Reviews

Summary Experience teaches that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is usually when it begins to reform itself. - Alexis de Tocqueville The year is 1789, and you are the King of France. You’d rather be tinkering around in your workshop, but instead you are stuck in this meeting of the three estates and no one seems to be very happy. You inherited the kingdom from your grandfather Louis XV at nineteen years of age. He died a deeply unpopular monarch and left you a kingdom with tremendous financial problems. Still, change is in the air. The Enlightenment has filled France with new ideas; the old world is dying and something new is being born, though it is hard to picture what it will be. There is a lot of criticism of the monarchy these days, and it is coming from both the nobility and the masses. You have often welcomed reform, but there is a right and natural way things are meant to be. Push too hard and something might break. This is why you’ve often retracted unpopular edicts. People call that indecisive, but you’ve always held that public opinion is never wrong. Now here you sit in the middle of the first Estates General in over one hundred and fifty years, listening to everyone air their grievances against the kingdom you rule. A flicker of intuition, a growing sense of doom, as a possibility begins to present itself. You might be the last link in a chain of kings that reaches back one thousand years. ...

I find myself questioning how things are typically done to see if there are any better ways out there. Currently my interest is focused on education. This book is widely recommended by overanxious parents everywhere. If I remember correctly Alethea was founded on some classical principles that were most likely inspired by Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957) and Sayers is a contemporary of Mason (1842-1923). Most likely influenced by her. Their methods have a lot of overlap but some differences as well. Charlotte Mason thought that all kids should have the right to an education and not just the rich ones. She came up with her own method of education which minimized the amount of time talking by the teacher and replaced it with the students “narrating” what they had just read. This narration is a cornerstone to her method as she believes it cements what the student has learned in their minds and helps the student to incorporate the new knowledge into their brains. I sure hope this is true as this is the main reason I write these reviews. She also believed that children did not need to be trained how to think but instead should be exposed to the best thinkers and use their innate reasoning to process the best kinds of information. She believed that every subject (excluding math) should be taught in a literary form as story is the best way to learn. The younger children would narrate paragraph by paragraph, then chapter by chapter and then finally an entire book at a time. This narration would start out in verbal form but would eventually become written. In short starting from around age 6 children should be exposed to the best art, literature, music the world has to offer and this “mind stuff” will be good food for a growing brain. This nutritive aspect of learning is also prominent in Mason’s thinking. For the postmodern push back, Mason assumed everyone would be on the same page when she said “best stuff” i.e. Dickens, Rembrandt, Mozart etc. But why not Peterson, Heffner, and Cardie B? I tended to agree with her approach as I feel like kids often underachieve because they aren’t asked to achieve anything worth achieving. The other thing about her method which was interesting was she didn’t like tests, or homework, but structured her curriculum to be consumed (dependent on stellar focus, which may be a relic by now) at high speed in the morning and then in the afternoon to work on handicrafts or learn out in nature. Give the children beautiful things to think about and they will become beautiful thinkers. Overall, I enjoyed the book, and it gave me some valuable perspective from a very experienced and well-read person. The downside of this is that I don’t know how realistic it was as a lot of it sounded insane in a modern context, but I would love to be wrong on that point.

Summary Sapolsky is a biologist specializing in neurology. Ever since he was a child, he has been obsessed with primates, so shortly after graduating from Harvard, he travels to Kenya to begin his studies on a troop of baboons. His study focused on the effect that stress has on the development and overall well-being of a physical system and eventually spanned around 25 years, where he would spend four months in the field and the rest of the year analyzing his findings in the States. The book is separated into sections that align his own maturity with those of the baboons, such as adolescent, young adult, etc. With this handy narrative device, the reader is able to witness the maturation of the author simultaneously with his subjects. ...

Summary Bill Bryson was flying over an ocean one day when he realized just how little he knew about how everything worked. This propelled him into over three years of research, talking to experts in various fields, visiting important museums and visiting some of the most important places on Earth, including Ohio. Bryson was unimpressed with the science books of his youth, feeling that they hinted at the wonders of the world before drowning them in abstruse terms and he set out to change that. Covering everything from Biology to Astrophysics, Bryson flies through the various disciplines giving the reader a brief and exciting overview of how they started as well as where they are currently. ...

