Non-Fiction

Like any bibliophile, I have stack of books that I plan on reading eventually, so it’s fairly common for a book to hang out on the shelf for months, even years before I get around to it. As soon as I heard about From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought, though, I knew I had to make it priority. So, after only, well, a year or so, I got right to it. After all, it features many saints and Fathers of the Church, as well as other luminaries like Origen, William of Ockham, and John of Paris. Unfortunately, it suffers the same weakness as almost all anthologies, and the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Those of use who’ve been around the Right for very long are well aware of that there is no shortage of blogs out there. Social Matter’s weekly reviews link to hours worth of reading material, and that just covers Neoreaction and its immediate neighbours; if you venture into the Alt Right, and especially if you include the Alt Lite, you’ll never have time for anything else if you try to keep up with everything. A lot of that material is valuable for several reasons, but unfortunately, the web logging format has some limitations. Though it works for occasional commentary or introductions to larger topics, there’s just not room to go into depth in any one subject, at least not comfortably. So, speaking for myself, the blogging format has grown rather stale. I’ll still occasionally find a new writer with some worthwhile archives, but at this point I only follow a handful of them and Social Matter’s weekly round-up.

When discussing Confucianism, the first book people think of is The Analects of Confucius, which is understandably the most famous Confucian work by a wide margin. This book is, Scripture aside, the most important book I’ve ever read in forming my own political and social ideas, and my opinion of Confucius is largely the same as his student Tsze-kung:

Next to Aristotle’s Topics, The Histories may be the most vaguely titled book ever written. I suppose you can get away with that when you’re the Father of History, as Herodotus is called, and as the author of the first narrative history it’s not like there was much room for confusion at the time. Besides, while Herodotus makes the Greco-Persian Wars his ostensible subject, he’s so far-ranging that the broad title describes the work well enough.

Last year, I asked my twitter followers for good books on the War Between the States, and I was promptly informed that I would (not just “might”) enjoy Memoirs of a Service Afloat During the War Between the States, written by Raphael Semmes, captain of the CSS Sumter and, later, the Alabama. Once I got my hands on a copy, I could tell right away it would be a good one because opposite the title page the publisher, Alacrity Press, had a note saying, “This book is a product of its time. Some of the terms and views expressed by the author may reflect common values and usage of his day that are contrary to modern values. They should be viewed in that context.” A trigger warning like that is something I take as a strong endorsement.

So, in the midst of all the excitement over the imminent Thousand Year Trumpenreich, I thought now would be a good time to read Donald Trump’s popular 1987 book The Art of the Deal. I don’t typically read books written by famous living people, partly because I prefer things that have passed the test of time, and partly because they’re often ghostwritten anyway. Now, Trump did have a coauthor, Tony Schwarz. In these situations, having a coauthor on a memoir often means that the coauthor did most of the actual work while the celebrity uses his name to sell copies. I’ll assume that this is still substantially Trump’s work just because he seems to take a hands-on approach to anything affecting his business, but it’s probably wise to keep this in mind. Also worth pointing out is that in any memoir the author is going to be selective about what he chooses to say about himself. Klemens von Metternich, for example, wasn’t self-revealing at all in his memoirs. Trump doesn’t give one a sense of hiding anything, and this is primarily a business book, not a confession, but again it’s best to be aware that any author will, consciously or sub-consciously, portray himself in the best light.

This is another book that I wasn’t aware of until I stumbled on it in a used bookstore. I was surprised that memoirs by Klemens von Metternich wouldn’t be more talked-about since he’s such a respected figure among the Right, and I went into the book with high expectations, thinking it would be something like a more focused version of Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy.

Education at the Crossroads is a revised version of a series of lectures Jacques Maritain gave at Yale University in 1943 in which the author discusses, in four parts, “The Aims of Education,” “The Dynamics of Education,” “The Humanities and Liberal Education,” and “The Trials of Present-Day Education.” In other words, what education is, where it is now, and where it will, or at least ideally should, go.