrible Marlowe novel, yet it’s a sophisticated Chandler memoir.

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Naturally, these major changes plus the random disaster, slowed down the number of books I read. For the first time in a long time, I went stretches of days without reading. And a number of days where I had so much going on that when I did read, I didn’t retain anything. I reread a lot of pages, slowing the reading pace down to a crawl for many books.

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2024 marked big changes to my site. My site underwent an entire redesign and overhaul in late 2023. My changes move glacially. And with the site changing it grinded my writing pace down to glacial melt. But even with the glacial shifts, I got excited for my first Deep Read Series on my shiny new site. I picked the topic American Decline, curated thirteen books, and hoped a few Good Word Members would join in some capacity. One person joined in and read Satyricon but on the whole — crickets. Some discussion occurred in the new forum, but in reality, I got over my skis. The American Decline topic showed me that my transition into reading and away from copy was and still is taking time. For instance, when I announced reading the infamous Bell Curve, and invited any member interested to read along, a few copywriters expressed excitement. They were excited to “Read a book that will help hack the human mind.” Bell Curve is anything but a book to hack the human mind, and my site and writing doesn’t veer near “hacking the human mind.” The copywriters made a lot of noise promising to read it, and a few read the introduction, some expressed concern that it wasn’t a mind hack book and it wasn’t as easy to read as they expected, and of course, once effort shock kicked in, the standard short film of the Internet Marketer/Copywriter who makes a lot of noise with their promises played out.

Scene 1: Copywriter says the book is an opportunity to learn something new, to face a challenge and grow, they’re brimming with excitement to tackle this tough task, and that the effort will be worth the reward.

Scene 2: Each copywriter vanishes, each ending their subscription, most unsubscribe from all email lists, and all are never to be heard from again.

Albeit, the glacial pace, big changes, shift in direction, all that plus dropping a list of thirteen books on the heady topic of American Decline, was a big reach. I held zero expectations of people reading exactly to my schedule; I held zero expectations they would read all thirteen books. I did expect, however, that a handful would join in on at least a book or two. One person bravely joined in and read a book, and I’m grateful they did. Good Word Members also had to deal with my writing experiments in 2024. Those probably came across as manic. So all in all, I started 2024 expecting serious readers, discussions on American Decline, but a number of factors led to an exodus of members.

Call it a growing pain or a change in direction pain, it all made me realize I need to approach my site differently. I knew I needed to capture a more serious reader. I have a handful, but a handful isn’t a business.

Fortunately, a videographer has been bugging me for a few years. He’s worked with two personalities I massively respect, Mike Cernovich and Alexander Cortes. He kept saying I’d be great on video. In late fall of 2024, I flew him out here to Boise and we started a new project. A YouTube page will be up and going in 2025, along with a new free newsletter, and some more features for paid members. YouTube will test me since I’m fairly camera shy. And I’m a bit of a Luddite when it comes to technology. But I’m hoping YouTube will resonate with an audience aligning with my change in direction.

To finish this section, I created a reading list page in 2024. It got too big and too clunky, but the experiment was worthwhile. I’m going to keep the reading list page but will make changes for 2025 to have it better organized.

With that, here are the books read in 2024, along with my rating for each:

1. Alienated America, Timothy P. Carney 5/6

2. Coming Apart, Charles Murray 5/6

3. Bell Curve, Charles Murray 6/6

4. The Two-Parent Privilege, Melissa S. Kearney 4/6

5. Feminism Against Progress, Mary Harrington 6/6

6. The Satyricon, Petronius 6/6

7. Shame, Shelby Steele 5/6

8. Great Society, Amity Shlaes 5/6

9. Bad Therapy, Abigail Shrier 4/6

10. Swamp Story, Dave Barry 4/6

11. Fletch, Gregory McDonald 2/6

12. The Last Action Heroes, Nick DeSemlyn 2/6

13. The End of Everything, Victor Davis Hanson 6/6

14. The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel, Douglas Brunt 5/6

15. The Long Embrace, Judith Freeman 4/6

16. The Three Languages of Politics, Arnold Kling 2/6

17. A History of the Bible, John Barton 5/6

18. Shepherds for Sale, Megan Basham 4/6

19. On Guard, William Lane Craig 5/6

20. Playback, Raymond Chandler 3/6

21. The Case for Trump, Victor Davis Hanson 6/6

22. Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance 6/6

23. Who Killed Homer, Victor Davis Hanson & John Heath 5/6

24. Homer and His Iliad, Robin Lane Fox 4/6

The Top Non-Fiction of 2024

Feminism Against Progress, Mary Harrington

Harrington’s style is beautifully manic. She writes with a deep sense of urgency and purpose. Yet that manic style packs a message critically important for today’s culture. Harrington does more than paint the egregious harms of feminism, she exposes deep cultural issues and the forces behind those issues.

Harrington out-liberaled the liberals. She doubled down on living feminist lifestyles, and while she felt unsatisfied, she kept adhering to the Progressive Feminist advice to keep going, believing in its message. When she had her child, it was her Road to Damascus moment. And from here, she looked into Feminism and her beliefs.

Harrington covers a ton with her manic style. She does a tremendous job detailing the various forces and influences that caused women to radically alter their bodies in the modern era. You may remember the era from around 1999 - 2008, give or take, where it became fashionable for women to look like skinny boys or as shapely as an ironing board. And with the advent of surgery — which she reveals the ideological influences — to alter your body to fit that norm: breast reductions, thigh gap surgery, butt reduction surgery, and so on. Women wanted to be boyishly skinny, to remove or reduce a body part, to no longer “get sexualized by the male gaze”, to no longer face sophomoric remarks about a body part, to no longer deal with genuine compliments about their figure or a physical feature, (since this meant their physical features were part of their identity at a time when those physical features were seen as backward, lower class, unfashionable, or constructed by the patriarchy), or, most likely, to no longer be left out of the new fad. Regardless of the wish, all current physical identities could be escaped with surgery to obtain the promised new and better identity.

That period was the era of my Borneo days. I remember overhearing girls at the bars considering a thigh gap surgery or bragging about having one. I remember going on a date with a slender girl who wanted a butt reduction surgery. These girls seemed to want more of the fashionable look at that time versus wishing to fight the patriarchy, yet the desire to physically alter their identity into something wholly different shocked me. Harrington details the ideologies that influenced women to undergo these procedures, and how those ideologies were part of a slippery slope leading us to today: popularized radical gender identity transformations, which are, in reality, just like the era to look like an ironing board, surgical body mutilation to fit in with social fashions. The ideologies behind this? A mixture of but not limited to, Feminism, Transhumanism, Marxism, and Postmodern Relativism (breast augmentation is debated in feminist circles, unsurprisingly, since 4th wave feminist positions often contradict each other, but many circles consider augmentation a negative because it falls under female beauty ideals "constructed by the patriarchy").

Harrington talks of the consequences of birth control concomitant with cavalier Sexual Revolution attitudes and how the combination helped influence men and women to the fringes of sexuality, helped influence people to the bizarre edges of cynical body part objectification. For instance, the idea that women need to have "sex like a man" and sleep with as many partners as possible to obtain personal empowerment. Or how polyamorous lifestyles are seen as an enlightened pathway to a cultured, urbane, and elite lifestyle (a Marxist concept, he called it Community of Women, aka, wife-swapping; and Marx wanted to abolish families since he claimed it's a bourgeois concept designed to keep women subjugated). Or that more and more kinks are required to obtain not only satisfaction but also spiritual enlightenment. The current various fetishes, once taken as a sign of psychological issues are now somehow a form of political and social activism. That the way to fight Trump, climate change, and stand up against the genocide of women in red states, is to have an orgy dressed as a furry. Doing these kinks or “alternative lifestyles” somehow bestows moral superiority and political superiority. And of course, it’s anti-Christian.

The argument that struck me the most, and upon reflection, I agree with more and more each day, is Harrington’s concept of Rewilding Sex. Simply put, remove all forms of birth control. No condoms. No IUDs. No birth control pill. No morning-after pill. No abortion except in the case of rape, incest, or risk of death for the mother. And by removing all of this, Harrington claims, puts the onus on men and women to get serious about who they choose to have sex with, to understand the gravity of sex, and to relish in that gravity. Harrington believes rewilding sex will force women — and men —to grasp fertility tracking, or in other words, a woman's cycles. To clarify, she isn’t saying that you should abstain from sex until you're married, nor does she knock that belief of abstinence until marriage and she respects the Christian mores of abstinence, but what she calls for most is injecting gravity and meaning back into sex. That this gravity, when vetting for partners, radically eliminates the sexual unseriousness of our current era.

All in all, Harrington gives a poignant and incisive analysis of our modern culture. Well worth the read, and she’s well worth checking out on various interviews.

Honorable Mention Non-Fiction

The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation, Victor Davis Hanson

This was close to overtaking Harrington. I wrangled with it. I read three Hanson books in 2024, and I read one close to the end of 2023. Hanson, in this book, tells us so much about human nature, the past, and today, and delivers needed wisdom. The End of Everything was a blast. It involved why certain civilizations vanished, wars, military strategy, cultural hubris, the danger of intellectuals, and each page offers insights for our modern day. A superb read.

Presidential Election

The Case for Donald Trump by Victor Davis Hanson and Hillbilly Elegy by Vice President, J.D. Vance tells us the why and how of the American currents that led to the greatest political comeback in American history, the comeback of Donald Trump. If you want to know why, how, and what paved this win — and Trump’s win in 2016 — both are a must-read. It doesn’t matter which side of the aisle you sit on. Read them together and a lot will become clear.

Best Fiction

Satyricon, Petronius

It was written during the reign of Nero, around 63 A.D. It gives us a look at Roman culture when the Roman Empire was still at the zenith of its power, well before a noticeable decline kicked in (a little after Marcus Aurelius).

Petronius was an advisor to Nero. He was Nero's cultural expert. Despite being loved by Nero, Nero executed Petronius after he read the Satyricon. It’s satire, and it’s graphic. Wildly graphic. But Petronius wrote the tale to warn of the morals of excess. You can see much of modern culture and our faddish cultural ideologies play out. For instance, how polyamory or hedonistic practices, while deemed by Progressives and secularists as a pathway to moral enlightenment, political and social preeminence, intellectual sophistication, and a form of healing, in reality, prove unsatisfying, foment cultural enervation, chain a person to self-humiliation rituals, and inject spiritual ambiguity into a person's soul.

Characters are always eating, always chasing some sexual thrill, and material obsession permeates the story. The parties are garish, and feature characters freely flatulating, and freely fornicating. The most famous scene, Trimalchio’s Feast has become a constant in literature, stories, and Hollywood. The iconic Sopranos series is a constant play on Trimalchio’s Feast: the constant eating, the parties at The Bada Bing, and how it’s all never quite satisfying, despite each sensuality's promise of gratification. The excess, and the cynical indulgence comprising and leading up to the excess, make gratification more and more elusive.

The story is graphic, hilarious, and relevant. A recent New Yorker article on Polyamory and their claim as to why it’s hip and cultured — Satyricon shows instead how the concept is not new, and why the hailed idea is in fact a detriment to culture and to a person’s spirit. This work is a classic for a reason. While many parts of it are missing, Christian monks still decided to save it for its importance (parts of it were destroyed, the beginning and the end, the work was cared for cavalierly due to its graphic nature, yet it was still decided to be saved). Which says something. A work this graphic, saved and restored by some of the most rigid Christian sects, speaks to its importance.

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Biggest Letdown

Fletch, Gregory McDonald

I love the movie Fletch. It is a classic. I rank it as a top comedy movie. Like most movies derived from books, I expected the book to be better. The book was awful. The screenwriters of Fletch saw crumbs of potential, took those crumbs to sonic heights, and turned Fletch the movie into a comedic masterpiece. The book version of Fletch is overtly cynical and nihilistic. It had unnecessary storylines, like Fletch sleeping with an underage prostitute in a groomer manner. This creepy storyline did nothing to move the character or story forward. I kept expecting it to get better, but it didn’t. The dialogue stunk, the atmosphere stunk, and the nihilism made for a choking stink.

Trashed Book

The Wager, David Grann

The Wager came with big expectations. It’s a bestseller, has killer reviews, and thousands love it on Amazon. I barely made twenty pages before chucking it in the trash. Grann kept taking stock potshots at capitalism, the West, Conservatives, imperialism, and I’m sure if I made it further, Donald Trump. The potshots overly slanted his position to the point that it drained all trust from his narrative. Grann proceeded from Postmodern Liberal Revisionism while outright rejecting proceeding from evidence. The other aspect that irked me was the atrocious cliches. Grann tried a stereotypical sailor vernacular from the 1800s. Lines like “a cracking good ship” came across as cartoonish and schizophrenic. And how those lines tangled with the partisan potshots made for some of the worst style I’ve ever seen on the page.

American Decline Series Recap

I got over my skis with it. But I enjoyed each book. I never got around to an article because I never answered the question, “Is America in decline?” satisfyingly. I will venture my belief that America is declining culturally in specific areas. We’re not nearly as degenerate as people online proclaim, but we’re increasingly vicarious, cynical, insecure, and unserious. It could also be a product of America dealing with the consequences of overwhelming affluence and leisure. But I'm convinced America is still exceptional, and still great, and am still wildly optimistic for its future.

My move from Denver to Boise also opened my eyes. Boise is a model of good governance. Denver, I still love it, and it still offers many great features, is in decline. And Denver Democrat constituents — the overwhelming majority — embrace this decline, treating it as an effect of “a growing city” despite Denver having one of the highest emigration rates in the country. Denver still has better amenities than Boise, and many wonderful qualities, but the Progressive levels of pride with growing crime, illegal aliens, higher costs of living, a noticeable decline in the standard of living, and their disgust of any red part of Colorado is deeply troubling. You would think the residents would tire of the noticeable hits on their living standards, but instead, they wave it as a badge of honor. That I don’t know what to make of.

Reading this series and then moving to a city without the issues of Progressive policy hurled me further in thought. Against the backdrop of the books I read and the move to Boise, at some point, I may write a few articles on it.

Upcoming for 2025

The big thing coming, is the video element of my site. The YouTube page will be a challenge for me. I’m betting a lot on it. We’ll see what what unfolds.

I’m tinkering with my daily schedule to get more reading in, and I hope that tinkering generates more articles.

I’m still doing the Deep Read series, as I enjoy them too much.

My site really isn’t political. But each year I feel more and more a calling to be a place where people on my political spectrum, Conservative/right-leaning, can come and engage in the culture of good reading. While Barnes and Noble is improving, many books and bookstores slam and shun conservatives. Also, with cynical areas like BookTok or “I read it so you didn’t have to", it’s tough finding a place of good books and engaging with them. I hope to be that area, an area for deeper engagement, an area Conservatives can enjoy. I don’t know why I’m sharing this other than I feel called to.

Here are some upcoming Deep Read Series of 2025 (some will change and some might be in 2026):

• Western Civilization

• Christianity - in particular Augustine

• America (Tocqueville)

• Dostoyevski

• Russell Kirk

And wherever else I turn.

To finish, my purpose is still to inspire better reading. We’re becoming a society that likes to analyze Cliffs Notes, and now a society analyzing the analyzer of Cliffs Notes, ChatGPT (and other AI platforms) versus a society that engages with the whole, that engages with lineage or themes. I hope to inspire deeper reading, reading for entertainment, and making good reading a fun habit in 2025.

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It was rather scary at times.

It still is.

Yet my list is growing and my reading musings have struck a chord. I believe reading is an intimate conversation. It’s a conversation between you and the author. And the more you engage with a book, the more intimate it gets. So naturally, my emails and articles relating to reading have gotten more intimate. Which I would say is the theme of this reading recap for 2022.

I’m going to recap the best books I read in 2022 and share some honorable mentions and other musings.

As of this writing, I read 44 books in 2022.

I may squeeze in two more before 2023.

I read two books twice, Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell, and The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle.

And two books took time to read due to length and their nature, Don Quixote by Cervantes, and The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith.

I threw one book in the trash, The Art of X-Ray Reading by Roy Peter Clarke (I mention why I did here). I’m not joking, it’s sitting in a trash heap somewhere in Colorado. The two biggest letdowns, The War on The West by Douglas Murray (I detail a little bit why here; as time goes on, that book gets more blasé), and Land of Wolves by Craig Johnson.

I’ll detail Johnson's letdown for the superfans of mine. Johnson created the Longmire series. I enjoy the series. Some stand out, some are filled with too many insider jokes, and some feel phoned in. But Land of Wolves was a big letdown. I nearly stopped after fifty pages. But being stubborn and a fan of the series, I endured it (albeit I read a lot of it at a lightning pace). Why a letdown? In the previous novel, Longmire takes out an entire cartel to rescue his daughter. And in a way, to avenge the death of an unborn daughter with his girlfriend. The story in that novel walks a bit past the boundaries of plausibility — Walt Longmire would be in his seventies and manages to eradicate a drug cartel in Mexico — but it’s enjoyable. The theme of protecting the women in his life stands out. Land of Wolves he comes back to Wyoming and all the women dislike him for what he did in the previous novel. Even his daughter is pissed off at him. Which makes no sense. A man goes deep into Mexico to rescue his daughter, and nearly gets himself killed, but pulls off a miracle and the women look at him like some sad little wimp. In real life, women would hurl themselves at Longmire for this action. And Longmire for most of the story is mopey, needy, and wimpy. Longmire’s main character trait is his ability to endure, his grit. In this story, he’s morphed into someone who would become an inconsolable mess if a light bulb burned out in a lamp. The story left such a bad taste in my mouth that I may quit the series entirely.

Moving on.

The email that got the most feedback was the Raymond Chandler piece (you can read it here). Which is poignant because, in a way, Chandler kicked off 2022 for me.

I’ll recap a touch.

The day after Christmas 2021, I went to Hollywood, California. I stayed right on the famous intersection of Hollywood and Vine. And I was about a block and a half from the home of Chandler’s most famous creation, Phillip Marlowe. I visited for about a week. My trip to Marlowe’s hood fomented a more sentimental and more personal year of reading. As I mentioned in that piece, I could feel Marlowe walking around. I could see him walking the streets. When I went to sleep, the building I stayed in, knowing his office and home sat a block and a half away, I wondered what he was up to. I looked out the window, across to the Taft building, and did what I love to do, ruminate.

Another reason why it got more personal in 2022, I worked to slow down my reading. If you’re a longtime reader of mine then you know I read fiction slowly. Ever so slowly. But I somewhat raced through non-fiction. And I felt like I was missing something. I felt like I was racing to just race when I didn’t need to. Fortunately, I stumbled across The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs. A book I wished I stumbled crossed earlier. The book gave me permission to read non-fiction slower. But more so, it showed me the best reason why to savor and enjoy what I’m reading versus racing through to see if it’s worthy of a reread. I now write marginalia whereas I wasn’t before. So that book shaped, or reshaped rather, how I read. And with that, reading got more intimate.

As I said, I read Don Quixote this year. And, after I read it, I declared it the greatest novel and story ever written (I cover more here). And it is special. But it got supplanted.

And with that, the two best books I read in 2022:

• Non-fiction: Conflict of Visions, Thomas Sowell

• Fiction: Growth of the Soil, Knut Hamsun

Growth of The Soil is not only the best fiction I read in 2022, I now consider it the greatest fiction ever written (more here).

If you’re curious to know my ranking (this is for fiction):

1. Growth of the Soil, Knut Hamsun

2. Don Quixote, Miguel Cervantes

3. The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoyevski

I conveyed in other pieces Growth of the Soil’s rich and beautiful depiction of values. But I deleted something personal from one of those pieces. And I’ll hint at a smidgen of what I deleted (I like you guys and gals but some things are between me and someone else and not for the world to see).

When I read Growth of the Soil a first happened to me. A person close to me surfaced as a passenger as I read the story; they existed in my mind as I read Growth of the Soil. My guess as to why this person became a strong presence, I’ll leave it at the themes and values depicted in the story. Fiction paints the world for us. Great fiction conjures our emotions, thoughts, sentiments, memories, and imagination. Hamsun pulled me into his story yet his story reached into my world and happened to figuratively sit someone next to me. I find that special.

Onto Sowell.

I’ve mentioned Conflict of Visions here.

I’ll recap why it struck me.

It’s the most powerful social theory I’ve ever read. It goes beyond politics. I’ll get personal again. How he depicts worldviews, in my dating life, I would not date someone with an Unconstrained worldview. Sowell doesn’t dump on the Unconstrained. But I see it as a worldview not aligning with my worldview. And it’s a misalignment that creates friction. One doesn’t have to go far on Twitter, or even an unhappy relationship, to see how each worldview can quickly get at odds with the other.

What fascinated me regarding these worldviews, as Sowell shows, is even if the person isn’t political in any way shape or form, the worldview still shapes their compass, their Northstar. You can see how the worldview at a baseline reveals how someone handles obstacles, conflicts, or how they approach the day. Some may have a knee-jerk reaction and say “You want to date a mirror image of you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” No, I don’t want a mirror image; I want a complementary worldview as a baseline. Each worldview is a spectrum variegated and nuanced. But as Sowell shows, if you take two people, and one has the Constrained worldview and the other the Unconstrained, they will view solutions, conflicts, processes, differently. And so different that it creates friction fast.

Like I said, Conflict of Visions is the most powerful theory I’ve ever read, and I believe Sowell is right. Once he paints the picture you see it everywhere.

Now let’s get into some honorable mentions.

The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle

Aristotle’s Ethics is a foundational book in the canon of Western Civilization (more here).

Let’s keep with the theme of personal.

Aristotle structures most of my ethical compass. He somewhat supplanted the previous framework, The Stoics.

Here’s why Aristotle supplanted the Stoics for me.

I discovered Stoicism around 2014 or 2015. I got really deep into it around 2017. Going so far as to attend Stoicon in London. And a few times I attended a superb event in Wyoming hosted by the University of Wyoming (it’s funny how the universe works, the event takes place in the Wyoming foothills at a Christian retreat camp). Stoicism offers a powerful moral and ethical guide. Stoicism offers a powerful — and now tried and tested — toolset to navigate our spectrum of emotions and impulses. And it perhaps offers the most potent skillset available if you’re about to face or endure dignity removing horrors (the story of James Stockdale being the most famous example). Sadly we only have around 3% of Stoic thought and writings. I’ll iterate, any man or woman would do well to read Meditations or Epictetus or Seneca. But Stoicism has its issues; Stoicism has its boundaries. Modern popularizers add to those issues and try to sweep its boundaries under the rug by inserting their cosmic and fashionable vision into Stoicism. They also morph Stoicism from a belief system into a morally undemanding set of practices and habits. Doing so, they ignore the issues.

A big issue with Stoicism: navel-gazing. “What would a Stoic do?” is a trying question often asked. Also, another issue with Stoicism, the lack of looking at the bigger picture (granted Stoic thought on the matter is lost to history). For instance, if people are getting lined up and sent off to the gulag for religious or political beliefs, modern Stoics see this as a way to practice their Stoicism. Undoubtedly, if I’m being sent to the Gulags for my political beliefs, religious beliefs, or for being a Clint Black fan, Stoicism will help me face that atrocity. But that misses the bigger and more important question. Why are people getting lined up and sent off to dignity and humanity stripping prisons? That isn’t the time to navel gaze nor is it the time to get excited to practice Stoicism. The other issue, Stoicism features trying aspects around “preferred indifferents.” A preferred indifferent is an advantage; either visceral advantages or self-created advantages. For instance, if you’re an attractive man or woman (visceral advantage), the Stoics say that your looks shouldn’t matter. Let’s dig deeper. Let’s say you’re an attractive man or woman, and you’re fit, and you’re stinking rich, and you have superb character and humility, and you have supreme command of your purpose, and you have wisdom and virtue, and you have high standards, and you have humility and grace. To call none of those tangibles an advantage is risible. That’s not to take away from the breadth and depth of what Stoicism offers. But it’s ridiculous to say those advantages are opinions and should not matter and what matters most is virtue. Yes, virtue matters. But if you’re going to try out to play the role of Jack Reacher or his love interest, debating with the casting team that looks don’t matter and it’s an opinion is not going to do so well. Those advantages can help us in some way, as they can help others. They can make us more apt to get a job, or they can make us better at our job. The list goes on and on.

Again, I’ll repeat, Stoicism is one of the most powerful ethical, moral, and pragmatic frameworks a person can follow. It influenced Christian ethics (in particular, Paul). It’s the core of Cognitive Behavioral Theory. It’s approachable, dependable, and anyone would do well to read a bit of it.