I’ll keep this one short. As the cover says, this book was written by the guy who also wrote kite runner, which was a very good book. This being my second book of his the appeal wasn’t there as much for me this time around. This story was also centered in Afghanistan (I started reading before the US troop pull-out and subsequent Taliban takeover in 2021, so it was synchronistic) and follows the life story of two women who end up living in the same house because one of them was forced to marry this dude as a child and the other was kind of forced due to the ongoing war. Similar to Kite Runner its cool to get a glimpse into the life of folks where you have no clue how they do what they do. This book was really entertaining and easy to read. The story itself was very dark. I enjoyed reading this book but wouldn’t label it as a “must read” especially if you get your hands on any of his other stuff first. Good stuff, prepare for despair.

Summary Victor Davis Hanson tells the story of the Peloponnesian war which is the war where Sparta and Athens fought for close to 30 years. This war starts shortly after Sparta and Athens had united to repel a Persian invasion, partially depicted in the movie 300. Ironically, this war was ultimately decided by Persia backing Sparta which broke the Athenians. For many, this war marks the end of the Greek Golden age. Taking place shortly before Alexander the Great’s campaigns, it included many Western superstars like Socrates, who participated in the early part of the war, Hippocrates, the father of medicine, and some of the eminent Greek tragedians like Sophocles and Euripides. Hanson recasts the Peloponnesian War as a Greek Civil War, because much like the American Civil War both sides shared language, culture, and many other inherited traditions, but they differed on governmental strategies. The Spartans are portrayed as being conservative oligarchs, while the Athenians were depicted as radical proponents of democracy. This difference in governing styles is often emphasized by Hanson, who uses it to explain the distinctive reactions of the two nation states to the challenges each in turn faced. ...

When it comes to politics I’ve never connected with the vision of a single group. When I do find myself leaning towards a party, it is typically only because I am leaning away from its opposite. Part of this is because as humans we are much better at knowing what we don’t want. Yet I would like to think that the other reason is that I try to value substance over partisanship. ...

There is no doubt whatever that this eternally self-replicating old fool (Nature) has now exhausted the good-natured admiration of all true artists, and the moment has come to replace her, as far as that can be achieved, with artiface. So basically, it is this whole thing. Huysmans was a novelist in the 19th century whose early works were part of the naturalistic school which sought out beauty and truth in the mundane, but later in his life this changed. He began to feel cramped and redundant inside the confines of nature and wished to supersede it through artifice. Maybe this would give us a more visceral or concentrated glimpse of beauty? Enter what is known as the “Decadent” literature. This school found its poster child in Dorian Gray, and this is how I came to hear about it. On a reread of the Picture of Dorian Gray, there was this quote: ...

After reading biographies of Washington and Jefferson, I was quite excited to read more about Hamilton. I thought he would be a shoo-in for my favorite Founding Father, but the reality of his character proved more complex. Some of my favorite things about Hamilton: He was the first Secretary of the Treasury and the genius behind the creation of American banking and foreign credit. He was a prolific writer, producing the rough equivalent of 70 novels by the time he was 49. ...

Summary All the Pretty Horses follows the story of John Grady Cole and his best friend Lacey Rawlins. Cole, sixteen years old, was raised on a ranch his entire life. His grandfather has just died and he discovers the ranch is about to be sold. He convinces Rawlins to join him and they both take off to Mexico hoping to find cowboy work. Thoughts My initial summation of this book was going to be “Hemmingway meets Coen brother’s No Country for Old Men”, but then I found out that Cormac McCarthy wrote No Country for Old Men. So now I guess the summation should be “Hemmingway meets McCarthy”. Sidebar This impression is created by a writing style called Polysyndeton. Going down this rabbit hole a little, it turns out that this is the style that gives the King James Bible and Shakespeare their distinctive cadence. From what I can tell it is a fancy name for run on sentences that would get red lined on English exams. ...