Again, I love Stoicism. It helped me escape the murky depths of scammy online marketing. It led me to raise questions regarding my values. It indirectly and in some ways directly, led me to the massive personal shifts I experienced in the summer of 2020.

But Aristotle, I argue and believe, understands the world better than the Stoics. Not that the Stoics drift far from Aristotle. They overlap in many areas. But Aristotle gives weight to advantages. He also teaches how you can create advantages. A simple one, if a man or woman exercises, and builds a fit body they become more attractive, thus gaining an advantage. But he also teaches that it’s not just an advantage, rather the advantage is a cherry on top. The real lesson, exercising bestows mental and physical benefits. Aristotle isn’t saying work out to get a sexy body to just get laid. That aim, he would say, is the distinctly wrong reason to get fit. Rather, he teaches that working out gives us strength. It tests us mentally. It helps us live better lives. And we can workout while recognizing the advantage of working out, like how it makes us look better. To go further to show how Aristotle gets it, he teaches how wanting to look sexy at the pool offers us a good impetus to work out, yet that impetus shouldn’t define us or be our main purpose in life. It’s merely the catalyst to get us exercising which then opens the door to the deeper physical and emotional benefits. I find that realistic. Granted the Stoics advocated rigorous physical exercise, but Aristotle nails the nuance and importance behind the why. And Aristotle gets that if you go to the pool, and you’re a fit man or woman, that gives you an advantage. Whereas the Stoics start getting into navel-gazing as to how it doesn’t matter and it’s all opinion. Sorry Stoics, while you navel-gaze and work to self-exalt yourselves above the idea of an aesthetically pleasing body, that fit body is turning heads in the real world. That Aristotle recognizes those tangibles makes him much more compelling. And that’s part of what put me firmly into the Aristotle camp.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith

I recently talked about this here.

The Pleasures of Reading, Alan Jacobs

I’ve chatted a lot about swimming upstream. You can check it out here and here. But this book inspired changes in how I read, and those changes are proving fruitful.

The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe

I just finished it. A classic. I consider it a Great Book.

It tells the story of 1980s New York City culture. But the themes are timeless. We get social class pitted against social class. We see how high society “culture” is often an exercise in pretentiousness and insecurity. We see how race grifters can grab power and infantilize the group they represent. We see how vanity, insecurity, and rationalizing impulsive behavior deliver dire consequences.

I grew up in Boston. And the characters in this book, the social divisions, reminded me of home. I grew up Irish Catholic. My family was in the car business. And the old wasp yankees looked down at us. I remember walking into a country club once, and some old wasp buzzard complained to the employee at the register that “this IRISH boy isn’t a member and certainly doesn’t BELONG in here.” A not uncommon occurrence in pockets of Boston and New York City. And the characters in the book, the Irish lawyers and cops, reminded me of so many people I worked with.

Wolfe’s attention to detail makes the world come alive. He turns the environment into a character, which is key when displaying social class.

A superb read. Hilarious, eye-opening, and rich with insight.

World War II

I’m looking down a few rabbit holes. One rabbit hole, I’m loosely looking at America from the 1920s through the 1960s or so. And it’s impossible to not look at World War II.

I read two eye-opening books on the topic. One of which gave me the chills at times. I argue, read these two books and you’ll own a vast knowledge of World War II.

The books, The Second World Wars by Victor Davis Hanson, and War of the World by Niall Ferguson. Both authors I deeply admire and respect. Niall Ferguson writes otherworldly prose.

The Second World Wars gives a deep overview of World War II. Hanson structures the book into seven categories:

1. Ideas

2. Air

3. Water

4. Earth

5. Fire

6. People

7. Ends

Hanson remarkably shows the background, the tipping points, the military strategy, and then the aftermath within each theme. He doesn’t show particular battles, rather he gives a substantive overview of military and political theaters and ideologies. He also peels back many myths. Such as the fashionable belief that everyone hated Hitler and his goons but somehow Hitler haphazardly seized power. In reality, and sadly, Hitler was revered worldwide. And today, many Germans like to entertain the belief that their families were part of the “resistance.” But horrifically, Hitler was adored at home. Some like to look at Hitler as some country bumpkin. But the academics and intellectuals were some of his biggest fans. Hanson peels back the curtain and shows the grave realities.

It’s a fascinating book. It’s a big book, but readable, accessible, and intriguing.

War of the World by Niall Ferguson is the book that raised the hair on my arms and gave me the chills. This book is far more conceptual in nature, but while conceptual, he makes it granular. The book seems to be a sequel to The Pity of War which details World War I. I’ve yet to read Pity of War but War of The World is approachable enough on its own.

Ferguson avoids the battles, he avoids the warfare strategies. As I said, he goes conceptual. The granular bit I mentioned, Ferguson covers what created the ethnic divisions that led to the atrocities of World War II. He covers the psychology creating the horrors man conducted during this time. And he offers us a distinct premise, that World War II never quite ended.

And to piggyback off of this, The Dying Citizen by Victor Davis Hanson was superb. He details what’s hollowing out Western Civilization, what it means to be a citizen, and defines and details the “forces tearing down civilization” we so often hear yet never see defined.

Classical English Style, Ward Farnsworth

I’ve mentioned it a few times, here and here.

If you’re a writer of any sort, it’s required reading.

If you’re a reader wishing to dive into some old English classics — literature, or non-fiction — this book will work like a Rosetta stone. It will clarify what maybe looks stuffy or repetitive and instead show its power and clarity.

The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler; Raymond Chandler, Tom Hiney

As mentioned, this combination opened the door to a deeply personal reading experience. And opened the door to the article/email receiving the most feedback. I won’t go on much further. Other than Chandler did write one more Marlowe novel after The Long Goodbye. I’ll admit, part of me is irrationally fearful to read it.

Why?

Chandler wrote Playback (the last novel) completely and utterly and distinctly shitfaced. He wrote it to woo a woman. And he wrote it in an inebriated hurry. I’ve heard it’s absurdist and funny. But I’ve heard it’s a departure from the famous Marlowe. That part has me worried. I doubt the story will taint Marlowe for me. That’s my irrational fear. But after that unexpected personal experience I had with The Long Goodbye you could say I’m letting the sentiments cool.

And to share more regarding that personal piece, I was blown away by the feedback on it. My reading emails and articles have struck a chord. And I can’t even quite pin down what it is I do when I talk reading, but I know I feel a deep calling to it. And when I published something that personal and got that much feedback, I felt grateful to you and felt more fired up. As I’ve said before, I’m shifting away from copy and marketing. I admire both, but there is only so much one can say about copy. And marketing methods don’t excite me. I’m thrilled that whatever I’m doing with reading has struck a chord. And I love that Chandler and Marlowe helped me with that.

Hamilton, Ron Chernow

I covered Hamilton here. It’s a superb read. Chernow is a superb writer. No, I did not see the broadway hit this book inspired, nor do I care to, nor will I since I’m not at all interested to see this book turned into a rap. I’m not sure how my reading will go for 2023, but I do plan to read Chernow’s Grantat some point.

Drink, David Nutt

I wouldn’t hail this book as a classic. I wouldn’t say it was great. But it was good. Why am I mentioning just a good book?

I wasn’t much of a drinker. I had my wild days in my twenties. But back in those Borneo days it was the standard go bonkers with my ski team after a competition or the standard go out and raise a little hell on a Saturday. But around thirty I started drinking way less. Then my mid-thirties way, way less. And then around the last two years or more, I maybe had one or two drinks a month, if that. I would maybe enjoy a scotch at a restaurant. Or after skiing, with an old friend, maybe nurse a beer. But I noticed the longer I went without drinking a scotch or whiskey, when I did have one, all I tasted was the alcohol. So it lost its appeal. The biggest thing I noticed, I slept awful even after having only one drink. For instance, I fly to Sun Valley, Idaho three or four times every year to go skiing. I noticed if I had a beer after skiing with a friend, or one with dinner, in order to fall asleep later, I had to walk around town for a few hours. Not that I mind walking around Ketchum, Idaho, but it got irksome. Especially on nights when it was close to zero degrees or less. But it was the only way I could get to sleep that night. And with my lifting, if I had one beer or Scotch on Saturday, I felt it on Monday when I was squatting.

Well sometime in April I went out to dinner at a restaurant. I had a few sips of scotch, but I don’t think I even finished it. A few days later I read Drink. I liked it. It didn’t moralize. It didn’t call you a sinner for drinking. So that last scotch I had some sips of was my last drink. I stopped drinking entirely. At the same time, I stumbled upon Athletic Brewing Non-Alcoholic beer. And I quite enjoyed it (I’ve had a few others from other brands and some are quite good, and a few are undrinkable).

I wouldn’t say this book inspired a big shift. But it did show me how I was enduring a drink here or there for no reason at all. I enjoy the taste of beer and now I enjoy an NA beer while I read without the downsides.

What also shocked me, was when it came up around people that I don’t drink anymore, they got upset. Or if I said I drink NA beer I get the “why do that!?!? If I’m drinking I want to get something out of it!!!!!!” Or I got that I was some Christian moralizer who now wants to tell people the ills of drinking. It was shocking. I barely got out of my mouth that I don’t drink or I drink NA beer and I got slammed with stock retorts telling me how wrong and lame I was to not booze. And these retorts came from people who barely drank. I’ve gotten used to it by now. I occasionally get odd looks from wait staff if I’m out for dinner and I ask for the NA beer. I can only imagine that if someone with a drinking issue is trying to quit drinking that it must be excruciating. I never had a problem with booze. Yet since I quit I get all types of blowback. I’m not against drinking or alcohol at all. Nor am I telling people to stop drinking. But people will castigate you for not drinking, or say that drinking wine every night is “lindy” or why drink NA booze since it contains 0.5% alcohol (a banana has the same amount of alcohol; fun fact, when that amount hits your tongue the alcohol is gone so it’s impossible to get drunk on it, just like it’s impossible to eat bananas in the hopes of getting a buzz), or that booze has been around for thousands of years so that makes it good for you. Murder has also been around for thousands of years, but that doesn’t make it good for you. But it’s been quite the experience stopping drinking. I can’t sit here and say “my life is now totally fucking amazing since I stopped drinking!” I hate that nonsense. It’s like going to a dinner party and that one person who made the “dairy-free, gluten-free dish, 100% vegan dish” boasts about it as if making that dish is doing their part to make society better. My life is much the same. I don’t miss booze. I enjoy NA beer. And it’s nice to have one while I’m reading. And the formulaic retorts fascinate me.

Upcoming for 2023

As of this writing, I’m reading Breaking Bread with the Dead by Alan Jacobs (it’s about finding personal depth in old books).

I just finished the Quest for Cosmic Justice by Thomas Sowell. The last in the loose Conflict of Visions trilogy. And I will read more Thomas Sowell in 2023.

Here are my predictions for my reading in 2023. And likely this will all change. I have an idea of where I’m going, but it shapes and evolves as I read.

I’m aiming to start The Decline and the Fall of The Roman Empire right after Christmas. It’s a behemoth. I bought the Penguin Classic edition. I’m not reading the abridged edition. I’m reading the full monty. It’s six volumes. Penguin put it into three big books. I have no idea how long it will take me to read it. I’m guessing most of the winter. Which will be interesting mentally.

Why?

I’m working on slowing down my reading. I felt I raced through before, whereas now I’m working to engage and converse with the book better. And I’m finding way more enjoyment slowing down. I also noticed slowing it down helped me find more confidence in my writing — funny how that works. But I still get that, “I read around four or five books a month! I need to read more books!” impulse. And something like The Decline and Fall works against that four books a month or so average. I predict I will maybe get thirty or fewer books in 2023 due to tackling this behemoth. But it’s a landmark work. It will challenge me. I’m a history nerd, so I’m guessing I’ll enjoy it. But undoubtedly I will have moments where I want to read the next thing. And moments where I want to hit an arbitrary number I set up in my head that no one cares about in the grand scheme of things.

And reading the Decline and Fall I’m curious how I will email you here with my usual reading musings. But I’m sure I’ll figure something out.

I will still aim to read for four hours each day. Sometimes I get it and more, sometimes I only get a half-hour. That’s how life works.

In line with The Decline and The Fall of the Roman Empire I still plan to keep reading more Great Books in 2023. I organized a Great Books bookshelf in my home. I start with The Iliad and I organized it in chronological order to the modern day. I’ve taken some liberties with it. Mortimer Adler, we could say, is the Godfather of The Great Books. The list existed before him but he curated it and made it famous. Since then, certain colleges like Hillsdale and St. John’s have made the list their own. I’ve made it my own. But I still adhere to the frameworks and principles Adler laid out. That framework, the thinker or book requires mass impact. I don’t inject obscure authors I may like; a case where I think the book is great and wish everyone would read it but no one else has read it. No. The book or thinker needed to have some kind of mass impact on the world.

Also, some thinkers I sidelined. For instance, I have most of the works of Jean-Paul Sartre. And Adler places Sartre in the Great Books canon. But to me, Sartre is the standard intelligentsia type. His writing bores me. Whereas another thinker loosely related to Sartre and as famous at that time is Albert Camus. Camus is far more poignant and grounded in my opinion.

Also, I don’t take knee-jerk partisan stances. Marx sits on my bookshelf. I disagree vehemently with Marx. But one can’t deny the impact and consequences of his theories. I’m a Burkean Conservative. Marx hated Burke. Marx’s work influences a lot of discourse today, discourse that goes far beyond Communism. So the work sits on the shelf (I have read sections of him over the years, but never in full; I may read him in full one day, we’ll see).

My Great Books bookshelf does have a Conservative (Classical Liberal if you want to get fancy) leaning to it. How? I have Milton Friedman, F.H. Hayek, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Thomas Sowell, Alexis de Tocqueville, Edmund Burke, Tom Wolfe, C.S. Lewis, Knut Hamsun, JR Tolkien and more on it. Now some scholars argue that Dostoyevski and Camus were Conservative. I don’t know the depths of that argument. They certainly have more Aristotlean influences. But that debate I’m not going to delve into.

Ok enough of this ramble, in sum, I plan to keep reading the Great Books (literature and non-fiction alike).

My current swimming upstream roots around Thomas Sowell. He led me to Adam Smith. The next one I’m eyeing, Alexis de Tocqueville’s, Democracy in America. And somewhat Sowell related, Aristotle. I will get to another Aristotle or two in 2023. Likely I will read Rhetoric twice. At least, that’s the plan.

I’m wondering whether to read Edmund Burke again in 2023. It’s been close to two-and-a-half years since Burke influenced my personal values; two years since he, directly and indirectly, led me to realize my values. So it might be interesting to return to him. Burke sparked my shift from atheism to now Christian Deism (Burke was not a deist, he was a Christian). He led me to Thomas Sowell. And how he helped me realize my values goes far beyond politics. He tapped into what I would call my backbone and disposition. And when I read Burke two-ish years ago, I read him too fast. So a part of me wants to read him again, but much slower.

I plan to go another year not reading a Success book.

I haven’t read a Success book since maybe 2018. We could say, Russ Roberts How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life qualifies as one. If we want to, then that would be the first one since I read The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll or Atomic Habits by James Clear in 2018 (I found the latter painfully dull and axiomatic; I gave it maybe fifty pages at best; I’ve looked at bits and parts since then for articles and research, but my god is it atomically dull). Success books, books on marketing or mindset or self-development, or funnel offers do nothing for me. I have no desire to read them. Nor will that desire ever return. I do sometimes dive into one for research purposes, but as soon as I dive in I’m reminded why don’t those books anymore.

Well, that’s it.

But I can’t leave without thanking you. The reading aspect of my business is now the main jam. That wouldn’t have happened without you. I’m grateful and honored that whatever it is I’m saying regarding reading has struck a chord. I’ll keep doing what I do and I hope it continues to strike a chord with you.

I hope you have a wonderful Christmas and New Years. I hope you stumble across some great reads in 2023.

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Recently, I swam upstream to read The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith. Adam Smith is the father of Free Market Economics. He’s most known for The Wealth of Nations. That book influenced and continues to influence our world. It’s also considered the underpinning of Classical Liberal economic frameworks. And The Wealth of Nations overshadows The Theory of Moral Sentiments. When Theory of Moral Sentiments was published, it was a big hit. And Smith evolved the work over his lifetime. He wrote the first edition of it before he penned Wealth of Nations. After he wrote that, he continued updating Theory of Moral Sentiments, releasing various editions, right up until his death. In many ways, Wealth of Nations details the machinations of commerce; Theory of Moral Sentiments details the machinations of human nature. From what I gather, the two books work together but also work individually. You can read one and not the other and be fine, or read both to see the breadth of his work and ideas.

As fun as it would be, or as boring, I’m not going to dive exhaustively into Theory of Moral Sentiments. I’ll cover some parts of it, but I hope to inspire a way to get into better books. I hope my personal example offers a roadmap you can use to dig into a few classics or dig deeper into a topic and enjoy either.

I’ll reveal how I swam upstream into Theory of Moral Sentiments. And a possible, we’ll call it, sit on the shore of the stream to gain some modern insight (what a tactic name, my next course, long names for tactics). We’re going to look at three books, one is obvious, the other two, Thomas Sowell’s Conflict of Visions, and Russ Robert’s How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life.

How I Swam Upstream From A Rabbit Hole

Thomas Sowell is my intellectual hero. My longtime readers know this and have heard me say this umpteen times. I discovered Sowell when I went down a Conservative rabbit hole. I went down that rabbit hole to explore my worldview, politically, morally, and intellectually. I came upon Thomas Sowell and I felt embarrassed I never heard of him before. But I’m glad I found him.

My first foray into Sowell was his classic, Basic Economics. I read it twice. That work is arguably Sowell’s most approachable and readable. In fact, what makes Sowell stand out, is his approachability. He marshals clear, empirical arguments with wit, insight, and clarity. Basic Economics is clear, concise, and memorable. Sowell’s depth and breadth of thought prove extensive, however. The more you read him, the more you discover. He writes excoriating social critiques, he also writes heavy-duty economic tracts, and covers other various topics. With all of his work, which is extensive, Sowell claims Conflict of Visions as the feather in his cap.

I swam upstream, loosely, to Conflict of Visions. I’m glad I did. I say loosely since I read a few other Sowell works before that work. Again, I’m glad I did. Why? Conflict of Visions requires time. Sowell tackles massive ideas, philosophies, psychologies, politics, and histories. All that he puts into a tangible framework. A framework packed full of insight and truth. I read Conflict of Visions twice. I read it slowly each time. It requires slowness despite his laying out a simple premise. The premise: people fall into either the constrained vision or the unconstrained vision. Whether a person is a political policy hawk or has no idea the difference between Democrat and Republican, individuals will fall into either vision. And it’s not perfect. No one person is ever 100% one or the other. It’s a mix. Nor does Sowell profess a grand unified theory of all. Quite the opposite. He instead shows worldviews. The constrained vision believes in the tragic nature of man and believes that society will forever be imperfect. Generally speaking, people falling into this camp tend to lean Conservative politically. The unconstrained vision believes the tragic nature is a farce, and that man can be perfected as can society. To perfect either, experts can lead the way. Generally speaking, people falling into this camp tend to lean Liberal politically. Again, a person doesn’t have to be “political.” Sowell clearly shows how people tend to gravitate towards certain beliefs and likes that resemble each worldview.

Tracing these worldviews back to their philosophical and psychological and dispositional roots, Aristotle is the father of the Constrained Vision; Plato is the father of The Unconstrained Vision. Keep in mind, Sowell doesn’t claim that Aristotle or Plato invented these visions, they existed long before either, but both put to words the inklings of each vision.

Sometimes a person can start off in one vision and change to the other. Sowell is an example himself. He started off as a radical Marxist to then became one of the greatest Conservative thinkers. Our vision may be genetic, as developing studies show and as Sowell lays out, but sometimes we arrive at our worldview later for various reasons.

I could go on. Conflict of Visions packs psychological insight to all ends. Once Sowell shows it to you, you see it everywhere. It’s the most powerful theory I’ve ever read. The psychology is immense. As I read, he put to words my worldview, constrained. And he named Adam Smith as a figure laying out much of the constrained worldview. Sowell mentioned how Smith laid out the tragic vision, what man is like, but also how Smith laid out the traditional principles and values the constrained vision gravitates towards. Sowell mentioned others, Hume, Hobbes, Aristotle, Burke, Christian ethics, and so on. But he kept coming back to Smith. I also found it interesting that Sowell, who also happens to be one of the greatest economists ever, quotes Theory of Moral Sentiments far more than Wealth of Nations. The same goes for elsewhere in Sowell’s work.

I decided to swim upstream to read Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Swimming Up To The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Theory of Moral Sentiments took me a month to read. It’s not that it’s unreadable, it’s that Smith deploys a classical English style that’s not used often today. And he asks big questions and answers big questions, and answers tangibly, so the book requires thought. In my experience, I sense that Theory of Moral Sentiments is a book many people wish to have read versus actually reading it. In other words, people who claim they plan to read The Great Books inside of five weeks or wish to write a blog post with, These 5 Classics Changed My Life Here Are 5 Moneymaking Secrets From Each! This book, however, doesn’t lend itself to those kinds of life hacks. The questions are big, the answers are nuanced yet beautifully detailed. Something like that takes time and savoring.

But back to that whole reading it.

As I said, it took me a month. I don’t read two books at once. If a book is a challenge or requires focus, at night, in bed, I either read The National Review or essays from a writer I like. I do this so I don’t doze off when I need to focus, and either will not distract me from thinking about the book I’m reading. That’s me. People who read more than one book at a time, I’m convinced you might be an alien from a different planet.

I’m also fortunate that I read Classical English Style by Ward Farnsworth right before I read Smith.

Why?

As I mentioned, Adam Smith writes in the Classical English Style. Today, many mistake this style as complicated. But once you grasp it, you see its power and its potency. The short of it, the writer uses a mixture of Saxon words and Latinate words to create an effect. Saxon words comprise simple words, like ‘walk’. Latinate words comprise words, like ‘ambulate.’ Walk and ambulate roughly mean the same thing, walking. But writers can use both, Saxon and Latinate, in a passage to express an idea. They use both as potential devices for wit, showing a spectrum, introducing a big idea (Latinate words), and then grounding the idea in tangibles (Saxon words), and so on. Farnsworth teaches the style clearly and memorably. You also recognize the power and potency of the style, and those who did it well (Edmund Burke, Abraham Lincoln, Herman Melville, and Winston Churchill were exceptional at it).

Smith writes in that style. I’m lucky I read Farnsworth’s book. Otherwise, much of Theory of Moral Sentiments meaning would have flown over my head. When instead, Farnsworth gave me a special key to open a special door of prose style.

Sowell also provided guidance through Smith’s work without entirely swaying my thoughts on it (more on this point in a bit). Smith argues that man is self-interested, but not wholly selfish. While self-interest gets a bad rap today, self-interest fuels healthy relationships, healthy behaviors, healthy goals, healthy self-questioning, and healthy societies. And Sowell helped to point out the parts where Smith argues against experts trying to control a chessboard. Smith lays out a famous concept that some men act and believe as if the world or society is a chess board and man and society comprise the chess pieces. And this man, a self-anointed expert, believes he can move any piece and it will behave as he believes it will. And if it doesn’t he believes he can start anew, and this time will be different. But the world doesn’t work like that. Smith shows why it doesn’t; Sowell shows why it doesn’t.

What I found fascinating, Smith lays out the behaviors, values, and dispositions that help move society. But not just society, values that would serve any man or woman well. The tract lays it out with examples. It’s not as pithy as some works of Stoicism, but Smith details how something like Stoicism or Christian ethics works in the world, why it works, and how you can aim to live a better life. His concept of the impartial spectator provides a wonderful guide on how to live a good life. The impartial spectator isn’t God or a sage, rather it’s a dispassionate imaginary person who observes you. This person knows good values, behaviors, and traditions. And this person watches you, and judges. So you can step outside yourself, as this impartial spectator, and observe your actions, either in the moment or after to gain perspective.

Now, I could go on. But my aim here, Sowell helped me see Smith’s lessons. On the flip side, Smith helped me see more of Sowell. My conversation with each went deeper. My understanding of each went deeper. I also started noticing their lessons and insight everywhere. My marginalia in books says “constrained” or “unconstrained” everywhere. Plus going upstream to read an influence of Sowell, I see the values I respect in Sowell, and the values I work to uphold personally.

Sitting By The Shore Watching The Stream

Russ Roberts popped up on my radar via a review of his new book Wild Problems. I went to Amazon and looked up Roberts. I noticed the Adam Smith book. I noticed good reviews and flap testimonials from a few sources I like. And I noticed he’s associated with the Hoover Institute at Stanford. Four other favorites of mine call the Hoover Institute home, Victor Davis Hanson, Niall Ferguson, Shelby Steele, and none other than Thomas Sowell. Sometimes, I feel a book calling me. Yes, call me weird, call me crazy, but I get a feeling about a book and that the timing is right. And as I’ve said before, I work through a list in my head sometimes, but it morphs and changes, sometimes the timing is ripe for some books and ripe for others. I saw it, saw the flap reviews, saw his background, and decided to pick it up to read it sooner than later.

The book is called How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life. Roberts popularizes Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Meaning, he took the lessons from Theory of Moral Sentiments and wrote it in a way a mass audience would understand.

Books that popularize the work or philosophy of a figure like Smith work like prefab houses. Some prefab houses are great. They get built with quality material, they look good, and they hold up. Whereas some prefabs look great but are built shoddily. And most popularized books, unfortunately, fall into the latter category of prefab. Books that popularize walk a tough line. Shed light on a topic intimidating many, show its rich lessons but try not to turn into another TedTalkX list of truisms. Most books popularizing a subject tend to turn it into another TedTalkX list of truisms, unfortunately.

Roberts, however, maintains depth and makes for a fun read.

After I read Theory of Moral Sentiments, I needed time to reflect on its premises. It was a heavy-duty read. I read a number of lighter books after to not get burned out, and to give myself time to think about the lessons. Roberts surfaced on my radar at a perfect time. How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life helped encapsulate the Theory of Moral Sentiments into more digestible nuggets.

Here’s what I mean. I’m going to refer to the whole sitting on the shore watching the stream thing. I swam upstream to Conflict of Visions. From Sowell, I went upstream to Smith. I then slowly went through Smith’s work. After I read it I wanted to give myself time to digest Smith’s insight. To digest his lessons on the impartial spectator, man’s desire not only to be loved but to be lovely, and wisdom and virtue versus ambition. Many more lessons exist in the book, hence it being heavy. Yet Roberts helped me summarize the lessons. He helped me extract a little more juice out of what I read and helped to clarify some thoughts. I didn’t swim upstream, instead, I was able to sit on the shore and see the stream I just swam.

When I read Roberts, at first, I was worried he was going to hijack Smith into a self-serving agenda — a huge issue with popularizing. But Roberts didn’t attempt any hijackings. He provided context, memorable quotes, and helped clarify what Smith was saying, without being overbearing.

Sometimes, you walk away after reading a classic wondering, “did I really get it?” It’s natural. If the work struck a chord, and you find yourself still wondering what it all meant, I suggest finding a work to help you understand it. Granted, the hard part is finding the book that does it. That will take some time and experience. Some works breaking down other works do an abysmal job. On one end, you find academic hair-splitting. On the other, you find books shoehorning into cliche self-help mantras.

For instance, A.A. Long is perhaps the best Stoic scholar today. His book Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide To Life unlocks the work of Epictetus and unlocks Stoicism better than any book I’ve read on the topic. Read Epictetus and read Long’s book, and you will own a deeper understanding of Stoicism that 99% of Stoic fans will never have. But it’s not exactly a fun read. It’s accessible, it’s readable, it’s interesting, but it’s aimed towards scholars of Stoicism or Hellenic philosophy, so it’s rather dry. You really have to want to know your Epictetus to squeeze any enjoyment out of it.

So what do you do? What if you want to read a great work, then maybe capture a bit of some understanding after but not be bored to death by lifeless academic writing?

I wish I had an easy answer, but the answer: do a bit of research. I found Roberts serendipitously. Though, I did do some research before, and I found a writer I respected, Jesse Norman. I saw he wrote a biography of Smith. I loved Norman’s biography of Edmund Burke, so I grabbed his biography of Smith. But Roberts surfaced, and How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life he talked specifically about the Theory of Moral Sentiments. I lucked out. But it all happened by my looking at the writers and resources I trust. That’s a great place to start.

Mistaken Swimming Upstream

Swimming upstream is an easy way to read “better” books. It’s an easy way to stumble upon original sources. But curiosity drives swimming upstream, not a rigid list. If you’re curious to read an original source, then do it. But today, people seemed a little frightened to read an original source, and instead, look towards the popularizing books first. And then look for a list of sorts to help them unpack the original source without ever reading it. An issue exists with this method. You’re trying to figure out what to think regarding a topic, versus arriving at your own conclusions.

Thomas Sowell’s famous professors, Milton Friedman and George Stigler, noticed that Sowell only read the original sources first. They asked him why, not as a criticism, but because most other students tried reading summaries or academic breakdowns of the work. Sowell replied that he’ll figure out the original for himself with his own eyes, and not let idiots ruin the work with their cockamamie theories. What Sowell says here, is a lesson in self-determination that many need today.

Let’s look at this. I just talked about swimming upstream. Swimming upstream isn’t necessarily a straight line back to an author or a book. You may read a mass fiction book, love it, look for the influences, and then find yourself reading Henry James’s The Bostonians. It’s not a direct line. It’s not, “oh, I want to read The Growth of The Soil by Knut Hamsun, I will read all the biographies on him first, then all the papers on him next, then the book.” Swimming upstream is your curiosity, not a rigid list of steps. But today we have an issue of “where do I start?” And embedded into that question is the idea of reading modern, fashionable, self-help styled books on a topic, since, as the idea goes, those books contain the “applicable insight” whereas the original sources are somehow stuffy and procrastinating. Some think to read Stoicism, you start with Ryan Holiday. From there, one must then read the approved list of Hustlepreneur Stoic books. But this isn’t swimming upstream. This is looking for the approved lists to read in the approved way to include oneself in the approved crowd. It’s eliminating curiosity, and it’s looking for someone to tell you what to think and how to view a topic. Versus letting yourself get into a topic, engaging with that topic, and doing the thinking on your own. It’s great to ask for some help and look to some other sources to gain a richer understanding. But today we’re taught to read in a passive manner; we’re taught here’s what you must think on a topic. Even how readers take notes or marginalia today falls under the approved methods. All the notes and quotes underlined stick to “mindset” lessons. They don’t engage with the premise or the thesis of the book. They don’t see the allusions in the story or the richness of the character. Instead, every note looks motivational and tied to fashionable self-help lessons. In sum, “where do I start” looks to remove curiosity. I argue it’s done out of fear. The person wants to read the “right” books to think in the right way. As you can see, this leads to not reading but assuming the lessons. And it leads to confusion. Because you could get to the original source, read it, and have no idea what’s going on since you’re taught to not ask questions. This is why Sowell said he’ll read it himself to come to his own conclusions versus letting someone else mess it up for him.

I’ll use an imperfect example of what Sowell means, and to show what I’m talking about. And I’ll use the example with Theory of Moral Sentiments and the introduction to the version I read (Penguin Classics). I consider an introduction in some classics, in a way, like a mini-swim upstream. But in reality, introductions can help inject context into an older work. We can get a little bit of meaning. The famous economist Amartya Sen wrote the introduction to the version of Theory of Moral Sentiments I read. Had I not gone down a Conservative rabbit hole, and even a Liberal rabbit hole before, nor had I not read Sowell and some others, nor had I decided to think for myself and instead went with the fashionable here’s what to think, Sen’s introduction would have made Theory beyond confusing. Sen is a famous Liberal economist (Liberal here meaning, left-wing, Democrat, etc.). It’s peculiar Penguin picked him to write the introduction. In the introduction, Sen makes Smith almost into a Marxist on economic theory. Sen takes what Smith says, and says, “well, he really meant this, and today his view would be different.” In other words, Sen’s long introduction injected his own philosophy. He kept iterating that Smith meant otherwise and going so far as to say Smith never intended for Free Market Economics. Then Sen injects why Smith, socially, clearly meant we can solve our tragic nature despite him saying we couldn’t. It was confusing. I stopped reading it after a few pages, as it was so trying. But had I thought, this is the expert, he’s correct, I would have gone into that book and been lost within five pages. Which would have been a shame. I would have likely stopped reading it altogether.

So what do we do?

Let’s clarify.

Swimming upstream isn’t done to read a specific work. As in, again, if you read a work of fiction, and you see that Thomas Hobbes’s The Leviathan influenced the author you enjoyed, you go and read Thomas Hobbes. You, here, are reading the original source. You’re not reading a bunch of complementary works prior to that work. The concept here, you enjoyed an author, and via that enjoyment, you understand that author. You grasp the lessons, philosophies, and other elements perking your interest. That interest fuels that curiosity. So when you grab Hobbes, you can see the ideas and elements that influenced the author you liked. This helps you see what Hobbes is saying and helps you grasp perhaps the more confusing parts of Hobbes. But, it’s you engaging with the book. It’s your own thinking and questioning. It’s no one else.

Now let’s say you go the other way. You pick up a book called, “The Hustleprenuer’s Leviathan” (I’d like to think my readers would ignore a book titled this poorly, but let’s just use it for our example). You read it, and the author hammers on how the Leviathan really means having multiple passive streams of income. And that Hobbes’s “war against all” idea means you need to treat each day like a warrior and hit your customers with email marketing seven times a day. I’m using a ridiculous example, but my aim, if you try to find what to think on a topic, especially if you grab one from the Success world, you’ll find yourself wildly misled.

If you’re curious about a classic when in doubt, read the original source. Some will be challenging, some not so challenging. But with the original sources, it’s better to come to your own conclusions. And if you liked it, but felt much of it flew over your head, then look to grab a book that helps unpack it.

In sum, it’s your own curiosity that leads the way to read some classics. Some classics intimidate. Some classics are a slog. Some classics are impossible to put down. I suggest, if you have an author you like, like Thomas Sowell, then look to read who influenced them. Or if you’re curious about Russian literature, like Dostoyevski or Tolstoy, then try it. Give yourself some time to read it. Look to grab a good translation versus finding some cheap e-book online (spend the few bucks to give yourself the best shot), and be willing to take your time. No one says you need to finish the book in five minutes. Often you’ll find many classics are a classic for a reason. Most are readable. Only a handful of philosophies are unreadable. Let your curiosities guide you. It’s easy to try to force ourselves to read heavy-duty books. It’s also just as easy to read the sugary popularized books prior to reading a classic. Not that all popularized books are bad. But the good ones require some experience and thought to pick out. But it’s much easier to enjoy Adam Smith if you love Thomas Sowell. Just like it’s much easier to enjoy some other classic work if it influences a topic or an author you like. You’re going to be much more open and willing to spend your time with a classic — if it requires it — than you would be if you’re forcing yourself through a topic just to say you read it. Most good works will have great footnotes to make the work accessible.

No perfect method exists to read “better books” other than go with your curiosities and likes. Reading is to be enjoyed. Some works require time. The more curious and interested you are in the topic, the more you’re willing to spend time with the work. You’ll be engaged with it. Like I said, I spent a month with Smith. During some moments while reading, I looked at my bookshelf and wanted to be reading the next book. That’s natural. But my admiration for Sowell kept me glued to Smith. Then, by luck, I discovered Roberts, and he helped encapsulate Smith. All of this was done by curiosity and swimming upstream.

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• A grand unified theory to explain all

• A zany genius that came up with the theory

• A popular billionaire attributed his success to the theory

• A hero’s journey about thinking you’re living the right way but feeling empty and then experiencing an awakening via the theory

• A way it benefits you personally (your relationships will never be better!)

• A sense that the theory elevates you above the rest

• A heap of quotes from popular thinkers, gurus, and thought-leaders

• And techniques to run a hip business and think like that badass billionaire (your co-workers will brag about your meetings, and your hiring process will be a hip thing to drop into a conversation for clout)

The book will appeal to what we’ll call Success. The label encompasses the audience, experts, gurus, literature, that preach personal and professional growth. It includes the sales methods, the mindset tactics, and all the other secrets promising a personal and professional utopia.

The Success world takes books like Wanting at face value. I argue that scrutinizing a book like Wanting provides the only way to extract its lessons. Otherwise, it becomes a sugar high, or an easy namedrop from someone wishing to signal a “hustle mindset.”

I’m not a superior reader in any sense. Nor am I implying my way works best. But I do believe we’d benefit from books if we engaged and scrutinized what we read versus “reading for success.”

The experts in Success make it popular to cherry-pick platitudes from books and brag about how many books we read. We’re also told via Success that critical questioning makes you a “hater.” And Success implies haters as poor, broke losers that will never make it.

The gurus unknowingly teach a bias: The Success Narrative Bias: You look solely for books, lessons, quotes, pandering to Success narratives. The person seeks themes preaching growth, overcoming obstacles, mindset, not being a 9-5 normie, schedules and routines, positive thinking, manifestation, making money, and more. And that often comes with how to do it better or faster. It’s a personal religion of sorts. You pick what panders to success narratives and eschew anything critical.

In short, you’re taught to be a follower.

I hope to inspire a better way to engage with a Success book. A way that bolsters critical thinking and bolsters the lessons you learn.

Wanting by Luke Burgis

The book appeared on my radar via Tyler Cowen, a National Review podcast, on Twitter, and through some of my subscribers and Twitter followers.

I held high expectations. It didn’t meet expectations. But I think the book offers interesting ideas and benefits.

First, a quick summary.

Wanting largely focuses on Rene Girard’s theory of Mimetic Desire.

Rene Girard was a French polymath. He taught at Stanford. And famed entrepreneur Peter Thiel took one class from Girard. Yet Girard is most known for Mimetic Desire.

As Girard defines it: Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.

In other words, none of our desires stem from ourselves but stem from imitation. And Girard asserts that all violence, disagreements, scapegoating, in short, everything stems from people imitating each other and wanting the same thing. Girard didn’t find imitation beneficial. He found that it creates rivalries.

Burgis spins Girard’s theory into a business success and self-help book. The book packs unique concepts. Concepts worth discovering; concepts worth scrutinizing.

A Marketing Lesson from Wanting

Let’s sit this section inside the framework of Wanting and Mimetic Desire. I’d arrive at the conclusion differently, yet it’s the same conclusion.

I’m going to unpack the sales concept of “speaking the customer language” or “creating rapport.” I’ll use the book’s title Wanting as the label to include Burgis’s ideas and Girard’s theory.

Many copywriting and sales ideologies rehash the idea of “speak the customer’s language.” In sales, it’s “build rapport.” Both tie to the psychological concept that people connect and bond to those who are similar. And the sales theory claims this rapport builds trust, hence increasing sales.

Let’s run that concept through Mimetic Desire.

Wanting says two groupings of people mediate desire: Celebristan and Freshmanistan.

Celebristan is like it sounds, celebrities. Girard labels the desires they influence as external mediators of desire or influencing desire from outside a person’s immediate world. And according to this theory, a figurative barrier separates these people from the normal population. And that barrier makes for “no threat of conflict.”

Three areas comprise Celebristan:

1. Time or they’re dead: like Epictetus or Calvin Coolidge.

2. Space: They live in a different country or are not on social media.

3. Social status: Billionaires like Jeff Bezos, rock stars like Nicki Minaj, or a privileged class like politicians Nancy Pelosi or Mitch McConnell.

People imitate individuals in Celebristan openly and freely. They do so without a sense of rivalry or a “threat of conflict.”

For instance, if Nicki Minaj starts wearing Daisy Duke shorts, then other women (non-celebrities) will openly imitate her. And they don’t feel they are competing with Nicki Minaj.

As far as marketing, celebrity testimonials try to tap into Celebristan. And it’s an ok tool. Yet due to the tool’s overuse, it can come across as cheesy. But certain celebrities, like Kendall Jenner’s Instagram, show the power of Celebristan.

Freshmanistan comprises you. It’s your circle of friends, co-workers, social media interactions, your neighbors, and most, if not all, people you see during your day. And this creates what Girard calls internal mediators of desire. Translated, your desires spring from your social circles and surrounding environment. And many of your desires — your work goals, why you have work goals, the clothes you wear — arise from you imitating people in your circles. And according to Wanting, it’s a rivalry.

Let’s look at a fictional group of female friends to see how Freshmanistan works.

Sarah is known as the “healthy and active one.” She stays fit with Yoga, a fitness class, hiking, Peloton spinning, and eats the fad foods seen as healthy. Beth exists in Sarah’s circle of friends. Sarah introduces Beth to a class workout. Beth likes the weights better than the Peloton and Yoga. Beth takes it further and joins a bodybuilding gym. She hires a trainer, lifts heavy weights, and soon Beth’s body surpasses “looks active” and transforms into that of a fitness model. She competes in fitness shows and does photoshoots. Beth surpasses Sarah as the “fit” one in the group. The friendship turns into a rivalry (the rivalry isn’t new, but it’s now growing deeper).

Sarah tries to supplant herself as the “truly” healthy one. She throws catty comments about Beth being “unhealthy” and “rigid” and “attention-seeking.”

Beth sees Sarah as fit but that Sarah wastes her time with fitness classes and jumping from one health fad to the next.

Regardless of the rivalry, Beth and Sarah remain friends and stay in the same social group, for now. The growing rivalry threatens to end the friendship.

That world of Freshmanistan, where rivalry boils under the surface, that is the world copy and sales experts want you to enter. They want you to enter it with “speak the customer language” or “create rapport.”

Now, Beth and Sarah are similar. They share similar interests. They enjoy the same things. But if Beth started telling Sarah how to be healthy, it creates resentment to outright anger.

We trust our friends for advice and support. But when that friend sells us ways to lose weight, it can get precarious.

Consider when someone new shows up in your social circle and tries to instill themselves. We ask questions:

• “Who is this person?”

• “What do they want?”

• “Why should I care?”

• “Who do they think they are?”

If that person tries to sound like us, keeps offering us something, we get guarded. It’s natural. We have instincts for our tribes. When someone new shows up, we’re not sure what to think of them. When a sales message tries to sound like us, we get skeptical.

As Wanting shows, the just-like-you tactic isn’t what it’s cut out to be. It may tap into similarities but it also taps into a rivalry.

Copywriters further complicate things when they combine credibility to “speak like the customer.”

Here’s what I mean.

Many copy courses and experts teach you to build credibility… but… you want to make the personality or the product sound as if it works for anyone. The goal: eliminate all excuses/objections that the customer may entertain as to why the product will fail.

One tactic used to attain that aim: The Worst-Case Scenario.

It works like this.

Make the personality selling the product into an absolute worst-case scenario. I mean over-the-top bad. In no way shape or form should this person ever succeed. And the copywriter bakes in messages that this person tried everything. That everything includes three to five popular methods to attain a goal. The aim of this tactic is to remove any objection of “the product won’t work for me.”

We end up with a rollercoaster ride. The message begins with…

Expert credibility…

Then slides to exactly like the customer only worse…

But if I can do it then anyone can…

Back to expert…

But now I’ve made it even easier because I’m just like you but worse…

And then back.

It’s a dizzying ride. Toss in tactics like the hero’s journey, emotional pain points, open loops, and the sales message gets crushed under its own weight.

You may argue that the Worst-Case Scenario combined with Mimetic Desire can trigger someone to chase the result (buy the product). But taking that to its logical conclusion: it fails. If that were the case, the world would be full of fit people. It isn’t. And as far as I can see weight loss sales letters aren’t losing out to get obese sales letters.

Let’s turn to a potent selling tool offered in Wanting.

The Cult of Experts

“The modern world is one of experts, they alone know what is to be done. Everything boils down to choosing the right expert.” Rene Girard. ¹

Experts influence and shape our desires. Today, experts command far more influence. As Burgis shows, fixed points, like a college degree, aren’t as clear or as respected. To get answers to questions, we turn to experts. We seek someone that we believe has the answers.

As I see it, people consciously and unconsciously look for factors that say “expert.” And many charlatans fabricate those factors. An entire industry exists selling guru stripes. You can pay to be in Forbes magazine, you can pay to get a Shark from Shark Tank to praise you. In sum, you pay to buy credibility.

Real or fake, expertise sells.

Consider big brands. You can knock big brands all you want, but big brands own the trust factor. Buyers know they can get something average to great, know that it works, and know that it’s backed with a history of buyers. That whole “the big brands are manipulating you through messages.” or in the dorky copywriting corners, “they use Edward Bernays copy to covertly persuade you….” is lazy thinking.

While those companies might use slick advertising, over time it’s trust that persuades. People know what to expect from a brand. We pick Advil because we know it works, not because Edward Bernays is on the BBPO copy team hatching a dastardly plot.

Brand trust reveals a track record of expertise.

Consider Claude Hopkin’s or David Ogilvy. Both bake expertise into their advertising. The word choices, the phrasing, and how they framed their ads, displays expertise.

This expertise also works with small companies or personalities starting out.

For instance, take our example of Beth and Sarah. Both could start giving health tips and advice. They could both monetize their knowledge. They may not be Hany Rambod (famed bodybuilding trainer), but their journey, message, personality, can make people come to see them as experts. And, what’s more, they will be authentically relatable, versus that forced relatable of “speak the customer language.” And will be far more relatable than buying credibility.

That real relatability builds off of transparency. People relate that the person is learning as they go, just a few steps ahead, and they see the journey played out. This gives the customer a sense that they too can achieve the result.

In your marketing, forget rapport or worst-case scenario, bake in expertise.

My Qualms

I found the book had a Tim Ferris, Ryan Holiday, and Silicon Valley Billionaires are my life-hacking bro-down dawgs vibe to it. And it was laced with Mimetic Desire is a grand unified theory that explains all.

Tyler Cowen influenced this pick. Cowen respects Girard. But Cowen sums up Girard’s gaping holes:

The universal mechanisms and making stuff up are two common criticism made on Girard. Yes, he’s respected as one of the greatest modern thinkers, but he comes with baggage. Burgis ignores the baggage; Burgis deifies Girard.

Which is strange.

Burgis details why we must question our experts. He gives examples of how to question the experts in our lives. Yet his own advice evades him.

Burgis asserts Tim Ferriss is a legit expert.

It takes a quick Google search to find out that Ferriss blows hot air. You can start with his kickboxing claims, his supplement company, or his “regular Joe background that came across some hacks.”

Or if you want to do a deeper dive on Ferriss, find out his bandwagoning-then-bailing record. Ferriss is a lot like a gold digger. How so? If you’d like, dig into his relationship and his gushings of WeWork. Look at it when WeWork was hot, then look at it when WeWork fell from grace.

Ferriss is an expert, an expert at facade.

And Burgis is right. Ferriss does “mediate desire” for many. And I argue that Tim is one of the greatest bullshitters alive. But Burgis ignores his own advice when it comes to Ferriss. For instance, my Tim Ferriss and WeWork example took me all of two seconds to find out (I won’t go into the pay-to-play aspects of Ferriss).

More important, Burgis doesn’t follow his scrutiny advice with Girard either. I understand why. Burgis wants to promote Mimetic Desire into the realm of Success literature. But Burgis features sections that teach questions, scrutiny, and reflection.

Does it not apply to Girard?

At least that’s the question I asked.

Let’s look into Girard’s Mimetic Desire.

It is a unique theory. It makes sense and has its merits. Girard claimed to have discovered it. Maybe he’s the first to make it a grand unified theory that explains all. But if you go back through philosophy, the concept of desire springing from imitation, it’s old. By old, I mean thousands of years. So no, Girard did not discover it.

Girard claimed all violence or disagreements root to people or groups wanting the same thing. That claim has merits, but it’s not always the case.

Mull over this violent interaction:

A woman jogs through a park. A man accosts her and tries to rape her. She defends herself.

According to Girard, their conflict stems from them wanting the same thing. Burgis iterates the same concept.

A woman going for her jog and a man wanting to rape her, their conflict, disagreement, and violence do not result from them desiring the same thing. The idea that the conflict ties to them wanting the same thing falls apart on psychological, biological, and philosophical grounds. Consider the freeze, flight, and fight response. It’s instinct. A woman instinctually fighting off a rapist doesn’t root from her wanting the same thing as the rapist.

Girard posits all human action stems from imitation. Nor does he find this imitation always beneficial. That’s catty.

Granted, most people are insecure. Most people ignore facing their insecurities.

Look at Beth and Sarah again. In the Wanting framework, Beth sees Sarah as fit. Beth tries a class. She takes to it and then becomes fitter than Sarah. Sarah then works harder or does different things chasing Beth. And Sarah does so in a jealous manner.

But I’m unconvinced that the Beth and Sarah’s scenario, or any imitation, ties to a catty rivalry.

Stepping outside of the Wanting framework and Girard’s theories, Beth may be inspired and influenced by Sarah without the insecurity. Let’s say Beth is a self-secure, confident woman. She sees Sarah as fit. Beth liked one component of Sarah’s fitness routine, weights. Beth tried weights and took a liking to them, and on she went. And let’s say Sarah is secure. Sarah may see Beth’s rapid transformation, appreciate it, yet stay her course. They may influence each other. And that influence benefits both and does so without cattiness.

We all have our insecurities. We always will. But I argue insecurities don’t fuel all choices, actions, and behaviors.

Another gripe, Burgis bases a lot of Wanting’s premise to Jim Collins and Collins’s Flywheel. Collins is another expert who falls apart under scrutiny. Collins is known for making the survivorship bias, narrative fallacy, and post hoc reasoning. Plus his lessons and books drip with unfalsifiable truisms, tautologies, and platitudes.

Yet Burgis insists on using Collins’s Flywheel as a tool to strengthen Wanting’s argument.

The Flywheel looks cool, sounds cool, but it’s often jargon that can be said about anything. And Collins applies Flywheels after a company has succeeded.

Burgis implores the reader to scrutinize experts. Collins’s Flywheel falls apart under as opposed to what scrutiny.

Take the flywheel in my example:

Increase customer visits ok… as opposed to what?… decrease customer visits?

Or…

Grow revenue per fixed costs ok… as opposed to what?… Shrink revenue per fixed costs?

Again, Burgis fails to question Collins, Ferriss, and Girard. Maybe it’s not Burgis’s place. Most Success literature reads sugary to cater to a specific audience. And Burgis maybe wishes to cater to that audience. But Burgis posits on page 58:

Because there is less and less agreement about cultural values and even about the value of science itself (consider the debate about climate change), people find “experts” whose expertise is largely a product of mimetic validation. It’s critical to cut through mimesis and find sources of knowledge that are less subject to mimesis.

Find sources that have stood the test of time. Be wary of self-proclaimed and crowd-proclaimed experts.

Great advice. But Ferriss and Collins are in the business of being self-proclaimed and crowd-proclaimed experts.

Burgis name drops and quote mines. Quote mining is when you cherry-pick quotes from others, often ignoring the quote’s original context to use it for your argument.

Quote mining plagues Success. It’s generally done in a manner to motivate. For instance, rehashing a platitude, or words uttered by successful people to, well, again, motivate. Burgis quote mines like a standard guru. He quotes popular personalities in a way that comes across as, “See, I’m down with the scene.”

He quotes mines and name drops, Tim Ferriss, Yuval Noah Harari, Nassim Taleb, Jim Collins, James Clear, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Richard Dawkins, Peter Thiel, Ross Douthat, Steve Jobs, and more.

If you look at the thinkers above, you don’t see a consistent line of thought. Some distinctly oppose each other, like Taleb and Dawkins. Nor does Burgis use these thinkers to show particular arguments from certain sides. Granted, maybe Burgis is trying to show that all these thinkers “want the same thing” and that’s why “a rivalry exists.”

In Success circles, it’s hip to say “find the middle ground.” As if all problems can be solved and utopia is found in the middle ground. But it’s a mistake to think the truth always resides in the middle. It doesn’t.

Burgis doesn’t explicitly say find the middle ground. But my spidey senses tell me and his buzzword-heavy prose tells me he wishes to imply it.

And the personalities he quote mines are so all over the map and taken so out of context, it’s hard to tell what Burgis argues.

In Closing

Wanting contains ideas worth exploring; it contains glaring issues. You might take my qualms as scathing. And you’re right to point that out. I’m wary of universal mechanisms, and books dripping with buzzwords that convey a grand unified theory. But this article reveals my conversation with Wanting. And I hope to impart that the book does pose interesting and beneficial ideas.

As for marketing, the Expert section of the book should be studied. People want to buy from experts. Burgis gives a good argument as to why.

Furthermore, Rene Girard’s Mimetic Desire is worth checking out. No, it’s not the universal mechanism he claimed. But if you look around, you see that he posited excellent philosophy on human behaviors and action.

I hope I didn’t scare you too much off the book. Again, my goal is to inspire critical reading and engaging with the author. And any Success book needs a heavy dose of scrutiny.

1. Luke Burgis, Wanting, 56, St. Martin’s Press, 2021 ↩

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“Read the other side! This way you can be informed!”

“Make sure to read both sides!”

But these statements display lazy scheming. Part of the scheming, it’s said as a virtue signal, a signal that the opinion uttered comes from a self-anointed high ground. A high ground of my opinion is correct and virtuous and since I claim to read both sides, the most sensible and virtuous people would come to find my opinion as the only true opinion. “Read the other side!” types are one-sided readers. They only read their side since they see their side as correct and true. They themselves can’t convince you to their side, nor do they know how to convince you, so they expect this one book to shatter your worldview.¹ And when they deploy this “read this book” argument tactic, they never mention any substance of the book, or what the book covers other than maybe a flap summary, but, instead, recommend a book as a counter to your argument. While the book might be great — often it’s not, often it’s generic agitprop — the person throws a lazy argument, rather, a thought-terminating cliche², of read this book to get convinced. Again, it comes down to a low-informed person who views their side as “right” and if you’re not on their side, you’re biased and “uninformed.” By the way, calling someone’s view “biased” is a bias.

Reading books of different views isn’t the worst idea, yet we’re not going to do that if someone outright dismisses our beliefs, (excuse me, our confirmation biases that cause us to play mental gymnastics to rationalize our stunted worldview) and then recommends that vapid Michelle Obama book to see the truth. That never happens. Curiosity leads us down the path, and if we’re deliberate with our curiosity, it does a much better job than some self-flagellating exercise someone wishes us to endure. I’ll share a personal example of reading the “other side” and reading “my side.”

I went from Catholic to smug Atheist to a Deist, to dare I say, a Christian deist. I can already hear someone saying, “But have you read Richard Dawkins!?”

Yes.

I have.

I turned atheist after my dad died. The priest at my dad’s Catholic parish hit me up for a cool $500,000, saying a donation like that would ensure my dad getting into heaven. I walked out to my car, stunned, and declared myself an atheist. But after a few years of holding this belief, I wanted to find out more. After all, it came from a reaction. Around 2018 or so I dug more into it. I was deep into Stoic philosophy at the time and I had attended Stoicon in London. At that event, a vigorous and rather heated debate struck up regarding Stoicism’s relationship to God. A few gentlemen castigated Stoic popularizers like Massimo Pigliucci and Ryan Holiday for turning Stoicism into a secular, atheistic humanism. What struck me, the atheist counters against the one god-fearing gentleman came in euphemisms, tropes, and what sounded like a sales pitch for a transhumanist Yoga retreat (the atheist failed the Socratic method, abysmally, and the Stoics loved Socrates). And the god-fearing gentleman fired back with poignant insight and deep knowledge of Stoicism. I kept my observations to myself, but I began questioning my atheism.

A few months later, I read Richard Dawkins, Yuval Noah Harari, Daniel Dennett, and A.C. Grayling. The more I read, the more word games they seemed to play, and the tone and prose they deployed came across as self-indulgent and smug. For instance, many thought-leader atheists imply those who have faith play word games to delude themselves into believing in a greater being. These famed atheists argue against these word games, yet then try clever “gotcha” questions, and then drone on teaching the science of evolution. But what they can’t prove in their hundreds of pages, and their clever “gotcha” questions, is that a God doesn’t exist. I noticed the more I read atheist arguments and thinkers, the more I was pushed toward believing in a being. Daniel Dennett’s take on why we have emotions, why we recognize beauty, or good and evil, to me, came across as dogmatically smug. Then on one of my favorite podcasts, The Panpsycast, I heard a compelling pantheist (pantheism, in a way too quick summary that misses much — God is the universe and exists in everything in some way) argument. It swayed my curiosity. So I looked at the arguments of those with faith. The Panpsycast also interviewed other famous theologians like William Lane Craig, and the arguments were clearer to me and less smug. And when I read Aristotle, C.S. Lewis, and the Stoics, it moved me into the deist camp. And my reverence for Christianity and my move towards Christian deism? Reading Edmund Burke and, again C.S. Lewis.

So much for “reading the other side.”

Now onto “reading my side.”

Around the time I began my atheist deep dive, I got curious to look into my political worldviews. I loosely figured I was a Conservative/Classical Liberal, and I even wore the hat, “Libertarian” for a while. But I never really looked into it with any depth. I decided to go with some left-wing views first. I read old and new, Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Kate Manne, Marianna Mazzucato, Ibram X. Kendi, and Rutger Bregman; and bits and pieces of Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau; and a few others escaping me at the moment (and somehow escaping me on my bookshelf). While some of it read interesting, nothing clicked with me. I found many of the arguments built on grand, top-down designed solutions; built on nihilism, and moral relativism; and built on, finally, way too much trust in the capacity of humans and societies to begin anew.

Around the summer of 2020, I dug into the Conservative side. Edmund Burke, I found mind-blowing. Thomas Sowell raised the hair on my arms (and became my hero). And modern thinkers like Charles Cooke, Victor Davis Hanson, Shelby Steele, Niall Ferguson, Madeleine Kearns, and Amity Shlaes knocked my socks off. And it resonated enough that I looked more into their influences, like Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton, the Federalist Papers, and so on. So here, you could say I found my political worldviews, but rather, it grounded my sense of self. And following my curiosity on my worldview colored my world. That, I didn’t expect. Through these thinkers and authors, I found all types of literature, art, music, and so on (the saying that Conservatives hate art due to the bottom line is a myth). And I found out why I liked Aristotle over Plato. Call this a bias, but many principled Conservatives or Classical Liberals (if you want to get dorky on definitions) consider Aristotle their philosophical father, whereas Liberals consider Plato their philosophical father. I think that’s pretty cool. And when you know a bit of both, and see the current arguments of today, you can see both at play. But, again, my worldview got grounding and a framework.

I share this personal example not as a repudiation of atheism, nor as a repudiation of Democrats. I share this as an example of letting your curiosities guide you, and how curiosities can lead to big shifts. And these personal shifts can occur in a variety of topics. You can do this on marketing, guilty pleasure fiction, history, and so on.

Let your curiosities guide you.

Onto the haul.

Haul

A big one, and one where I have read a few books. So let’s go.

Read

As I said in the last haul, I’m doing these hauls a little differently. And sadly, due to the nature of the books I read, I wish I could devote more time to each, but I’ll do my best to keep it short.

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, Alan Jacobs

The quick review: it altered my view on reading. It struck a chord and altered how I read, and now I wish I read this a while ago. Here are two key changes:

I’m slowing down my non-fiction reading.

I’m now reading my non-fiction with a pencil and making marginalia, mainly I ask questions (I previously used a pencil and made marginalia only if I read it a second time).

My upcoming reading course will center around Jacob’s book and How To Read a Book by Mortimer Adler, and Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose (as well as my own beliefs and experience).

I’m a Mortimer Adler fan. His book How To Read a Book I could call a “life-changer.” If you know me, or if you’re a Good Word member, Adler’s methods root much of my reading style. Adler didn’t just write a book on reading, he was a formidable mind, a mind and figure influencing our current world. He’s also the master curator, or the OG as the kids say, of The Great Books. It goes without saying Adler is worth reading.

I love Adler, but Adler was a snoot. I admire his snootiness, it relates to judgmental and stubborn tendencies, but Adler sees reading for pleasure as pointless. Jacobs quickly points out the fault in Adler’s position, and Jacobs is right. I like to think Adler truly loved the Great Books and found immense pleasure and purpose reading them, which is easy to do, but I’ve argued elsewhere that Adler was a gifted and professional reader, and his advice comes from a rare mountaintop. And his issue, he teaches his advice as if most readers are his equals. Most readers are not Adler’s equals, some climb the mountain to sit next to him, but no one starts off as Adler’s reading ability equal. Jacobs puts into words the merits of Adler, but also the issue with Adler, and that is, getting into reading, and taking out the dogma. Jacobs offers a far more approachable way to read books, and not only more approachable, a far more enjoyable way to get into reading, to make the most of reading, and to better understand the kinds of books Adler heralds.

Jacobs also recognizes something Adler misses, reading speed. Today readers are hounded to read faster. But trying to read faster, as galaxies of evidence reveal, destroys comprehension. It also destroys the ability to enjoy a book, to enjoy sentences, to enjoy the story, and, most important, destroys the ability to engage with the book. Also, reading speed is genetic. I know some people that inhale books at an incredible pace. I know some people who read incredibly slowly. Jacobs argues to work with what you have and to slow your reading down enough to read at a pace allowing you to engage with the book on your terms.

But one of the best lessons from Jacobs, tapping into your pleasure and curiosity to foster a better reading habit. Jacobs shows the flaws in “reading lists.” He introduces the idea that many reading lists today appeal to those who want to “have read” versus reading. For instance, the standard “read these nine books before you die” fare. Most of these lists fall for the correlation does not imply causation fallacy. Simply, having read Psychology of Money, Atomic Habits, Sapiens, How To Win Friends and Influence People, Alchemist will not make you more successful, wealthier, smarter, a better salesperson, or any other trite promises attached. And Jacobs goes further to show that while reading has benefits, having read say, Don Quixote does not automatically make you a better person. Jacobs kneecaps the lists saying “read only these books.” He shows how that’s constraining and sucks the pleasure out of reading, and most important sucks you out of reading.

Jacobs offers a balance. He offers a way to find better books, read better books, and how to read books better. He calls it swimming upstream. Which is, if you love an author, fiction or non-fiction, see who influenced them and then read that person. It’s a great concept. For instance, if you love Thomas Sowell, you’ll swim upstream to read Adam Smith. If you love fiction author Craig Johnson (creator of the Longmire Series) and swim upstream, you’ll hit Don Quixote and Dante’s Inferno (among many others, Johnson sprinkles in his favorite authors in almost every story). It’s a fantastic concept, and it’s an easy way to get “deeper” books.

Jacobs eschews most “lists.” I argue for a balance between Mortimer Adler and Alan Jacobs. The Great Books are cornerstone books that wielded, and continue to wield, massive societal influence. And many of The Great Books are enjoyable and insightful. Eschewing that list entirely, though Jacobs isn’t saying that, would be unfortunate. But most lists, as Jacobs rightfully shows, are constraining and often lame. But lists can offer a guideline to a topic or a theme or, especially to me, get you closer to a person you respect or admire.

My position, create your own lists. Find the writers or figures or even a friend you admire, and start with that. Swim upstream. You can do this on any topic. And make it your own. If one or two or more voices provide a wealthy resource of books, keep going with it. If you find a vein you like, go with it. Make it your own, and let your curiosities and enjoyment lead the way.

If you’re a serious reader, if you want more enjoyment from reading, if you want to read better books, if you wish to improve reading — read Jacobs. It’s a quick read, but it will unlock a whole other level for you. It did for me, I bet it will for you.

The Growth of the Soil, Knut Hamsun

Before I read The Growth of the Soil I ranked Don Quixote as the greatest piece of fiction ever written. Then I read The Growth of the Soil and it’s now, in my humble yet accurate and as true as gravity opinion, the greatest fiction of all time. In case you’re curious about my ranking...

(1) The Growth of the Soil
(2) Don Quixote
and...
(3) The Idiot.

Some of you may have heard of this book, but many of you, likely have not. And not hearing of it is a distinct story.

Why?

Well, why wouldn’t you have heard of a book that won the Nobel Prize in literature?

And why wouldn’t you have heard of an author that rose to the heights of literary fame, a man once more revered than Hemingway, a man whose novels and prose changed writing?

Yes, Knut Hamsun at one time was one of the most revered authors and literary figures in the world. And he isn’t that old in the grand scheme of things, he wrote from 1877 – 1952.

So why haven’t you heard of this book, published in 1917, that garnered incredible acclaim?

Well, it doesn’t help when the author fawned over Adolf Hitler and Nazi ideologies, and it gets worse when you write a hagiographic eulogy of Hitler.

Hamsun is a peculiar figure, to say the least. Now, in most of Hamsun’s esteemed literature, we find zero Nazi ideology. Only a dishonest person would claim Hamsun’s agrarian sentiments make him a Nazi. The philosophical argument of whether we should or should not ignore Hamsun due to his love of Hitler has been going on since his passing. He was Norway’s literary hero, now, to Norway, it’s “how do we approach him?” I’m not going to get into the philosophical debates of whether he should be remembered. I’m not going to do the eye-rolling and pathetic, “trigger warning.” Hamsun was a man of his culture and time and believed in an abhorrent political ideology, and, despite today’s beliefs that only a handful of people liked Hitler (or the current accusation that Republicans are Nazis) or works like Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil claiming it was faulty thinking — during Hitler’s time, many around the world found Nazism a great belief. It wasn’t. It was awful. It was abhorrent. That’s not an apology for Hamsun. It’s my attempt at context. The Growth of the Soil is a masterpiece. It’s filled with rich insights into personal values and rich insights on how modernization can corrupt. It portrays personal relationships, human psychology, and a prose style that’s compelling, endearing, and poetic. It was once considered one of the greatest novels of all time, but Hamsun’s legacy has made it a philosophical debate. Where I stand, it’s a masterpiece work that’s worth reading.

Moving on.

The book got on my radar via Victor Davis Hanson. On his podcast, The Victor Davis Hanson Show he covered his favorite books, and this was his top (he detailed the Nazi bit, detailed the legacy and how to approach it, and did so better than I did). Like many, I had never heard of it. But Victor Davis Hanson is a favorite thinker of mine, and his knowledge of the world and arts is superb. When he said he loved it, I put it on the list to read immediately.

From what I gather, translation is critical. I talked to my best friend’s wife who is from Norway. She said Hamsun wrote in an old Norwegian style, yet what made him peculiar, he used old prose with Norwegian new realism. Norwegian new realism I will not dissect. But the Penguin Classic translation I read was fantastic. Continuing on the prose, what struck me, the poetic nature and cadence. It read a little similar to Dostoyevski’s tumbling out beauty, but Hamsun sucks you in. In other words, in some classic literature like Dostoyevski, while the sentences are beautiful and readable, you need to work through them a little. Hamsun, on the other hand, pulls you right in. His sentences are beautiful, compelling, concise, poetic, and make you want to read on.

Values. The story portrays personal values. The story details values interacting or clashing with other people’s values, and even the values of society or the environments and the various cultures surrounding people. Hamsun’s main character is Isak. Isak emerges from the woods to start a farm. While not an intellectual, he owns land smarts, and knows the value of hard work, and being true to himself. He’s unaware of his personal values, yet he has them, loads of them. And we get the story of his family, then his neighbors, then the various other characters, and then the ever-changing world and its various values. And Hamsun portrays the values in multiple ways, but he roots values, or the contrast of values, and compares them against two symbols: Sellanraa (the name of Isak’s farm) and the City.

It hit me recently. Many describe the story as biblical. I know a bit of the bible having read it once long ago. But I never gave the biblical element much thought, until I reread Genesis 1 and 3 recently. I was eating dinner, thinking of a recent Church sermon I attended, I turned around and looked at my bookshelf, and then it hit me. What hit unlocked more of the beauty and insight inside the Growth of the Soil. Let’s look at the lightning bolt that hit.

Genesis 1 is the creation story. Genesis 3 is when Eve gets tricked by the snake, bites the apple, and gives the apple to Adam. The snake deceived Eve to bite into the Apple and told her that biting into the apple means she will come to know as much as God. That story symbolizes vices or ideologies that can corrupt or mislead both humans and civilizations — the apple, biting into it, corrupts. Hamsun uses “the city” or “cities” to portray a certain set of values, and inside these values, exist ideas, philosophies, and ideologies that can corrupt. And the cities symbolize to extents industrialization or modernization. What hit me, “the city” is biting into the apple, it represents the allure of urbane beliefs and worldly pleasures, but it’s a ruse. It misleads — or creates — people into having a corrupted value system. Note, Hamsun doesn’t moralize. Hamsun shows living a superficial life and mistaking it for a deep life leads to emptiness. He shows temptations to find our utopia, skipping what worked in the past, leading us to unhappiness. And he shows that dishonesty, impulsiveness, and envy — all lead us to turmoil.

On the flip side of this, Hamsun used “Sellanraa” to represent ideal values. And the biggest thing that hit me, Isak is a character that never bites the apple. Isak isn’t perfect. He’s flawed. He’s aware of his flaws to some degree, as Hamsun adeptly shows. But Isak knows or senses the apple, he knows it corrupts, he’s aware of it, so he instead forges on, working hard, working to uphold himself to good values. And even as Isak attains incredible wealth and recognition, he never once bites the apple. It’s a gorgeous story Hamsun does well. He takes man, a flawed and tragic being, but makes that man not bite the Apple. And he does this in a realistic manner, without making Isak boring, moralizing, or goody-two-shoe’ed perfect.

This delivers the reader a beautiful and insightful story. “City values” interact with “Sellanraa” values. We see characters move near Sellanraa, thinking being a farmer is easy and expecting to live country gentleman lives, but the idealized vision fails. They lack a work ethic, get jealous of Isak’s success since they see Isak as a rube, and they despise the Sellanraa values. Yet Hamsun throws in nuance, it isn’t a binary, black-and-white story of opposing values battling it out. We get rich insight into love, fatherhood, honesty, dishonesty, modernization, and more.

What I found deeply interesting and moving — the depiction of relationships. And how “city” values interact with “Sellanraa” values. For example, without trying to give away too much, Isak’s wife goes to prison for a few years for infanticide. She came from Sellanraa, went to prison, but at the prison, became “cultured” — aka she bit the apple. Granted, Hamsun shows a few of the benefits of her gaining culture, but she gets lured into taking more bites of the apple, and it corrupts her. And when she returns to Sellenraa we see the clash of Isak’s ideals with his wife’s newfound city values. I won’t give away anything, but her corrupted values cause pain for Isak, and, pain for the reader. Likewise, we see one of Isak’s sons go off to the city, and we see a boy trying to escape his roots, trying to shed everything he sees wrong with his family, and trying to shed what he sees as unhip traditions. While Isak’s other son and daughter, find a home with “Sellanraa” values. This play on values makes not only compelling reading but touching, moving reading. And with the relationships, I wanted to grab Isak and put a better woman in front of him, the same with his neighbor. I wanted to play matchmaker. And it was visceral. Now, had Hamsun chosen to give Isak a wife complementing his values wholly, it would have made for boring reading. We wouldn’t see the rich lessons and insight. We wouldn’t be able to walk away with what The Growth of the Soil offers us. Not that a wife complementing him would be implausible, as in, if Isak knew a bit of vetting, he could have easily found a woman that complemented him. And Hamsun teases us with this possibility, but, again, if Hamsun wrote that, it wouldn’t offer him the creative canvas to paint that insight. We’d miss the cautionary aspect of not vetting for a good partner.

A masterpiece work.

Statesman as Thinker, Daniel J. Mahoney

Nietzsche and Machiavelli fans will hate it. Christians will love it.

Mahoney delves into Statesmanship on the surface, but he’s really making a case for what’s missing in today’s political leadership, what’s hollowing society out, and what ideologies are leading to decay. He offers a few key figures who were ideal statesmen. The key figures standing out to me: Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Winston Churchill, and Abraham Lincoln.

The book is advanced. Mahoney writes to a well-read audience.

One, a dictionary is needed. Not that he’s purposely using big words, he’s using the right words, yet some of them need clarification to the philosophy he’s detailing. Two, a philosophical dictionary of sorts is needed. Mahoney is concise, but he will say “Nietzschean” in a way that if you’re not familiar with Nietzsche, in particular Nietzsche’s Ubermensch concept, you will need to look it up. In summary, and injecting personal opinion, Nietzsche reads wild, offers some cool philosophy, but he’s nihilistic regarding traditions, and, in a way, pushes a grand narcissism. If you’re wondering why people are saying “cancel the classics!” at school, that has a Nietzschean flavor; in short, the idea of putting self over inherited traditions, and putting self over anything — God, community, family, traditions, and so on. Nietzsche’s philosophy serves as a great impetus to motivate oneself; Nietzsche’s philosophy serves as a great impetus to undertake a nihilistic and narcissistic worldview. Mahoney lays this out in clear, concise detail.

I found certain portraits of the figures Mahoney details powerful and insightful, others less so, and those others seemed more or less a recap of what some other thinkers thought of a person. And sometimes, the portrait served as a clarification or an argument against detractors. At times things got a little repetitive. Regardless, it’s a solid read, it’s insightful, and it’s a wonderful introduction to certain figures like Edmund Burke or Alexis de Tocqueville.

I mention Christians will love it. Why? Mahoney bakes the importance of Christian ethics into his writing. For you non-believers or agnostics out there, you can still enjoy the book. Despite the mistaken beliefs, Christian ethics isn’t televangelical beating over the head of the Ten Commandments and that an angry, spiteful God is watching your every movement. Christian ethics are much like Aristotle’s ethics, but a little less egalitarian than Aristotle’s (that’s the standard consensus, I disagree a bit, but that’s not the topic of this piece).

To finish, while the book sits in the political philosophy realm, insight exists regarding Success. In particular, the virtue of integrity, versus the nihilistic belief of making self-worth depend on conversions, attention, reading hustle porn, and making money.

Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell, Jason L. Riley

Thomas Sowell is my intellectual hero. I’d say he’s also a hero of mine, period. If you’re a longtime reader of mine, you know all this, and perhaps are bored of hearing it, but, too bad, you will keep hearing it.

Jason Riley is a Conservative thinker and writer. I’m familiar with his writings from the Wall Street Journal. I was excited to read this biography. One, it’s written by a writer I like, and two, it concerns my hero. A good combination. The book did not disappoint.

The biography more or less details Sowell’s work, his philosophies, his critical work, and how it all shaped and evolved. And details why Sowell’s being black and Conservative keeps Sowell from getting Nobel Prizes, despite his work being empirically far superior to many winners. The biography does detail parts of Sowell’s life, but Riley focuses on what comprises Sowell’s philosophy.

Sowell grew up in the Jim Crow South, in abject poverty, before moving to the slums of Harlem in New York City. He displayed a prodigy-like mind at an early age. Politically Sowell started out as a radical black Marxist. In fact, his earliest college papers were on Marx. Yet he shifted his political beliefs to become, arguably, one of the greatest Conservative figures of all time. And, no matter your political beliefs, Sowell is a thinker that will leave an enduring legacy.

The lessons in this book are plentiful.

For you Sowell fans, you get a vast look at Sowell’s work. And it’s eye-opening. His economic work, sadly, has been kept relatively hidden. Yes, kept hidden. He’s a black conservative empirically disproving many popular theories. And he gets castigated for it, horrifically so, by left-leaning political thinkers. They say he’s “an Uncle Tom” or he’s “been whitewashed” or he’s “serving his master like a good n———”

Which is utterly appalling and unfortunate. Sowell’s work is groundbreaking, he covers a wide territory, and he’s readable.

For those unfamiliar with Sowell, but curious, you’ll find a great introduction. You’ll discover the vast topics Sowell has covered, and some books and works to start with. You’ll also learn the gravity and impact of Thomas Sowell.

Biographies, real ones — not the hagiographies Ryan Holiday’s company, Lioncrest farts out — offer manifold lessons. Lessons we can walk away with and apply in our own lives. One such lesson from Sowell: stubborn and hard-headed self-determination. He valued good teachers, he valued rich insight from past thinkers, but he was determined to do it his way. In the realm of Success, we need more of that hard-headed self-determination rather than the find a guru to tell us what to do and give us permission to do it. Sowell questioned everything. When his famous professors Milton Friedman and George Stigler told him to do things or avoid things, or check out a guide to help him with a book, he said, “I’ll figure it out myself.”

I love that.

Instead of reading every single Gary Halbert letter, going through every single Tony Robbins book, figure it out on your own. And work hard at it. This isn’t a call to not asking questions, this is a call to get self-determined; to ground your principles, convictions, and instincts — without the need of gurus translating how your path should go for you. That stubbornness is a good quality. That hard-headed determination is a tonic most would do well to drink from.

The Vision of The Anointed, Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell said he’s most proud of Conflict of Visions. In my opinion, if you read Conflict of Visions, you will never see the world the same. Conflict of Visions is one part, or the main part rather, of a loose trilogy: Conflict of Visions, Quest for Comic Justice, and The Vision of The Anointed. In a sense, Conflict of Visions lays out the argument and its terms, while the other two works unfold the philosophy and arguments.

The Vision of The Anointed details what Sowell labeled in Conflict of Visions as The Unconstrained Vision. Here’s a quick definition of both visions. The Constrained Vision believes that man is flawed. And that the collective knows more than one expert on the whole. That means traditions, localism, community, and what we’ve inherited from society and our forefathers give us much wisdom and stability. This vision wants the rules, the laws, to be simple, as in, like the rules of Soccer. Everyone plays by the same rules; disparities will happen, but that’s part of nature. Whereas the Unconstrained Vision believes not in processes but solutions. They feel that man and society can be perfected, and usually, the experts or those with superior knowledge will lead us to the promised land. They reject the rules for the Soccer game, they want equality in the outcome, they want the disparities eradicated, and wish to create rules to do so.

This work details the Unconstrained Vision. For you political nerds, this looks largely at more left-leaning politics and the consequences of the solutions proffered. Sowell unpacks legal, economics, race, income, and more. He also details the history of this vision, the thinkers and ideologies leading to it.

It’s a fascinating work. You can read this book if you haven’t read Conflict of Visions. In fact, it’s more approachable than Conflict of Visions.

Political theory or philosophy aside, Sowell is a master of psychology, human nature, and critical thinking. Read enough of him, and you start asking questions. You see through the rhetoric, the hyperbole, and the hot air of nearly anything — and not just politics or race. Sowell owns a remarkable talent for teaching you how to ground something in reality. He loves the simple “then what?” line of thinking. Since a few “then what’s? on a big claim often leads you to, “well, I dunno.” But Sowell shows you how to find the tradeoffs, and if the tradeoffs aren’t there, to then spot the bullshit.

It’s fantastic, anything Sowell is fantastic.

The War on The West, Douglas Murray

Douglas Murray is a bit of a firebrand Conservative author, his book The Madness of Crowds gained notoriety and success; The War on The West was my first go with Murray, and a few people said it was going to rock me — I found it underwhelming.

I found he didn’t address anything new, and not that he needed to, but the argument felt underwhelming. I felt his examples boxed him into a narrow space, and while he used good examples, it’s like he left them hanging on the surface. It lacked the rhetorical vigor and depth I expected from a firebrand personality.

But I wouldn’t take my review as a reason to not read it. On one end, if you’re curious to learn some of the “Woke agenda” and why it’s decried, War on The West offers a decent introduction. You’ll find out why Conservatives in America and Europe (though European Conservatives are different, but that’s philosophical quibbling) decry things like Critical Race Theory, Social Emotional Learning, Pronouns, Gender Transitions, and so on. Murray focuses primarily on race and the double standards of those castigating the foundations of Western civilization. It’s a fast read, clear, and concise.

But to harp on language, yes it’s clear and concise, but it lacks punch, substance, and depth. Murray writes a safe book. He tosses red meat to his audience, and that’s the extent of the book.

In my opinion, if you really want a book with weight and punch, with substance and depth, and a book arguing beyond a shadowboxing jab, then go with either The Dying Citizen by Victor Davis Hanson or White Guilt by Shelby Steele. Both are far superior. Each offers substance and background; each marshal a strong argument; and, finally, each goes beyond tossing red meat to their audience.

Classical English Style, Ward Farnsworth

“Use small, simple words!”

“Write short sentences!”

“Big words are used by those who want to sound smart. Don’t do it! Use small words. Write in the active voice only! And avoid adverbs!” (I hope you see the contradictions.)

That advice pervades modern writing. And modern writing and reading today, much of it adhere to that advice. Popular fiction and non-fiction feature short sentences, small one-syllable or two-syllable words. And it’s getting boring. It’s starting to sound the same and look the same. It’s an outright myth and false claim that big words and long sentences are used only by those trying to sound smart or academic. Yes, academic writing is comedically bad, but also comedically bad is its opposite — the generic modern writing style pervading books, blogs, and social media today.

This book is an antidote to the generic, wooden, watered-down prose infecting modern writing. If you’re a serious writer — read this book, immediately, yesterday if possible.

Farnsworth begins this work with a way to simplify how to understand words and prose. He divides it roughly yet aptly between Saxon words and Latinate words. For instance:

• Saxon: see

• Latinate: perceive

Latinate words can change and alter into an -ion word or other forms, like perception or perceptive. Saxon words are more informal or easier, like ‘see’. Now, some Saxon words are big, and some Latinate words are small. But Farnsworth shows how Saxon and Latinate provide a good compass: Saxon = simple and small; Latinate = fancy or formal. From here, Farnsworth builds off how great writers of the past and current use a mix of Saxon and Latinate words to powerful effect. And as he teaches he busts many style myths.

For instance, “using big words to sound smart” equals, as the theory goes, “using big words means you’re an insecure douchebag that knows nothing about writing to make money online.” Ok, I took some liberty in my example. But that big words to sound smart is largely a myth. Where it is correct — academic journals and jargon. Current academics can’t write their way out of a brown paper bag. They dump nouns on the page. It’s a prolix mess. And yes, Academics tend to live in their tiny bubble, adoring their pet theories, and ejaculating meaningless jargon onto the page that other academics seemingly like. Let’s walk away from the Ivory Halls of self-indulgent Intelligentsia and into reality. A common and good piece of writing advice is “use the right word.” Well, sometimes the right word or collection of words is the big word or the Latinate word. For a simple reason, one can use a Latinate word for a stylish effect. A writer can start their sentence with many small Saxon words, one or two-syllable words, and then end that sentence with a big Latinate word for effect. “On Twitter, we see gurus giving writing tips, they say ‘use small words’ and ‘write short sentences’ all fine and well, but many of these gurus are sciolists.” That Latinate ending is a style choice. A writer can use that fancy Latinate word for rhetorical effect or use that word to introduce ideas or an argument. It all depends on the context.

In my example, depending on my aims, I can use the fancy sciolist word at the end for rhetorical effect. I can use the Latinate ending here to encapsulate gurus and simultaneously lay bare the weaknesses of gurus and their ideologies. In other words, I can drag gurus into a boxing ring, tie their hands behind their backs, and go to town on them. I can also use the Latinate word here in my example as a transition device. I use guru prose as an example, then use my Latinate word to introduce or transition to an argument. As in, I take the small, on-the-ground ideas, use a word to create a more formal arena of ideas, and then go from there. Many more uses of Latinate words exist, it’s not limited.

On the flip side, a writer can use all Latinate words and then end the sentence with a Saxon word. Like above, it can be used for rhetorical effect. Or, also like above, you can use it to transition into an argument or premise. For instance, you can take the high and mighty language of Intelligentsia, the big noun words, and make them look like out of touch idiots. “The application of Michel Foucalt, the moral relativistic inclinations he propounds of systemic oppressions, and his disputations with traditions disclose a singular factual reality of Foucalt, he’s nuts.”

Farnsworth, however, goes deep. He shows the effect of Latinate sentences unpacked with Saxon sentences. As in, an author lays out big ideas and arguments with Latinate words, and in the next sentence, the writer uses Saxon words, saying the same thing as the Latinate words, but the Saxon words, as is their purpose, grounds the lofty ideas to concrete reality. On the flip side, the writer can start off on the concrete, writing Saxon words, and then in the next sentence, say the same thing, but using Latinate words to show that the ideas go beyond the concrete and have some lofty weight to them. And Farnsworth teaches a variety of style tricks and methods.

One thing making Farnsworth special, once he shows it to you, you can’t unsee it. And he gives you a way to practice it and apply it instantly. You may not remember the name of the method or the rhetorical trick and say “ah, that’s a metonymy” but you will recognize the skeleton.

What I did not expect, the Classical English Style will unlock works for you. I wish I had read this before I read Edmund Burke, David Hume, and The Federalist Papers. Classical English Style is a Rosetta Stone of great works. Farnsworth laments over the loss of style. He says how prose masters like Edmund Burke and Abraham Lincoln were accessible and powerful writers. But the myth of “short writing” made the greats like Lincoln seem too heady. He argues that Saxon only writing restricts writers at times, and it can weaken an argument (my point on Murray is a perfect example). And he shows why this modern day prose gets boring and unsatisfying and, I’d say, eye-rolling. Yet once he shows you a little of the Classical English method, suddenly certain books that seemed “well this is old arcane writing” popped to life. The writing gets clear, magical, and compelling. I read this work right before Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and it unlocked that work for me. While it took me over a month to read Theory of Moral Sentiments, Farnsworth made it accessible, made it come to life. I could see the arguments, the effects, and just how great Smith is as a writer. So if you’re looking to read some classical works, and want them to be readable, read Classical English Style.

And to leave off, for you writers in my audience, Farnsworth will challenge and inspire you to write better. He also curates some of the best and most memorable sentences ever written. You’ll want to read them aloud, chew them over, and unpack them. It’s a must-read for serious writers.

Billy Budd, Bartlelby, and Other Stories, Herman Melville

Hilarious. Melville is most famous for Moby Dick. I never read any Melville before. I expected a stern style. But I laughed my ass off.

I read Bartlelby, the Scrivener. It details the story of an office that does a bit of legal work but works at doing the bare minimum. And a man named Bartlelby shows up, does sterling work his first day or so, then rejects more and more work, saying, “I would prefer not to.”

Melville deploys the Classical English Style mentioned above to hilarious use. For instance, the main character of the story is the owner of the office. The owner has a self-righteous, overinflated sense of self-importance, and he’s aware of his insecurities. Melville takes this self-importance and uses long, ambling sentences with Victorian words to then end each sentence with a wry, near slapstick ending. As in, he describes the beauty of the office, and the joy of having a window, and that window has a view, it views the black, smog stained brick wall of the building next door, a building a few feet away.

The story offers a tragic madness and a tragic comedy of Bartelby. We have no idea where he came from, what his background is, or why he prefers not to. He causes near madness to anyone encountering him, yet we feel for Bartelby.

It’s a fantastic story; it’s hilarious.

Not Read

The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge, Calvin Coolidge (Introduction by Amity Shlaes)

When I was a young boy, my dad took me to the hometown and homestead of the Coolidge clan, Plymouth Notch, Vermont. By total chance, I shook the hand of Calvin Coolidge’s son, John Coolidge. At my age, and being a history dork kid, this to me was like shaking the hand of the son of a superhero (did I mention I was a dorky history kid?). I didn’t really know who Coolidge was when I was a boy, but I was able to grasp that shaking the hand of a president’s son was special.

Coolidge is a president often overlooked and misunderstood. Franklin Delano Roosevelt deserves the blame for how Coolidge is received today. Why? Under Coolidge’s presidency, America became exceptional. When Coolidge took office, flight was barely a thing, when he left, commercial flights were a thing. No, he didn’t singlehandedly do that, yet his policies raised the standard of living in America to incredible heights. He had the lowest unemployment in history. He had the best economy in history (even riding out two recessions that started worse than the Great Depression), and the deficits and budgets and debt, the US has never gotten back to, or close to his level. Minorities also made incredible advancements during his tenure. In sum, life was pretty good with Cal at the helm. When the depression hit, FDR noticed that people yearned for the Coolidge days. So FDR ran a marketing campaign blaming Coolidge for the current depression, and that only he, FDR, could save the country. As a result, FDR swept Coolidge and his accomplishments under the rug. And fun fact, the standard of living America enjoyed during the Coolidge years didn’t return until the mid-1950s, an astonishing thirty years after his presidency.

In my humble, but packed full of accuracy, insight, and truth opinion, Calvin Coolidge is the second greatest American president, maybe the greatest. I rank Lincoln the highest, and Washington third.

Calvin Coolidge loved to write, and he wrote in a terse, wry style. Amity Shlaes wrote the introduction to this autobiography, and her biography of Coolidge is superb. The history dork in me is alive and well, so I’m looking forward to reading it.

Breaking Bread with the Dead, Alan Jacobs

Two reasons have me excited to read this book, and one reason is, I admit, perhaps a little petty or judgey (yes, I’m judgmental, or “judgey” as someone once said). My petty reason, Alan Jacobs destroys Stoic popularizer, Massimo Pigliucci in this book. Massimo Pigliucci does offer an ok gateway into Stoicism, but he morphs Stoicism into a secular, morally undemanding ethical system, and also into an Epicurean buffet like philosophy, as well as pushing hardline progressive values. In short, Pigliucci is a moral relativist, a Stoic relativist, and he’s a smug asshole. Jacobs calls out why Pigliucci is wrong in this book. The immature side of me, the side that lowered the bar of decorum and called him a smug asshole, enjoys that.

But the main reason, Jacobs goes into reading the classics. As you can tell, I loved Jacobs’s other book, so I’m looking forward to this one.

The Content of Our Character, Shelby Steele

Shelby Steele is a dangerous man. His book White Guilt displayed the prose of a masterful sword fighter. He wields arguments and truth with a deft, masterful touch. He’s a favorite thinker of mine, his documentary, What Killed Michael Brown is utterly fantastic (watch it), and this is the book that made him famous.

The Square and The Tower, Niall Ferguson

Another favorite writer of mine. Ferguson is a superb historian and prose master.

Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift

I’m working on reading some more classics. Gulliver’s Travels is a Great Book and a famous satire. I can’t recall if I read any of it in high school or college, but I’m looking forward to digging into it.

The Iliad, Homer

It’s the oldest story we have. It’s the first book in The Great Books. I remember some pieces of it from high school, I know it’s a bit of a slog compared to The Odyssey but it’s a foundational work.

African Founders, David Hackett Fischer

I’m reading two time period rabbit holes. One is around the Founding Fathers or the birth of America. The other is the 1920s and into the 1960s. I got three more Founding Father period books to go, this being one.

Fischer is a renowned historian. I heard and read reviews from sources I trust. And on the Bookmonger Podcast(a good source for new books) I enjoyed the author’s easygoing manner and his insight. The book details the culture enslaved people brought with them and why that culture endures.

One Damn Thing After Another, William P. Barr

William Barr is an interesting man. He served as attorney general under two presidents, George Bush and Donald Trump. Two sources I respect recommended this book, Andy McCarthy (a famous attorney) and author Jack Carr.

The War That Made The Roman Empire, Barry Strauss

I heard Strauss on a few podcasts, and I heard Victor Davis Hanson mention him. The premise of war he details sounds intriguing.

Robert E. Lee, Allen C. Guelzo

After I finish my Founding Fathers’ era rabbit hole, I’m eyeing the Civil War era. Robert E. Lee has been canceled in America. Presentists' (people who adhere uncritically to present day attitudes, and force history into the lens of fashionable moral standards) cast Lee into their “all things bad” pot. I’m not hailing or revering the Confederate South, but ignoring its history and ignoring its figures or reading them through the tribalist lenses of Nikole Hannah-Jones (The 1619 Project) is a failure.

Guelzo is also a superb historian.

Conquest and Cultures, Quest for Cosmic Justice, Knowledge and Decisions, Intellectuals and Society, Thomas Sowell

With my love of Sowell, I think you get what I would say here.

From what I hear, Knowledge and Decisions is an economic masterpiece. And Intellectuals and Society is a prescient book, a book hated by people like Robert Reich or Paul Krugman.

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon

I’m eyeing it. I’m feeling it. I’m desiring it.

No, I’m not getting naughty here. I have an intimate relationship with reading. And I’m sharing something perhaps odd.

I eye books.

I sometimes have a long flirtation with them before I read them. Sometimes, I want to read them sooner but I focus my energies on a different book. But then I return to that book. I didn’t pass on the book because I felt it was unworthy or liked it less. It’s that the timing wasn’t right. And then the time is right. And I feel that the right time approaches to read The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a behemoth. Each volume in the picture contains well over one thousand pages. It’s a famous volume, a volume still wielding enormous significance in the world. I’m planning to read it soon, perhaps in the next few months. It’s calling me. Yes, to get even weirder, I get a feeling a book calls me to read it. I plan to read some books first in preparation to tackle this behemoth. And I know reading this behemoth work will take me the better part of a few months.

I believe this will be my winter season read.

1. This “read a book and see” exemplifies issues with modern reading. The issues tie to the long decline in many Western education systems, and, I argue, on how Gurus tell us how to read. The main issue, a lack of critical engagement or questioning of a book. We are taught that books offer lessons. And with all the tips and tricks, we look solely for lessons versus critical engagement with a book. So we sit back, ask no questions, and seek lessons. When good reading, as does good thinking, requires you to engage critically with a book. This person telling you to read “this book” as a way to change your opinions, likely never questioned that book. ↩

2. Thought-terminating cliche is a bit of a fallacy. A person ends the debate or conversation with a cliche instead of a point. And that cliche is designed to end the conversation. Here it’s “you should really read book X.” (We could quibble and say this is an appeal to authority as well). Another example would be, “stop thinking so much.” This misdirects the attention as if the person is overthinking.

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I had planned to recap and haul. But the books I read blew past the boundaries of a recap. And the email would have been too long and lacked a consistent theme. Each book deserved its own treatment. So I’m going to drip these emails out. We’ll start with Aristotle’s Ethics, move over to Raymond Chandler, and then I’ll do a somewhat recap and haul to finish.

First, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. I’m going to cover a fraction of Ethics. If you’re hoping for deep philosophical debates regarding Aristotle’s terms, his concepts of Good and Evil, or how he’d approach the Mind-Brain Problem you’re in the wrong place.

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics

Aristotle’s only surviving works are the courses and lectures he taught. And one surviving course and lecture, Ethics. The first line in Ethics sums up the aim of the course:

Every art and technical skill, every systematic method associated with those, and in the same way every action and choice seems to aim at something good.

In other words, everything you do seems to aim at something good. But what is “good” and how do we do that? Another way to view the main lesson of Ethics: what is a flourishing life, and how does one live a flourishing life?

Aristotle answers: strive to have excellence in character. We could go on a few different tangents on how to have excellence in character, but we’ll look at the famed concept of The Golden Mean. Or as Aristotle refers to it (in the translation I read), the midpoint.

Aristotle unpacks what it means to live a good life. A good life requires excellence of character. And how does one get excellence of character? Aristotle starts with the target choices of virtue and vices, pleasures and pains, right things and wrong things, and fortunes and misfortunes. He then lays out that good things are, external goods, goods of the soul, and goods of the body. He unpacks goodness via, virtues of thought, virtues of character, and virtues of the intellect. That narrows down to virtues of character and virtues of intellect.

Hang with me and keep those things in mind.

Ok, that whole choice thing.

When we make choices we do so from our current capacity. Capacity? Our current knowledge, experience, potential, talent, beliefs, worldview, patterns, securities and insecurities, strengths and weaknesses, and aims. It’s like playing golf. The swing you have on the day you play is the swing you have. The swing is like your capacity. It might be off, it might be on, but it’s the swing you have today. You act from your capacity. You choose from your capacity. Like a golf swing, you can improve your capacity. Like a golf swing, improving your capacity takes work.

A famous tenant of philosophy: the unexamined life is not worth living. The examined life is worth living. The examined life means living deliberately. Yet not in a navel-gazing-the-theory sort of way. Many people go through life without personal reflection. They lack awareness of their current capacity. They may think about life, but they never go beyond the surface, and when they act, they act from autopilot. For instance, they find themselves in the same relationship situation over and over. They see a documentary on Netflix and reflexively think it’s true. And when conflict arises, insecurities guide them. They are not deliberate in their target choices. It’s not that these people are bad, dumb, or inferior; rather, they go through the motions of living.

The examined life, inside Aristotle’s framework, injects depth, deliberation, and skill into our capacity. In other words, we work to deliberately exercise our virtues. And the more we deliberately exercise our virtues, the better we habituate our character. We habituate our emotions, behaviors, and nature towards the right aim. That aim, to not to fall short or not go too far. Aristotle posits we go for the midpoint, aka the Golden Mean. And that doesn’t mean shooting for fifth place in a ten-man race.

Let’s unfold this.

Aristotle said that physical health played a critical role in flourishing and excellence in character.

Again, Aristotle starts with a target choice: flourishing. And to flourish we need excellence in character. That demands virtues of character and virtues of intellect. And physical health delivers external goods, goods of the soul, and goods of the body.

Let’s consider falling too short in physical health.

Falling short in your physical health includes never exercising, sloppy nutrition habits, and poor lifestyle choices. If we’re honest, we also include excuses, rationalizations, impulse-led behavior, and more. But it goes deeper. Let’s say someone wants to go to the gym. They are trying to get healthier. After work, they get a text inviting them out. They could go to the gym, they want to go to the gym, but they tell themselves, “My friends are going out, we had so much fun the other day, I don’t want to miss out. Plus this bar is new.” Here, the person wants to do good. They know what doing good entails. But they rationalize a vice into a virtue.

Instead of working out, our person hits the happy hour. They booze. They eat bad. And when they get home, they feel zapped. They binge-watch Netflix before falling asleep. They sleep like shit, wake up feeling like shit and say, “I can’t exercise today, I feel too tired, I don’t want to hurt myself.” Our person habituates falling too short patterns. They want to be better, but the habituated falling too short pattern hinders best intentions. In time, this behavior catches up with them. If you have poor physical health you age poorly, you’re prone to getting sick, you mentally don’t function as well, and you struggle if you need physical strength in a situation. This goes for both men and women.

And being physically unhealthy does nothing for your looks. Aristotle, to the ire of many, says being good-looking offers an advantage. If you’re an attractive male or female, Aristotle believes — and I agree — that it’s an advantage and that it can aid in living a flourishing life. And if you’re attractive and you uphold a standard of personal physical health, it fuels this advantage. On the flip side, Aristotle posits that if you’re not Idris Elba or Gisele Bundchen, striving for good physical health will make you not only healthy but better looking.

It’s not just good looks; Aristotle teaches to advocate for yourself. And advocating for yourself does more than just make you buff and sexy.

Let’s unpack this. Keep in mind personal capacity and goods of the soul.

Working out to attain a baseline of sound physical health requires making it a habit. Regardless of whether it’s an elite athlete at seventeen beginning a training program to better their chances, or it’s a fifty-year-old wishing to lose weight, the hardest part sometimes, making it a habit. That task of making it a habit requires time, work, and self-motivation. You can read all the habit books you want, no matter the advice or hip-sounding methods, in the end, you need to get your ass to the gym and train. It’s as pain-in-the-ass simple as that.

When working out becomes a habit, we know it’s a good thing. It exemplifies consistency. The habit itself is virtuous. This virtuous habit likely points to or fosters other virtuous habits. For instance, if you make time for your workouts, you likely maintain commitments elsewhere in your life. Aristotle isn’t a guru saying that if you work out it delivers perfection in life. Rather, the habit of scheduling or making time for your workouts is one habit helping other areas of your life. Aristotle is also teaching self-motivation. While self-motivation is somewhat inherent to our dispositions, we can strengthen that motivation. That’s not to say, as the gurus promise, that you will attain 500% motivation all of the time every time. No. Aristotle shows that it’s natural to have some days and moments you grind through. You won’t be feeling it, you won’t be motivated. And that’s ok. Despite the sugar-high gurus making it sound like you need or can attain otherworldly motivation, you won’t always have it and that’s part of life. But having habituated virtuous habits — like showing up to workout even if you’re not feeling it — pushes you towards excellence. In other words — and this also pertains to outside of working out — when you habituate good actions, on those days you’re not feeling it, those actions carry you through. You grind it out. Or you put a bad effort into perspective and learn from it. But a bad effort doesn’t halt everything. Why? You’ve habituated your capacity to keep moving forward.

Let’s dissect this even further.

Aristotle teaches that a rigorous training regimen is best. First, someone busted their butt to get to the gym. In time, if they kept going, they habituated the habit. What does that mean? They are consistent. Consistency is a cornerstone to success in any endeavor. That goes for any craft, hobby, or personal development. A person habituated themselves — habits, scheduling, self-motivating, and more — to be consistent with their physical health.

Ok, so that rigorous training program. A person makes it a habit of working out. They get to the gym, they’ve been doing it for years. That’s amazing. But Aristotle advises to challenge yourself. That doesn’t mean going to extremes, like trying to win every Strongman or Mr. Olympia. Rather, get into an environment that challenges and tests you.

Here’s why.

A rigorous training regimen is difficult. It’s a mental and physical test. Let’s look at a regular person undergoing rigorous training. That training might be lifting, Brazilian Ju-Jitsu, regional fitness shows, road cycling, and more. A regular Jack and Jill, they’re not training for a professional sports championship. They endure it for themselves. That’s a challenge. That’s virtuous.

Why?

It’s undergoing difficult things, willingly. You will have your personal goals. You might do an amateur competition for fun. But in the end, it’s for you. There is no grand glory. If you’re an accountant with a rigorous lifting routine, you know you need disciplined habits: work schedule, meals, diet, drive time, rest, and beyond. Aristotle shows that this sort of activity habituates excellence in character. How? To stand up to the challenge you give yourself requires discipline, consistency, sacrifices, and trade-offs. It doesn’t mean you live in the gym and forego having a family. It means you find ways to be that well-rounded, well-read person that makes training work in your daily life. In other words, this value of yours, this physical fitness value and its ingredients, aligns with other aspects of your life. Your relaxing hobbies, your professional life, your family, and the other elements align with the fitness regimen. And each element, each value, feeds the others. All the granular aspects that make it all work help habituate your character.

How so? How does it help habituate excellence of character?

Let’s stick with the general example of rigorous physical training. Consider the positive trade-offs. You can better handle adversity because you’ve undergone difficult things. If shit hits the fan in your life, you still get your butt to the gym to train. It might suck, you might not feel it, but you move forward (and studies show working out is fantastic in this situation). You’ve developed a capacity to face hard things. And Aristotle shows that character isn’t built off of one secret. It’s not categorical that if you work out you are therefore going to be successful and amazing in all endeavors. Rather success builds upon many tangibles. And physical training, undergoing difficult things willingly, helps build a virtuous behavior pattern to better handle life’s ups and downs.

Aristotle details the nitty-gritty of excellence. He teaches that habituated character builds from various elements, behaviors, actions, and self-learning. This differs from current Success fare. Many people seek excellence in character via Success gurus and common Success ideologies. But Success fare and its fans get excellence skewed. The guru and their claims, or the “secret tactic,” or both, are seen as the surrogate of success. For instance, consider the popular book Atomic Habits. It contains useful information on how to develop good habits. But many fall into the belief that great habits are the target choice in life. And that great habits deliver excellence in character. And that habits create motivation, wealth, or any other pinned on hope. People believe the book and its author are a surrogate for flourishing.

Yes, Atomic Habits offers useful information, but it offers a small ingredient and not the whole aim. Flourishing and excellence in character come down to you, the individual. When you habituate actions and behaviors, like habits, you work to make it a part of you. Learning about habits can help, but it’s not the endpoint. It may be a place to start, but many stay stuck mistaking the fashionable advice as the target choice or the divine surrogate to their utopia. Many people in Success are doing the right thing: reaching for better. But they spin their wheels putting all their hopes onto a small tactic. While that tactic is good and may help, it isn’t the deity of flourishing.

No one secret delivers excellence in character. Some parts, like Aristotle’s Ethics, move you closer to excellence than others, if you’re willing to apply the lessons, but it’s one part, not the end all be all. And Aristotle teaches this truth well. He shows that your excellence in character, and what you strive to do well in, is distinct to you. You may emulate others, but in time you need to make it your own.

Let’s turn to the too far aspect. And let’s continue with our Success example.

The Success Industry fomented a too far fetish. People fetishize turning themselves into an autistic, narcissistic, sociopathic — yet “offering value” — ubermensch entrepreneur. It’s bizarre. Success fanboys hear that a famous billionaire did something immoral, yet they praise that immorality as “doing whatever it takes.”

And the people seeing that immorality as a good, fantasize that they can turn into an autistic, narcissistic, sociopathic — yet “offering value” — ubermensch entrepreneur. It’s a fetish. It’s sad. It’s part Hustle Signaling (like a Virtue Signal, Hustle Signaling is a behavior or action in the hopes of proving that you’re part of the hustlers tribe and innocent of any anti-hustle belief of behavior), part validation seeking, and part going too far.

The going too far part here is aiming at professional success for the sake of personal vanity. A person wants to be widely recognized as an autistic, narcissistic, sociopathic — yet “offering value” — ubermensch entrepreneur. They believe that recognition equates entry and arrival at the Success Country Club. In reality, the person taking on this vanity project turns into none of those things. They come across as a try-hard dork. But in this instance of one wanting success, they go too far in their vanity. They worship a quirk, a detrimental one, and often avoid doing what they need to do — stop fantasizing about being a money-printing edgelord and get to work.

But here’s what makes Aristotle ace. Here’s what makes him practical.

When you’re starting out, Aristotle advises that it’s better to go too far than to fall short.

Consider our online marketing example.

In our edgelord notoriety example, the one benefit here, the drive to succeed. Now, the too far aspect results in the person acting as a try-hard dork. But at least a drive exists versus no action taken. Aristotle would rather you push the envelope at first. Be a little greedy (that doesn’t mean dishonesty). Be aggressive in your marketing (again, that doesn’t mean dishonesty). He wants you to hustle after that dollar. It’s better to chase the spotlight — via hard work and earned reputation — than to not. If you’re working out, better to do it for looks than not working out. Why? Because you’ll bust your butt for that body versus not. And with bravery, better to be reckless than to have no courage.

Aristotle shows that going too far, at first, acts as an impetus to action. It helps to habituate the behavior. Aristotle teaches that with time, maturity and reflection, you find that midpoint. It may come along subconsciously. Or it may come with considerate reflection and experience. If you’re working on a critical part of flourishing, excellence in character and excellence in intellect, then it helps find that midpoint in something like Success, and learning how to not go too far.

Some areas are impossible to take too far. Aristotle wants you to aim for otherworldly in that area. There aren’t too many things in this category of impossible to go too far. Like these two:

• wisdom, aka virtues of intellect

• excellence in character

No one will ever say, “oh, she’s too excellent in character, who can trust that!?” Excellence in character you can sense. The person exhibits good humor, good values, high personal standards, kindness, self-assuredness, and awareness that they’re not perfect. And to work on excellence in character is good. Attaining that excellence in character, it’s individual to each person. They will undergo their own journey. That’s what makes it special.

Look at intellect. Aristotle teaches that wisdom matters. And he shows that wisdom can color your life beyond being smart. It makes your downtime more pleasurable and meaningful. It makes conversations with your friends richer. That doesn’t mean you have deep and heavy conversations all the time. Rather, you appreciate the time spent; you appreciate the laughs; you appreciate your friend on a deeper level; you enjoy the color of the time spent.

Aristotle implores erudition. He wants you to be curious and constantly learning. Whether it’s your craft, or knowing more about your favorite band, he teaches you to dig deeper. And it’s not mere book smarts he’s advising, he says one must have skin in the game. For instance, he teaches that you can make contemplation enjoyable, deep, and strategic. Strategic? Perhaps you read an inspiring biography. You glean lessons from the biography and apply those lessons. And, moving beyond the obvious read to learn, Aristotle shows that deep learning or reading fosters good thinking. As in, some books you read you may not be able to directly apply its lessons. Let’s say you read a book on the history of F-18 fighter jets. Certain elements you can apply to your profession: attention to detail, happy mistakes, and more. But many elements you will not be able to apply directly — like test piloting F -18 jets. But in time, the non-immediate applications of that book might enrich your thinking. It might foster a professional benefit, or it simply just colors your world.

In other words, Aristotle details the benefit of being pragmatically well-read. That being well-read makes you a more rounded person. That pragmatic aspect means you don’t read solely to navel-gaze on a topic; nor do you read a book to solely extract its income secrets. You engage with the book. And you can’t go too far in this. No one wishes they knew less about the world and were less well-rounded.

Ethics offers manifold lessons. Again, what it offers goes far beyond what I mentioned here. Aristotle goes into relationships, friendships, philanthropy, politics, and so on. Many see a book like this and get a little nervous. They fear it a slog. ButEthics is accessible. It provides nuance in its wisdom. It’s a must-read, to say the least. And no one says you need to rush through it. Again, the translation I read was readable. And the translator offered good advice on how to read it.

I can’t make you read anything. But putting Ethics on your list and reading it soon will not be the worst thing. It’s one of the greatest tracts, it’s a cornerstone for Western Civilization, it’s a great guide to living the good life, and it’s readable.

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I’m surprised that the most popular part of my site is now anything reading. The articles, the emails, and the Ex Libris page (which needs updating) get the most feedback. Whatever I’m doing struck two chords, one in me and one in my readers. I’m going to steer more in that direction. I envisioned a direction when I started my site but couldn’t yet grasp it. I’m now grasping it and seeing my path. That path moves me away from copywriting. I’m relieved. I’ll be blunt, I’ll be a snob, only so much can be said about copywriting or marketing. I don’t write offers for anyone else and haven’t for years. My purpose isn’t to be the greatest copywriter ever. I don’t want to talk “Converting Headlines” for the rest of my days. I’ll still talk copy, I still love copy, and I’m going to release a copy course soon, but copywriting is not my purpose.

My purpose exists elsewhere.

As you know, I like bullying sciolists and ultracrepidarians (really fancy-schmancy pejorative term describing “experts” that offer their opinions on things that they’re clueless on or have no experience with, yet pawn it off as expert insight). They need the bullying. It’s fun, I’ll keep doing it, but that’s surface level. I like looking under rocks. The Success world is interesting. It’s a big clique. A clique seducing individuals to hand over their agency and individuality — despite selling individuality — without question. But it’s an alluring clique. It attracts money. It attracts smart people. It teaches people to think and behave in Pavlovian lockstep. It fascinates me. So that’s where my compass is pointing me.

And I have a book percolating in my mind. One that will look into the Success (I’m likely going to come up with a new label for this, I find Success a bit generic and want to put things on my turf), and the what and why behind it.

If you’re curious, here are some sentences I wrote and stared at for an hour the other day:

For whatever reason, I think this is a chapter or an overarching theme I can unpack. It may not make any sense right now, but I figured I’d share rumination’s on what’s to come. And at the bottom of this newsletter, if you’re really interested, you’ll see two ruminating paragraphs based on the theme of this world selling success yet offering safety.

Oh, and I’m going to do a reading course soon. The idea, how to profit from books.

And speaking of reading, I’m fleshing out a reading newsletter as a part of the Good Word Membership (which also features newsletters on copy). As of this writing, I have two published newsletters regarding reading (six on copy). The feedback has been great. More newsletters are to come and, at some point, a reading course.

Ok, enough philosophizing, let’s get into some recaps and the haul.

Don Quixote, Miguel Cervantes

Don Quixote is a classic. It stands among the greatest works of literature.

Many people know some Don Quixote tidbits: Don Quixote and his sidekick Sancho Panza roam the Spanish countryside, and Don Quixote attacks windmills.

I knew the windmill bit and owned inklings it was a comedy. Don Quixote is readable — at least my translation proved readable — and it’s hilarious. My full conversation with the book would expand well past the bounds of my summary. But here are some quick themes.

As I read it, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the guru world and its worshippers I write about.

Consider the word we obtained from the work: Quixotic. Merriam Webster’s Dictionary defines it as someone foolishly impractical, especially in the pursuit of ideals. Garner’s Usage Manual shows the usage as impractically based on wholly unrealistic dreams of improving the world.

Don Quixote means well, but he’s quixotic.

He arrived at his quixotic mindset. Quixote inhaled books on Knight Errantry, then, believing he’s found the way, goes out to the countryside and wreaks havoc.

Don Quixote resembles many people in Success, either directly or loosely. This group reaches for betterment. That’s a wonderful quality. But they reach and get yanked into a powerful religion. These people read all the holy success scriptures Atomic Habits, Influence, Grit, Thinking Fast and Slow, Deep Work, The 4 Agreements, Why We Sleep, Think and Grow Rich, The Psychology of Money, The Obstacle is The Way, and more of that fare. They attend events like Gary V., Tony Robbins, Russell Brunson, Traffic and Conversion, and Ted Talks. They may even do Ayahuasca, breath work, Anger to Orgasm workshops, and other “juicy” and “delicious” oddities offered by “life coaches” promising to heal “trauma.”

These people hand over their agency to the homogenized collective. If you ask them what books changed their life, you can guess the answer instantly. They speak in glittering generalities and buzzwords. Their marketing campaigns look like everyone else’s. They treat the tautology the best investment is yourself as a business model.

As a result, these well-meaning people foolishly chase a utopia. They see giants when it’s really a windmill. They are exploitable and easily commanded. This group chases that ever-elusive, next level. That next level? Whatever is fashionable with gurus and the worshippers. That motivation is great. The impetus to attain those next levels is great. It’s reaching to get better. That’s a sterling principle and quality. But like Quixote, the impetus soars to cosmic edges. The worshipper loses agency, personal vision, and sensibility. Failure isn’t reflected on but rationalized and compared to an unverified anecdote read in a mindset book. Financial losses aren’t seen as “my business needs a more stable financial/economic model,” it’s reframed into cosmic reasons to chase conversions and better marketing.

Don Quixote, armed with lessons from errantry, chases his ideals to comedic levels. He has handed over his agency to the cosmic ideals he read in knight errantry. And, like an utter madman, lives out what he read in knight errantry books. He can’t see that’s he blinded by knight errantry. When he faces something real, he scurries away. But he’s quick to grasp a tale to rationalize his cowardice as brave. Don Quixote can’t see his own madness. He’s beyond the point of reason.

But Don Quixote does offer us wisdom in his foolishness. He believed in a sense of honor and duty. And in a way, he is admirable with his vision of duty. He wanted to do right. As misguided as he was by his own foolishness and madness, he moved towards something good. We can admire his belief in upholding oneself to high standards. We don’t need to be blinded, but we can recognize and aspire to the essence of what Don Quixote desired.

Don Quixote exists in contrast with Sancho Panza.

Sancho Panza is Don Quixote’s hapless sidekick. He’s at times passive-aggressive, selfish, resentful, gracious, humorous, empathetic, and slothful. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza mirror each other in one way, they adhere to proverbs and anecdotes. But Sancho is more like that person that quips a folksy answer to explain away everything. Yet we sense that the folksy downplaying acts as a guard.

For instance, you may know someone who leans on humor too much. As in, the humor becomes an excuse, a guard, as to why the person can’t execute a task. Or you may know that person who will use a folksy saying to ignore or downplay everything. It’s like the person who wants to lose weight, they say they want to go to the gym, but quip proverbs as to why they didn’t or can’t go. And their sayings, you’ve heard it before, you agree to it almost, but you know or sense it’s a guard. It’s said in an appeasing manner in hopes of you leaving them alone.

Sancho is that person. He’s stuck in his own way. He is told to do something, doesn’t do it, but to rationalize his not doing it, he comes up with agreeable folk sayings. And Sancho has all the sayings on hard work or bravery, but that’s it, it’s all sayings and little action. And when Don Quixote calls him out — which he does constantly — on his proverbs, Sancho placates Don Quixote with the right proverbs.

Sancho means well. He blindly follows Don Quixote. Don Quixote promised Sancho the world, and Sancho wants it. Though he’s aware Don Quixote is insane, Sancho still holds out hope that he can get something for nothing.

Many people in Success want success, naturally. But success is hard. It’s scary. It takes hard work, it takes luck, it takes failure. Whether you’re trying to start your own business or climb the career ladder, as you work towards something, you wade into unknowns. That unknown scares many. And some people want the recognition of being at the finish line without ever having waded into that unknown. And for this group, all the self-growth and business success books, the events, lessons, the look-at-me-hustle behaviors, all offer the social theatre of work. Some prefer this social theatre consciously. Most get learned into believing they must partake when in fact it’s superfluous and a distraction. It’s much easier to partake in the social theatre of posting about your “grind” than it is doing it. And for some, they come to believe that posting about the grind in a Facebook Group or reading a book like Think and Grow Rich is concomitant to doing the work. But it’s a distraction. A safe one (this behavior exemplifies one of many behaviors that I call, Hustle Signaling).

Sancho isn’t as bad as this. But he stays safe in his proverbs. He stays safe in the platitudes of Don Quixote.

Now, I could go on. As I said, my conversation with this book can expand well past this Recap & Haul. Don Quixote is packed with lessons and insights on human nature. Miguel Cervantes bakes in the good, the bad, and the ugly. At times you pity Don Quixote, at other times you’re laughing hysterically at his foibles.

The translation I read was readable. I’ve seen some qualms on it that it misses some parts. In time, I may read another translation of it. But if you want a readable one then Edith Grossman’s edition is great. If you speak Spanish, then get the original.

Don Quixote is almost one thousand pages. But, again, it’s readable, hilarious, and memorable. After reading it, you’ll notice its influence on movies, stories, shows, and writing. It’s quite a book, and it’s well worth the time.

The Socratic Method, Ward Farnsworth

I had it wrong.

I had the Socratic method as simply asking a bunch of questions to get to an almost nihilistic, hair-splitting impasse. Basically, be that kid who asks “why” to the point you can’t get anywhere. I was wrong. It isn’t that at all.

Yes, Socrates was a gadfly.

But Farnsworth elucidates the Socratic method and makes it accessible and memorable. I’ve read other books by Farnsworth. He does a great job of making the technical memorable and useful. How Farnsworth teaches in his books, you may not walk away remembering the technical term, but you walk away knowing how to recognize and apply the method.

The big takeaway, spotting inconsistencies. Spotting inconsistencies in someone’s point, spotting inconsistencies within yourself and your beliefs, and spotting inconsistencies all around you.

The way Farnsworth teaches it, you’ll spot it all the time. And I like the warmth Farnsworth brings. Here’s what I mean. A camp of people will pick up a book like this hoping to secretly prove everyone wrong. They will think they can covertly get their spouse to change or see things their way. Or maybe they can hop on Twitter and prove Joe Biden wrong. Or that they can instantly detect a weak argument and win. This sanctimonious camp thinks they can turn into bots spotting weak arguments and then making people apologize to them for being wrong and then doing whatever the bot bids.

Farnsworth will disappoint that group. He teaches the tact of the Socratic method. The Socratic method, done right, requires patience, empathy, and warmth.

That warmth struck me.

Spotting the inconsistencies in others requires spotting inconsistencies in yourself. But to spot well, you can’t attack yourself, even if you’re calling out some serious bullshit. It’s a matter of reflection, curiosity, and decisiveness. And as Farnsworth points out, some people will refuse to see their inconsistency. Before you leap and think, “a-HA! All Democrats/Republicans can’t see their own bullshit!” That’s not what he’s showing. Farnsworth details empathetic ways to get people questioning things, yourself included. But if someone starts to get heated, or starts to attack you, he shows ways to get to an impasse because the battle likely isn’t worth it.

And when you’re able to warmly see inconsistencies, it helps you think. It helps you speak up. It does help you argue when need be, but you argue with a sense of compassion and calm.

It’s a wonderful book. For my copywriting crowd, the Elunchus is a great tool to use in your copy. In short, you spot inconsistencies with your competitor’s promises and claims, and then you detail that inconsistency, and, in your marketing, pay off how you offer something better.

For the non-copywriters, The Socratic Method is a great guide to get some critical thinking. You can spot the root issue with bad arguments. You’ll learn an appreciation of good arguments, whether you agree with them or not. And most important, you’ll be able to spot inconsistencies in your own beliefs in a way that doesn’t overly criticize yourself.

It will not hurt to read this book.

The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler – The Little Sister, Raymond Chandler

If you’re a reader of mine, then you know my love of Raymond Chandler.

These works hit me on a palpable level. I love it when you get close enough to an author, and their work can cause visceral reactions. Whether it’s emotional, deep contemplation, or the hair standing on your arm, it’s a special feeling.

First, the Notebooks of Raymond Chandler. Chandler kept heaps of personal notebooks. He had them all burned, but two survived, barely. While he may not have wanted them to survive, it’s a boon to us they did.

In the notebooks, you feel Chandler’s purpose. You feel the heartbeat of his writing. He cared for the craft, he respected the craft, and at times, it drove him to his edges.

But one part of the notebook stood out to me in particular. His open letter to Hollywood.

Recently, I visited Hollywood. And I stayed one block from the fictional home of Chandler’s famous character, Philip Marlowe. The building Marlowe lived in and worked in exists and still stands. And many other haunts of both Chandler and Marlowe exist, like Musso and Frank’s restaurant.

Having visited, then reading this open letter, Marlowe’s world and Chandler’s purpose came to life for me. Chandler put Marlowe in the heart of Hollywood. I see why. And it gives so much depth to Marlowe. And Hollywood took Chandler’s first book, The Big Sleep, and put it on the big screen. It starred Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. It was a hit. It’s a great movie too.

The open letter to Hollywood in Notebooks was written after that movie, as was the Little Sister.

Personally, after visiting, and reading that open letter and The Little Sister, Chandler’s purpose, his devotion to his craft, and his sensitivity hit me. I felt a man burned out and shocked at the phoniness, shallowness, and self-righteousness of Hollywood. I felt a man questioning himself, yet still confident in his art.

In The Little Sister Chandler bares his soul and leaves it all on Hollywood and Vine. He takes the reader behind Hollywood’s glamorous doors and shows its absurd reality. We also see Chandler exhausted and let down. Behind the glitz and glamour, exists pure shallowness and phoniness. Chandler is attracted to the glamour yet appalled to nihilistic levels. And when he thinks he can take no more when he wants nothing to do with it, something pulls him back; the art, the truth, some glimmer of hope pulls him back and keeps him in Hollywood.

Also personally, the parts of Little Sister where Marlowe feels like he’s had it, where he doesn’t recognize who stares back at him in the mirror, but he goes through the motions, that stood the hair on my arms. Towards the end of my scammier direct-response days, I began losing hope. I questioned my professional life. What I had hailed when I first started, after living it, succeeding at it, I saw how empty and nonsensical it all was. The famed personalities were train wrecks. People were mired in financial dire straits, constantly. The products were utter garbage. I was making great money, I was knocking on the door of a seven-figure income, but I felt off. I didn’t feel right. I knew my offers sold bullshit. I ruminated also if I made the right career choice after my success in the car business. I criticized myself harshly for getting into something that felt so off. I wondered if I should move back east, and get back into the car business; to use the weight of my last name and now my newfound, tested, and successful marketing skills. But writing kept pulling me back. Something writing, I felt it in my bones. And here I am today.

I’m not saying Chandler and I share the same story. But I am saying, I felt his disillusion. I felt his manic battle between purpose and why do this anymore? Plus The Big Sleep was one of the books that helped me change course. Marlowe will do what’s right without grandstanding or preaching. That influenced me to head where I am today.

Chandler may write a hard-boiled detective novel, but like Marlowe, he’s a sensitive man. Sensitive in the fact that he cares. And that honesty and integrity matter, especially in art.

Read Chandler.

Intellectuals and Race, Thomas Sowell

Like Chandler, if you know me, I love Sowell. For an intellectual standard or hero, Sowell is it for me. Intellectuals and Race proves eye-opening.

In our era, race is hip. The Black Lives Matter coterie permeates cities. And authors like Robin DiAngelo and Abrams Kendi get $20,000 for an hour of their time.

We hear all these concepts on race today, but where do they arise from? We get words like “systemic racism” but what does that actually mean?

Sowell grounds it and tears it apart with facts and evidence.

Race is a touchy subject. And Sowell marshals arguments that destroy most of the fashionable beliefs on race today.

Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow

Ron Chernow has a knack. He has a knack for grabbing you by the feet and dragging you into the fire of his figures. He shows you their disposition, the time they lived in, the ideas they encountered, and the figures and rivals they encountered.

I read Washington by Chernow. Washington is a person to study. Hamilton is more interesting.

It’s not to say Washington is boring. He set a standard to uphold for American Presidents. He was the right man to run the newly created US government. But Hamilton created most of that government. Washington lacked the mind to originate Constitutional ideas, and, like most founders, lacked the mind to create the American economic system. The current framework America lives and breathes in, Hamilton birthed it. Hamilton had the knack to take the otherworldly ideas and visions and make them small. In other words, he pulled the soaring visions from the clouds, grounded them, and built a framework that became American Democracy. And as he built that framework, other brilliant men, like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, believed Hamilton was running a con or playing with voodoo. Jefferson, once arriving in office, went so far as to investigate Hamilton’s system. He grumbled when, after the exhaustive investigation, the conclusion reported, “Hamilton created the perfect system.”

Naturally, that makes for an interesting man.

What stood out to me, among the many things that stood out, is that we see the human side. Hamilton had a brutal childhood growing up in the West Indies. When he got to America, the erudite young man owned massive ambitions and wished to put his brutal upbringing behind him. And he did. Hamilton was an erudite tour de force. His talents and hard work opened doors for him. He became, well, Alexander Hamilton.

Hamilton is a noble figure. He’s a remarkable man. But he was human. His greatness was combined with weakness. For instance, his inability to let things was both a strength and a weakness. On the strength side, it drove his purpose to create and uphold the Union. On the weakness side, it led to his biggest blunders and to his death. Also, for a man who knew human nature inside and out, he got the wool pulled over his eyes by a conning woman and her skeezy husband. He also couldn’t see that admitting to the affair, in the most honest of fashions, with outright radical honesty, sharing way too much detail, backfired horribly in the public (but, oddly enough, his wife didn’t seem to care). But how was he to know? How was he to know that admitting to one thing would backfire? At other times, when he attacked someone who slighted him, Hamilton made the right choice. And sometimes, it was so off the mark, one wonders how the hell could the man who created the brilliance of the US Government, the three branches of the federal government, wrote most of The Federalist Papers, a military badass, and a man who presciently grasped human nature, not see that?

That’s what’s great about Chernow. He shows the human side. Hamilton lived under high stakes most of his life. He held himself to a high standard and sometimes failed his own standards. He was incredibly self-confident, but incredible self-confidence doesn’t equate 100% happiness as self-help gurus, Yoga influencers, and sciolists sell to the general population. That makes Hamilton accessible. That makes this book accessible. That packs the book with manifold insight and enjoyment.

Read Chernow. There are many reasons why you should.

But here’s a writer’s and reader’s reason.

I love reading him because I need a dictionary. Before you react and think all he uses is ten-dollar words, he doesn’t. Chernow aims to use the right word to encapsulate the right meaning. He’s the kind of writer that expands your vocabulary in the right way. For instance, Chernow knows when to use limn and when to use portray. Limn is a verb, one we don’t see often. It means to outline in clear sharp detail. Portray means to describe in words, or to play the role of. Chernow phrases carefully and pragmatically. It’s like his work, he’s careful and pragmatic. And with that careful pragmatism, he adds rich colors to his writing. Those colors, the words he uses, breathe life, humanity, and accessibility into the towering figures he writes about.

Haul

Drink, David Nutt

I sometimes listen to the Art of Manliness podcast. And Shawn Smith on Twitter, someone I respect, mentioned the episode featuring David Nutt on drinking.

I listened to the podcast and enjoyed it. Maybe it’s the myth-busting in me, but David Nutt spoke a lot about the common myths regarding drinking. For instance, that whole “drink a glass of wine a day for the anti-oxidants” is bunk.

What I liked, Nutt didn’t moralize. He said people like drinking for a reason, but on the whole, outside of minor social lubrication, no real benefit to alcohol exists.

Since hearing the interview I’ve been meaning to pick up his book. And as you can see, I found it.

Raymond Chandler

Admittedly, I have not read all of the Chandler books. Nor did I have all of them in my collection. I went ahead and changed that. I can’t wait to read the rest of Chandler, and I know he’s an author I will return to for the rest of my days.

Talk To Me, T.C. Boyle

I’ve never heard of T.C. Boyle.

One of the places I get book recommendations is the print magazine of The National Review. (The National Review also hosts two podcasts, The Bookmonger and The Great Books where I find other recommendations.)

But the review for T.C. Boyle was zany. That made me want to check out this book.

John McWhorter

Two different books with two different feels. I’ve read a number of McWhorter articles over the years. While my politics don’t align with his, I’ve always admired his writing and respected his thought. Nine Nasty Words got a great review from The National Review and a few other writers I admire also mentioned it.

Woke Racism I’m looking forward to. McWhorter is a Liberal, and he excoriates current Progressive beliefs on race (Black Lives Matter, Critical Race Theory, Ta-Nehisi Coates, etc.). McWhorter has long said, and I agree, that these “anti-racist” movements infantilize black people. He further poses, and I agree, that it’s racist in the sense that it creates a “movement” that allows a certain faction of white people to feel better about themselves. McWhorter never minces words.

A Conflict of Visions, Thomas Sowell

Sowell is my intellectual hero. I’ve said it before and will continue to say it, he’s one of the greatest thinkers of our time. A Conflict of Visions is his look at why certain political ideologies differ and some why behind that.

War of Worlds, Niall Ferguson

I shake my head sometimes. I respect and admire Niall Ferguson. I read Doom by him and loved it (If you want perspective on Covid-19, read it). And he might be the only guest on Tyler Cowen’s podcast where I listened to his interviews twice. So why shake my head? Well, you’d figure for a fan, that you’d have an idea of his significant works. I had no idea he wrote an esteemed book on the atrocities of the 20th century. I plan to read this after I read Victor Davis Hanson’s The Second World Wars.

The Landmark Thucydides

I had planned to reread The History of the Peloponnesian War. And to do an analytical read. But I haven’t come around to it yet. Yet, one of my favorite thinkers, Victor Davis Hanson, mentioned this translation. Like above with Niall Ferguson, I can’t believe I missed this one. The Landmark is translated by Robert Strassler. From what I gather, he is the preeminent Thucydides historian and translator.

The Penguin Edition I read was good. But it missed the maps and needed context. Strassler put in the maps, and also according to many thinkers I admire, he has the best and most readable translation. And he offers notes that help guide the reader in what’s going on. This one will be read soon.

Firepower, Paul Lockhart

I heard this book mentioned a few times on a few podcasts I like, The Editors and The Victor Davis Hanson Show. I believe I heard author Jack Carr mention it. It’s about how various weaponry altered the course of war.

James Madison, Jay Cost

This pick is part of my political rabbit hole. I’ve been reading some books on the Founding Fathers. I’m familiar with Madison after I read The Federalist Papers. And more so now after reading Hamilton. Madison is an interesting figure. Some call him the first politician in the modern sense.

The Last King, Andrew Roberts

As I’ve been reading a lot about our Founding Fathers, the one man they castigated, King George III. So what about King George? By chance, a new and exhaustive biography has been written. I plan to get to this one after I read David McCullogh’s John Adams, and Jay Cost’s Madison.

Till the next haul.

Jim

P.S. My two ruminating paragraphs. These two paragraphs show my fleshing out themes for my book.

The Success world, both the professional and personal development parts, sells success but in reality it offers safety, safety from failure, safety from originality, safety from the unknown, and safety from being wrong. I’m not saying most who fall under this world’s sway want safety in the sense of complacency. No. Many of these people do want and are reaching for success. But most if not all, divided between those conscious and those unconscious, see the Success fare — the tips, coaching, secrets, methods, etc. — as safe. For instance, a man can pay $10,000 for a weekend in Malibu Beach with Garrett White. That man can play pretend Navy Seal, journal and cry, and get insulted by someone with a drill sergeant complex. All done because it’s safe. Garrett sells that man a shortcut rite of passage promising him that he will become a “self-assured and evolved man with a group of brothers.” In reality, that man needs to lift heavier weights, seek a good therapist, know and uphold himself to masculine values, work hard, read some ancient philosophy and literature, and accept that shit will happen. But that requires work. Garrett White offers safety from that work.

The marketing and business success “secrets” also offer safety. The tips and methods offer an escape from failure and the unknown. It’s “this works according to this expert and many like it.” It’s safety in numbers. It’s a lot like Pick Up Artists. Men sought Pick Up Artists to get the “line” that wins the girl. Instead of putting yourself on the line with “Hi, I’m Jim…” the line, the method, promised to minimize failure and minimize the unknown. And if the line or method failed, one can avoid personal responsibility and scapegoat the method or tactic. It’s not to say you can’t learn basics. Anyone would do well to learn basics. But a point happens when a person needs to do it on their own. They need to put their neck on the line. They can’t always keep the training wheels on. They need to inject their agency into what they do.

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I tried forcing it out, but what came out was forced. So I’m going to put it back into my ruminating brain and aimless walks.

So, today, I have a haul and some recaps. I recap a few books in the photo.

Recap: How To See, David Salle

Most books on art, most conversations on art, spew jargon. David Salle’s book does not spew jargon. He avoids the highfalutin theory that pseudo-intellectuals and four-flushers love to spout. Instead, the renowned artist and art critic delivers a clear and simple way to see art.

Salle centers his book around two questions:

• How does it make you feel?

• What does it make you think of?

He teaches you to ignore the standard “What does it mean?” or the “What kind of fancy theme am I supposed to be seeing here to sound like I’m cultured and not some sling blade moron?”

I love art.

I can’t say I’m an expert. I barely know the labels like abstract expressionism or realism. I couldn’t go to a museum and tell you, ah, this is a post-modern realism take on the abstractionist expression of the pre-industrial world.

And that’s why I found Salle’s book freeing. He teaches how to have a personal conversation with a work of art. He also teaches how to cultivate and develop taste.

And it’s a selfish conversation. Yes, selfish.

Why selfish?

Because it’s between you and the painting, not between you and what you think would sound good to an art critic.

Salle bakes in a theme that the more you let a painting move you the better your eye gets. You see good art. You can grasp a piece’s meaning. You can also respect a piece even if it doesn’t speak to you.

Furthermore, Salle teaches how to spot shtick and crap. But Salle doesn’t teach the reflexive “it’s crap” he walks through why something stinks. And you develop a radar for it.

People think of learning art as learning culture. And when we think of learning culture we often envision a wooden dork or some emo hipster that acts like every waking second of his life resembles being dumped on prom night.

But that isn’t the case. Salle shows how to grasp culture and art on all levels, lowbrow to highbrow, and how to appreciate each level.

I argue that developing aesthetic tastes provides an important skill professionally and personally.

Let’s look at the professional side.

Consider a copywriter.

A copywriter writes words that sell. But those words are never alone. Most sales letters aren’t a straight word document with the copy. The words sit next to a picture, the pitch is said on video and delivered by someone, and the words go to a particular market with particular tastes.

The best copywriters I know own a decent eye to best present their copy (one of the most overlooked skills, and one never taught). They will work with the design person (many online designers stink) or they will voice that the stock photos cheapen the value of the product. That eye, that sense, builds the ability to say, “you know, this font and color scheme looks a little childish for this market.” Or “you know, the font and colors, it’s too fancy; we’re selling socks here, not hand-built Ferrari’s.”

And on the general professional front, cultivating aesthetic taste can help you present your business’s mission better. It plants your flag in the ground and waves it for the audience you want.

On the personal side, the skill is manifold. One skill, good art can enrich your life. You can enjoy a museum nearly anywhere and that colors that location for you.

But developing taste does something else. I opine it helps you spot qualities. You can sense and intuit qualities about a person, a restaurant, a business, or a book. I’m not saying that good people all have an amazing eye for art. I am saying, however, developing that sense for the quality of something helps you see the qualities in others, good or bad, owning or lacking.

That’s why a book like Salle’s is well worth the read.

White Guilt, Shelby Steele

Shelby Steele is a dangerous man.

Shelby Steele’s name surfaced often during my political deep dive rabbit hole. When I discovered Thomas Sowell, Steele’s name surfaced.

I gathered that Steele was a leading conservative thinker. I wasn’t sure at first which topics or philosophies. But soon I realized he spoke on race. When the Los Angeles Times called conservative candidate Larry Elder, The Black Face of White Supremacy Steele’s name came up a lot in conservative circles.

And you may have heard his name in the news. Amazon at first rejected Steele’s recent documentary What Killed Michael Brown on its streaming platform. Amazon implied the documentary was racist.

In sum, Steele is a lightning rod in left-wing circles. Those circles call him abhorrent things: Uncle Tom, race traitor, race denier, Stockholm Syndrome sufferer, plagued with internalized whiteness, and, appallingly, a house n-word.

Why?

Steele is a black conservative. And “black conservative” to progressive Democrats, most academics and intellectuals, and in popular American media, dregs up all types of demeaning epithets and insults.

Again, why?

Steele writes on race. A topic that the Left — politicians, pundits, academics, media, etc. — claims as its own. And he disproves their theories, brutally and empirically.

White Guilt was my first foray into Shelby Steele. Steele’s prose works like a master fencer. He deploys a graceful, elegant, and vulnerable writing style that assassinates empirically. He assassinates Critical Race Theory, affirmative action, virtue-signaling, race peddlers like Ta-Nahesi Coates or Al Sharpton, and much of the progressive theories on race, gender, and politics.

Let’s compare Steele to Coates.

Ta-Nahesi Coates writes a lot on why everything is racist. I managed to endure his book Between The World and Me.

Remember when I talked about why developing an eye for art is a good thing? The same goes in writing. Coates writes in a style that’s pseudo-fancy. He’s not impossible to read, rather, he forces a poetic style to sound deep. He uses a style that appeals to the type of person on Instagram that uses the hashtag “wanderlust” and virtue signals at any chance.

But try-hard prose aside, Coates’s book is self-pitying. He moralizes, infantilizes African Americans, feeds a victim narrative, and panders and patronizes to his reader base.

I can go on with Coates, but Coates centers his prose more like a crazy ex that slams doors and screams “you never understand me.”

Steele, on the other hand, captures the beauty, the rawness, and the vulnerability that eludes Coates. Steele opens up personally. And it’s deeply personal. When racism rears its head, with Steele, you feel all its ugly and demeaning aspects. But Steele does what Coates can’t, he guides the reader with a clear and cogent argument. He takes you through the ugliest parts of racism and provides perspective.

While the book is on race, Steele teaches ways to consider difficult decisions or obstacles.

In other words, Steele doesn’t navel-gaze.

Hear me out.

Many “success” books or “live your best life” lessons, in reality, teach you to navel-gaze. For instance, I love Stoicism. I find it a powerful philosophy teaching tangible ways to live a good, moral, and upstanding life. But many Stoic popularizers today — Ryan Holiday, Massimo Pigliucci — turn Stoicism into an odd navel-gazing philosophy.

In the realm of Success, gurus tell you to gratitude journal or to be asking yourself at all times “does this make me money?” But all this looking and questioning, it’s navel-gazing.

Steele inspires the reader to put their life, their agency, into their hands. It’s a powerful theme. Whereas someone like Coates puts it off that he can never rise (despite him becoming a millionaire) and it’s on others to fix it. And gurus make it sound as if you can’t rise in your life unless you pay them to show you how.

A fantastic read and fantastic masterclass into powerful writing.

There’s No Free Lunch: 250 Economic Truths, David Bahnsen

There’s No Free Lunch is the kind of business or success tract we need.

David Bahnsen hosts two National Review Podcasts. I tune into them here or there. I like his sense of humor and his salt-of-the-earth vibe. But he’s also a monster economist and runs a top-notch private wealth management firm.

This book reads more like a daily inspirational. But you can read it straight through. Each passage features a quote from a famous economist, like Adam Smith or Thomas Sowell, then, Bahnsen delivers a memorable and pithy insight.

And the insights are plenty.

A big insight that surfaced for me, most marketing and success gurus hyperfocus their audience on the results. As in, you run an ad, and you look solely at the results. But while that’s a critical component, it misses that on the other side of those conversions, on the other side of the dollar signs, are individuals.

Bahnsen shows that economics is more than math and a spreadsheet. He shows that economics measures human flourishing and human action. That flourishing part derives from commerce benefitting both business and consumer.

Returning to my marketing point, it’s easy to over-focus on percentages or a profit boost. Today’s software measures every little thing in a sales funnel or ad campaign, and the gurus' hail that making money makes you more valuable to society. That messaging and considering only what the software measures distances us from this fact: individuals buy your products. The distance blinds and seduces many into the most aggressive, egregious, and unethical parts of marketing. And if you criticize someone falling into this stupor, they reflexively fall back on the guru trope of, “you’re a hater, and you hate making money.”

Why that fall back?

People that fall deep into the most aggressive parts of online marketing often buy into the belief that money equates personal value and that high conversion rates make them smarter and better. If you call out the lies or that their offers are scammy, it attacks their ethical vanity.

I’m all for making money and all for making a big fat income. I love it. But human flourishing works two ways. In business, it’s the business making money, and what that money does for that business. And for the consumer, it’s their life being improved in some fashion. Many online marketers overlook the latter.

Another part I loved from the book, Bahnsen shows that the disinterested third party — gurus, consultants, experts, events — people hire often ends up as a waste of money.

I thought of masterminds, gurus, income experts, and the Garrett White or Jim Kwik fare of sciolists. Bahnsen shows why these high-paid people have zero skin in your game.

Gurus never think about your business. For instance, someone like Ryan Deiss runs an expensive mastermind. As I’ve pointed out in my article on masterminds, Deiss, and no one else in that room wakes up and thinks about your business. And they don’t live your business. Deiss and others will never know the nuance. And the ideas they bloviate, often grand and said to impress others, are consequence-free. Your numbers are never looked at, the research and development of the product are never looked at. Instead, you pay thousands upon thousands of dollars to hear themes of “hustle and grow!”

Bahnsen isn’t advising people to not seek wisdom. But he implies to self-govern and lean into your decisions and learn from them.

I believe a nuanced line exists. It’s great to educate yourself, to ask for help, to gain as much wisdom as you can. But the gurus push you into thinking they offer the keys to the kingdom, and they offer it quicker. They sell shortcuts around what you need most, to learn as you go.

Another aspect I enjoyed, take this old chestnut from gurus, “paying attention to politics is stupid!!!!!”

I agree that watching MSNBC or Fox News all day wastes time. But as Bahnsen shows, politics is human nature. A person’s individual character, and politics reside in that character.

And your business exists in a political world. Completely ignoring it, or hoping for a Socialist Commune or the Ayn Rand Utopia proves another waste of time.

Your business runs in the present. It runs in reality, and no, you can’t stop paying taxes or have the Bolsheviks come back.

So having some information of depth and substance on politics, you can keep an eye on particular forces that may affect your business. You don’t need to be a policy hawk, but your business exists in a political world, its legal frameworks, the beliefs and stances of your customers, and changing tides. So understanding a bit keeps you on your game.

To finish, this book provided a lot of inspiration. I opine Bahnsen’s book is the kind of book that best motivates and teaches. Highly recommended.

Haul

Aristotle

I’ve read bits and pieces of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. I’ve yet to read anything beyond those bits and pieces, and it’s time to rectify that. I’ve read Plato. I enjoy Plato yet some ideas line up and some I disagree with. I’ve voiced that, and I’ve heard that I’m going to love Aristotle. I plan to read Ethics soon and likely will twice.

Raymond Chandler, The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler

If you’re an avid reader of mine, you know I love Chandler. This book features his ruminations on writing and some other goodies.

Word Workout, Charles Harrington Elster

Elster’s Verbal Advantage I consider a must-read for any serious writer or reader. He shows a word, then teaches everything related to that word. At the end of a section, he has a test, and not an easy one. But Elster teaches word-smithing better than anyone.

You would think teaching words would be dry, but Elster isn’t. I found Verbal Advantage engaging and a lot of fun and a humbling challenge. But while he teaches a big word like my favorite, sciolist he shows all the other words related to it. And his teaching style paints a clear picture of various words, and when and how to use them.

The battle in good writing is finding the right word. You can use one word to capture a phrase or pick the right verb to paint action. If you’re a copywriter the same rule applies. But in copy, often, the struggle is working to sound fresh and novel and not like everyone else or a salesman on crack.

If you’re a serious writer, Elster is a must-read. If you’re a serious reader, I highly recommend Elster.

Word Workout works like Verbal Advantage. I’m looking forward to getting into this one.

The Great Society, Amity Shlaes

Amity Shlaes is one of my favorite writers. Coolidge and The Forgotten Man were excellent. She’s a heavyweight thinker and writes in the style of Thomas Sowell, but with more excitement. This book is about the 1960s and the Great Society plans instilled by the government.

Killer Angels, Michael Shaara

My aunt grabbed me this one for Christmas. It’s a famous book. I’ve heard of it, and have intended to read it for years. It’s the second book in a trilogy. I plan to go in order when I get to it.

The Socratic Method, Ward Farnsworth

I loved Farnsworth’s Rhetoric. Farnsworth uses a ton of examples to teach. You may not know the method or remember the name, but how he teaches it, you get it. So I’m looking forward to his unpacking of the Socratic Method.

1984, George Orwell

1984 comes up a lot in current media. On one end, many on the right reference Orwell’s 1984 when they push against Woke ideologies and far-left progressive politics. Orwell’s book acts prophetically with the amount of political correctness going on and the expanding reach of the government in our lives during this pandemic.

On the flip side, the Orwell estate has agreed to someone writing a feminist version of 1984 based on a character. I find this eye-rolling and sad.

If you wish to know why Shelby Steele in White Guilt answers it. Steele also shows why ideologies like Intersectional Feminist Theory simply make a victim of women and attack all other things.

The stunt — and that’s what it is, a stunt — to make 1984 feminist displays chronological snobbery (a fallacy that we’re smarter in the present time than the past) and an attempt to “erase the wrongs of the past.”

For these reasons, I decided to pick it up and read it. I read it in high school, and I remember reading it when I did a study abroad in college. But will crack into it again soon.

David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

My aunt and I went to The Christmas Carol play here in Denver. I was in a Dicken’s mood. I love the Christmas Carol, it’s my favorite Christmas story. I’ve never read much Dickens. I believe in college I got maybe halfway through A Tale of Two Cities.

My aunt and I went to the bookstore the morning after the play, I wanted to pick up a Dicken’s work. In 2022 I plan to inject more fiction into my reading routine. And I plan to tackle a few classics. That’s why I grabbed this one.

The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

My aunt raved about it, said it’s one of her favorites, I know it’s a classic, I grabbed it.

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People hold a tendency to hoist authors and their books onto a pedestal.

It’s easy to do this.

Books can alter our lives in many ways. A passage can shift a belief, teach us a business method or a story can walk us through a difficult personal decision.

It’s easy for us to admire and respect an author and their ideas.

But Success — personal and professional development camps — pushes us into blind belief versus engaging with the ideas and conversing with the author. Hustle Culture and Success Porn push us towards “Leaders are Readers” and here’s how to get the secret key to your Utopia by reading any book in one hour and extracting its key money-making secrets.

I argue that our past education leaves another trace on us: we look at books, correctly, as things to learn from. But we bow down to the author or ideas in the book. We miss that the author is a person with flaws. And we often miss, especially if we admire or respect that author, that their book may contain flaws.

As a result, we turn books into Delphic Oracles and their authors into mystical sages.

And how about the book's lessons?

Seeking a book’s secrets feels active but proves passive.

Why?

We hunt for quotes injecting us with a motivational opiate. That removes you, the reader, from the picture. It removes your experiences, knowledge, thoughts, questions, and character out of the picture.

Here’s the better reading aim: work to leave the book on the same intellectual footing as the author.

And this is tough.

Why?

You or I will never exist in the league of David Hume as far as intellect. You may be brilliant. But no matter your brilliance, some books, some authors, are, indeed, smarter.

It’s intimidating to a tactful, self-aware person to think they’re going to read David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature and work to leave on the same intellectual ground.

But what matters most in your reading: the aim.

What does aim mean?

Active reading.

You engage with the words, the ideas, the story, and the author. In non-fiction, you raise questions, reflect, and agree or disagree. With fiction, you chew over the words, reflect on the characters, and place yourself into the story’s world.

Another benefit of doing this, many books, authors, experts, as well as courses, will turn into dross. Business and success books turn to dross the fastest.

Why?

Because it’s easy to notice the cliched writing and shallow, rehashed ideas.

Work to converse with the author. Engage with the ideas. That draws out the lessons, the wisdom, and all the other benefits. It connects you to the book, you can feel the arguments or feel the story. Eschew seeking the “secret trick” or waving the book around as the “method” to find Utopia.

Now, you might think engaging with a book robs us of enjoyment, and that you must take things super serious and slow. That’s wrong. Reading fiction slowly, even if it’s a guilty pleasure book, pulls you into that story’s world. You can escape into it, hang with the characters, and the story grows vivid in its color and detail.

Enough ranting, let’s recap.

Washington, Ron Chernow

An absolute masterpiece.

It’s fun reading a book this size and when you need to put it down, to do so, disturbs you.

Chernow delivers an exhaustive biography of George Washington.

From a historical perspective, we get the chronological nuts and bolts of America’s first President. Then we get an accurate analysis of Washington the man. We find his disposition, character, nature, strengths, insecurities, and personal values.

Next, we find the history of the era. Chernow provides a camera as we watch Washington live in his time. Last, we get the conceptual nature of Washington. The period he existed in, the ideas, philosophy, and outcomes and consequences all mixed into a pot. And how Chernow achieved all that, in a balanced manner — not with a political or “lessons of leadership” agenda — is a gift.

Tied to my opening theme, gurus and experts lead you to read a book like Washington solely for lessons on “leadership.” And the book packs leadership lessons.

But I argue that to treat Washington as a categorical leadership tract cheapens the book. And it’ll make you look ad hoc for quotes or phrases that fit current “leadership” themes. But Washington was anything but the “always do something leader!”

He possessed the right qualities popular in today’s leadership literature: he maintained a set schedule, he woke early, he read the great books, and he owned a self-development bent.

But duty-bound describes his leadership. Washington liked to work within a framework versus being the leader that “takes charge and makes his own way.” He could also be rather indecisive. He would ruminate over a decision to the point of self-defeat.

Washington’s duty-bound style misaligns with popular leadership ideologies. Today’s leadership books trumpet ideas of scorching new paths and taking massive action. And to also perform social theatre, like, eating last, or hosting meetings around the company’s “why.”

Instead, in Washington, we find reality and the nuance of human nature. We find a complicated man who at times was thrust into roles that were over his head. At other times his demeanor cemented the American democracy.

Washington lacked the mind to originate constitutional ideas. Yet genius surrounded him: Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, and more. Those geniuses bandied about philosophical concepts from thinkers like Aristotle, Locke, Hume, Hobbes, and Thucydides. Washington, insecure regarding his level of education and sensing things were over his head, read those thinkers to grasp the ideas. If he struggled, he would defer to someone like Hamilton.

In a way, Washington played an ideal conduit to the framer’s ideas. He got the playbook and ran it. He also lacked the “do something and take charge!” impulse. That impulse, we learn via leadership books, is a good trait, but not the only trait of a good leader. For instance, the constitution and America would likely have stumbled if a more egotistical person, like John Adams, was first out of the gate to run the country.

Washington maintained patience. He worked to get the Constitution up and running.

Books like Washington are must-reads.

One, pure enjoyment. You can read this for fun. Chernow makes it a page-turner.

Two, reading it actively, engaging with it, or reflecting on it, the conceptual depth surfaces. And that’s where the book can work for you. If you’re concerned about today’s political debates, this book has something for you. If you’re curious about the start of a so-far successful democracy, you’ll find out why here. If you’re curious about what made Washington tick, it’s here.

Discrimination and Disparities

Thomas Sowell swings a blunt, empirical ax at fashionable social justice movements (Woke and Progressive politics) today.

Sowell details two parts, as you can guess, discrimination and disparities.

Discrimination entails race, sex, income, gender, and education. As well as more political aspects, such as trade, capitalism, communism, and realities behind “imperialization” and “colonization.”

Disparities entail income inequality, gender gap difference, class, exploitation, countries, and so on.

Sowell expounds on why solutions intended to end discrimination and disparities fail.

Let’s consider disparity.

Sowell points out, empirically, that disparity is natural. It happens with humans, in nature, and everywhere. For instance, geography plays a key role in why some civilizations thrived and others didn’t. Certain port towns owned advantages over other towns due to geography. In New York City, big ships can pull right in. In other coastal cities, either the water is too shallow or contains something like too many poisonous snakes, or breeds diseases like malaria. Certain port towns worked out better than others due to disparities.

The same happens in business or sports. Some people luck out and some own gifted advantages.

Yet many see disparities as a wrong to fix.

Today, it’s trendy to claim New York City found success due to racism. A group claiming that, makes it sound as if white men, in solidarity, conspired to make New York City a success at the expense of another group. The ports, the luck, the time, none of that matters. Sowell doesn’t minimize that ill has happened. Yet the intent behind New York City wasn’t, “a ha!… let’s go to this geographic location, screw over this group, and make a lot of money at the expense of another city full of people we don’t like, and together, we can enjoy our privilege.”

Land grabs and violence have occurred in history everywhere and with all groups of people. Much of it is abhorrent in nature, and we must recognize the abhorrent parts, but self-flagellating ourselves or trying to end disparity does nothing but harm.

And Sowell argues from facts. Given today’s current themes of social justice, you’d do well to read this to gain a sober perspective.

And as I’ll show below, I opine this book shows why pushing the “Big Plan” or trying a radical and sudden change often leads to more headaches. Grab the book here.

The Forgotten Man

I loved Coolidge by Amity Shlaes. And I love Coolidge, the man, and president, more after reading The Forgotten Man.

Amity Shlaes is a writer to study. How she paces the reader, how she details empirical evidence — a way that makes it real and shows the consequences — delivers a masterclass in storytelling. Most copywriting courses teach that you need to press emotions at all times. But some products, in fact, many products, don’t lend themselves to that. As I’ve said before, despite what sales trainers and copy experts proclaim, people aren’t suffering severe emotional lacerations using a product.

If you’re a copywriter, you’d do well to get into Amity Shlaes’s prose style.

Ok…

The Forgotten Man details the Great Depression in the United States. It looks at the two presidential administrations, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and what happened.

In particular, Shlaes looks at the famed New Deal put forth by Roosevelt.

If you’re at all familiar with the Great Depression, the common belief tells us that FDR and the New Deal either pulled America out of the Depression or that both saved America from disaster. That’s all canards.

The Great Depression forever changed the American landscape, but not in the way you think. It changed how Americans see the Executive branch, aka the President. The president went from behind the scenes, to rock star celebrity status. And it changed how the political parties are seen. In fact, it fomented the fashionable victimhood and rage against Western culture.

Before the Depression, Coolidge turned down running for president for another term. His famous Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover ran and won in a landslide. Hoover was famous for his rescue efforts in America and abroad. He was a brilliant engineer and wildly successful businessman.

Hoover was a celebrity. He reveled in being famous. And when America elected him, he, like many enjoying business success, believed that success in one area means your ideas and opinions will work in all areas. And Hoover owned the belief that he knew best and could fix anything.

The common misconception says that the Black Tuesday crash caused the Depression. It didn’t. The market climbed back but then a few issues surfaced. And at that point, Hoover couldn’t but help to get involved. With his fame, his business success, he thought he could instantly “right” the country and make it better. Instead of doing what Coolidge did, ride it out, he tried to fix things. Hoover created an utter mess.

Hoover, today, gets a lot of the blame for the Depression. FDR deserves blame for that myth; FDR deserves more blame than Hoover.

FDR took Hoover’s plans and kept them going. He doubled down harder on Hoover’s failures. But FDR added a cherry on top, the Soviet-inspired New Deal.

Yes, the New Deal, pushed by FDR, was in fact, inspired by Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and most of all — Joseph Stalin.

FDR built and kept a “brain trust” of then-famous progressive intellectuals. These intellectuals went to the Soviet Union and with their rosy-colored Marxist sentiments, loved what they saw. Despite this group seeing poverty, famine, and near backward living, they felt the Soviet Union was headed in the right direction philosophically. They praised Stalin and his plans.

The New Deal and FDR made the depression worse. A lot worse.

Nothing improved under FDR. While some of the programs made progress as far as transportation and roads, the jobs were transitory. For instance, Calvin Coolidge had an unemployment rate of 1.8%. FDR, between 15-30%.

But here’s a theme I noticed as it pertains to today’s deification of “action” and “success.”

Let’s tie in, Washington, and Discrimination & Disparities.

We get lambasted today with, “take massive action.” Or truisms likes “action beats inaction.” We can find books like “The Magic of Thinking Big” and accessory books teaching secrets to attain that “big action” via a prison-like daily routine.

We get it. Take massive action. Think big, dream big, and when it’s time to act, act big.

Possessing strong self-motivation bestows an advantage. But buying into the hype of take massive action! can create dire straits.

Here’s what I mean.

Let’s pick on Herbert Hoover.

Hoover, to the Success world, the money Twitter corner, to gurus and experts, and to modern media — had it all. He owns the hip narrative of “failing all his entrance exams but got into Stanford.” Success acolytes love that story of he failed at the school stuff but succeeded at the life stuff.

As a mining engineer, Hoover proved brilliant. He became a shrewd businessman. He also excelled at rescue missions with his engineering techniques. And Hoover exemplified an honorable humanitarian bent till his last days. Hoover is complicated. A great man in many areas, and a man deserving our respect, but he made mistakes that forever untethered America.

Hoover believed he could fix the country in his vision. He had all the right things on paper. And he failed. Hoover likely would have done better if he took a page from Coolidge’s book, let it work itself out.

Here’s what I’m after.

Action is important. But grand plans aren’t always needed. Soaring actions like eradicating inequality once and for all, or making millions of dollars instantly, prove blind to history and human nature.

Those grand ideas sound great but can lay a trap.

People reflexively buy into rhetoric offering a utopia. In business, we buy into the rhetoric of insane growth. Even our personal growth, people buy into a fast and massive “shift” that will deliver us our personal utopia.

Whereas marginal improvements, letting things ride out, or, my favorite term for personal growth, “sitting in the shit” sounds passive. Instead, we’re taught to do something and we should have had the issue fixed yesterday.

But doing nothing requires action. It requires active observing, patience, and a look into history or others, and again, knowing when not to act. It isn’t at all passive. It isn’t at all complacent. It’s work. And oftentimes, on the personal level, it’s a lot of work. Grab the book here.

Screwtape Letters

C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters is widely acknowledged as a Great Book and a classic.

This short fiction details Screwtape, a devil, mentoring a young demon, Wormwood, trying to turn a man on earth to the dark side.

While this book is unapologetically Christian and Conservative, it doesn’t require you to adhere to both ideologies. In other words, it reads like an original Stoic work: you don’t need to be a Stoic to garner deep lessons and wisdom.

What stood out to me, we all have our own Screwtape.

You might think of it as a one-off sin, like you once cheated on your girlfriend or boyfriend in high school. But Lewis shows that our Screwtape acts more as a pathology rather than a one-off peccadillo. And that pathology comprises the ideologies, insecurities, rationalizations, the entitlements, and the fashionable movements, swaying us into the dark side.

For instance, smug, sanctimonious political or mindset beliefs, pull us into the dark side. You may recognize this in Success. An idea permeates that 9-5 “normie” people are lower, and if you and display extreme willpower and live under a perfect day formula, that somehow makes you better.

On the flip side of that, Lewis isn’t denouncing pride. In fact, he argues and shows that having pride is good. That good pride resembles pride in your work, or pride in striving to be a good wife or husband, and pride in things that come from a place of care, hard work, and diligence.

Lewis captures so much of the human spirit in this work. From the utopian fantasies of certain ideologues to our own attraction to cult-like methods to live a “better” life, to handling our own impulsive passions.

Lewis breathes reality and nuance into what it means to live a good life. He gives life to recognizing the pathologies that drag us down. And through his humor, he teaches critical thinking.

Truly, a remarkable book. No matter your faith or politics, this book is an absolute must-read. Grab the book here.

Decadent Society

Charles Cooke of the National Review said on a podcast, “America is a deeply unserious country right now.” That sums up Douthat’s meaning of decadence.

Unserious?

Decadent?

A simple example, politicized military leaders claim they’re now taking out the new threat to America: white rage in the military. Meanwhile, China launches hypersonic nuclear missiles circling the globe.

Another example, as America looks to cancel Abraham Lincoln for not doing enough for black populations — I guess dying to abolish slavery is not enough — China graduates hundreds of thousands of engineers.

Ross Douthat shows why much of America is decadent. To be clear, he uses the classical definition of decadence. His definition works closer to blind stagnation and a society eating itself.

America stagnates in its decadence. We focus on canceling statues, putting our best and brightest on the task of creating better AI advertising technology, and giving a longer news cycle to Dave Chappelle’s comedy routine than to the disastrous Afghanistan pull-out.

Douthat unpacks how this happened, and how it happens not just in America, but elsewhere and in other societies. Decadence doesn’t entail hedonism per se. It’s more or less when it becomes fashionable to hate your traditions.

Let’s look at culture.

Consider today’s popular music. Today, barely any #1 Billboard song is written by the artist that performs it. The last was Ed Sheeran’s “Perfect” in 2017. Whereas in the 1970s, it was the norm for the artist to write and perform the #1 song. Today’s pop, rap, and rock features fewer and fewer notes and sounds more and more robotic.

Hollywood leans on reboots. It seems like we’ll never get another Plains, Trains, and Automobiles style comedy. Or an Oscar movie that crowds want to see. Today, Hollywood seems more interested to make old movies woke. And when the reboot bombs in the theaters, we suffer news cycles or the insufferable Trevor Noah lecturing us that it bombed because of white supremacy.

But Douthat’s book isn’t a bitch-fest. It’s a well-written guide on critical thinking. And a guide to see the current culture.

I argue that a book like Decadent Society, and a thinker like Douthat, do wonders to your marketing.

How so?

Most copy and sales courses hyper-focus you on “customer psychology.” We get tons of lessons on how to sell to the individual. And that’s not wrong advice. But we overlook that marketing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. People are complex and nuanced, and people live in their way in the world.

Douthat offers us a way to think about our market, our business, and the world our customers and you live in.

One thing screamed to me as I read the book: online marketing and direct-response marketing are decadent.

I’ll unpack this if you’re interested, if not, skip ahead.

Let’s look at this with sales.

Sales and copy ideologies, and even mindset and Success ideologies, remain rooted in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

You might be saying, “But funnels and online marketing!?”

Funnels are not new. A funnel online works no different than the infomercials of the 1970s and 1980s where you called a number and you were sold things.

People mistake the speed as new.

As in, simply having a funnel work faster, track more people, and makes payments easier, that’s the speed of the mechanism, not an innovation. It’s great that we have this speed. But speed doesn’t constitute a breakthrough.

Most “experts” of sales, copy, success, and beyond rehash advice.

Consider success advice and who gives it.

If you trace back, you will hit Clement Stone. He created a framework that spawned gurus. Clement Stone saw that he could make money with Napoleon Hill’s ideas if he put it in a framework (according to Dan Kennedy, Stone knew Hill was a huckster dolt).

Stone then created the framework of stage speaking, selling the products, and having events. It spawned the likes of Norman Vincent Peale, Og Mandino, Tony Robbins, and countless others.

But if you look at the advice, not a whole lot has advanced.

Yes, standouts do exist.

In sales, we find Jim Camp and Oren Klaff. Each arguably advanced the concepts of framing and qualifying the buyer.

If we move over to the world of habits, David Allen or James Clear, both work to get to first principles.

And as for copy, some of you may be wondering, “What about Gary Halbert ?” Joe Karbo spawned Gary Halbert.

Gary, in my opinion, brilliantly took popular sales concepts of his day and put them into print. But remember, Gary wasn’t the only one, he was the most boisterous one.

Consider how many “new” copy courses there are teaching the hottest and craziest tactics. But look at sales letters and Video Sales letters on, say, Clickbank: it all looks the same. Go back to 2012 and compare those sales letters to today’s, not a single thing has changed. Even look back to about 2008, it all looks the same. All that’s improved, font and load times.

I’m not saying innovation must happen all the time. But those tactics, that rehash, fall far away from first principles. The core of a good sales letter comes down to good writing, being direct, and working on ways to get the right buyer.

I’m not saying don’t learn, but realize much of what’s out there is stagnant.

The first principles of David Ogilvy and Claude Hopkins will hold. Being direct, honest, and using good salesmanship will win. Grab the book here.

Why Not Say It Clearly

If you’ve read a lot of books on writing, you won’t find anything new in Why Not Say It Clearly.

And if you haven’t read a lot of books on writing, this book is an excellent guide into writing technical aspects well. You will find a lot on research — excellent for the copywriter — and how to write it clearly.

I recommend this to those writing copy in technical fields. And I also recommend it to those looking how to translate their research into simple, clear, and direct writing. Grab the book here.

Terminal List

Author Jack Carr, a Navy Seal badass, perhaps one of the most badass Navy Seals to have ever lived, wrote an awesome book.

I loved the reality of the main character James Reece. For instance, most badass characters are stoic to the point of cliche. Like the protagonist gets a shotgun blast to the chest, and walks it off, while some damsel worries about him.

But Reece will actually GO to the hospital.

I won’t give too much away, other than it was a fun read.

But, what I appreciated most, Carr deploys a compelling prose example that you copywriters can get hip to.

I love the sentences where he introduces the subject and then hits you with an active verb.

For instance: James rolled….

James the subject, and rolled the verb. He uses this style during action scenes, moving the scene or characters, or to pace a character’s movement. It creates a compelling effect.

The second prose aspect, and it’s a masterclass, when Carr details something technical, like the workings of a gun. He makes it simple, clear, and compelling. Carr describes the workings in a linear fashion but does so with clarity. He roots scenes with these descriptions. And without the emotional hyperbole, the scene or the item described becomes real. We can see it, feel it, hear it, or sense it. Grab the book here.

Haul

Not pictured: The Dying Citizen, Victor Davis Hanson

I’m hooked on Victor Davis Hanson’s podcast. He does a remarkable job of unpacking history and classic works of art, literature, or philosophy, and showing what that means for us today. His podcast helped me understand The Federalist Papers and the Constitution. And he’s close friends with Thomas Sowell. So, naturally, I’m excited to read this book.

What To Read and Why, Francine Prose

I adhere to Francine Prose’s method of reading fiction. I love it. Her method added vivid color to my world.

I saw this at the bookstore, I had no idea she had another book, so I grabbed it. It looks to be her insight into some classic works of fiction and some insight on how to read those works.

Leading, Alex Ferguson

This is a Tyler Cowen recommendation. I agree with Tyler that most business books on leadership and success flat out suck. He iterated that sentiment in his review of this book, yet said this book has far more insight. Alex Ferguson is one of the most successful Soccer — football to my outside America crowd — coaches. He managed Manchester United, and some say, he’s the greatest manager of all time.

The book looks to have some substance to it versus the oversaturated nonsense of “on the battlefield of the playing field, we find lessons of character.”

Titan & Grant, Ron Chernow

Chernow is a beast. I won’t get to these ones for a while, I’m down another rabbit hole of early America and America during the 1920s through World War II. Hamilton will be the next Chernow book I read.

Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith

A classic, and Great Book. Adam Smith is hailed as the father of modern economics. This book ties into my rabbit holes three ways. One, it’s a Great Book, two, Edmund Burke respected and admired his friend Smith, and three, the 1920s owes its success to the Adam Smith economic policy than what we know today.

A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume

Hume wielded influence over Edmund Burke and the Founding Fathers. And this work is one of the most influential works in Western philosophy. I’ve yet to read Hume, I know tidbits. But his name, his ideas, and what he influenced kept surfacing in my life recently. I plan to put a dent in this one soon.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding & Two Treatise of Government, John Locke

I heard on a National Review podcast, that we have two types of Conservatives today, Edmund Burke conservatives (I’m in the Burke camp in case you’re wondering) and John Locke conservatives. Locke fathered Classical Liberalism, and some of it in response to Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes.

Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes

If you read the above, you see that Locke had, in a sense, a written debate with Leviathan. Leviathan is a classic. When I went to the British Library a few years ago, I saw the original Leviathan. Seeing a book written in 1651, right in front of you, and grasping the gravity of that book, I cherish the memory. I plan to read this before Locke.

Histories, Herodotus

Histories is one of the oldest non-fiction works we have if not the oldest we know of. It was written in 430 B.C. So yeah, it’s old. Herodotus is known as a storyteller, and the history he details is a little suspect, but still of substance. In other words, it lacks the accuracy of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. Still, it’s supposed to be enjoyable, accessible, and a good look into early civilization.

The Conservative Mind, Russel Kirk

This book came from my early searches into my political rabbit hole. Russel Kirk hailed Edmund Burke as his hero. This book supposedly wielded a lot of influence on Conservative thought in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

The Experts Speak, Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky

This isn’t so much a book but rather a humorous collection of quotes where the experts were wrong. I think this might be a fun source to use in my writings, given that so many business experts are at best sciolists.

The Play of Words, Richard Lederer

This comes from my Garner list.

Garner shows a bunch of books and authors that teach how to build a better vocabulary or grasp syntax via exercises. I enjoy books like these as they boost my vocabulary in the right way: finding the right phrase, and more often the simplest one, to capture what you want to say. Books like this help my writing, and my reading. And I believe if you’re writing a lot, or a copywriter, you should have a steady diet of these books.

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