Category: bookreviews

Farewell Summer (review: 2/5)

~ Mark ~ 2 Comments

I was really surprised to find a Ray Bradbury book that I didn’t like. His latest book, Farewell Summer, is the 50-years-later follow-up to Dandelion Wine, set (somewhat autobiographically) in an idyllic summer in the American midwest. It’s a meditation on life, maturation, and death told through a war between the neighborhood boys and a local elder. The book is really short. The publisher even cheated a bit: with generous margins and extra-wide line-spacing it just barely makes it over the 200-page mark. One of the things that bothered me was that the book was so dialogue-driven, when his narration is what I really appreciate. And perhaps I’m just too young to relate to all this deep reflection. Maybe if you like the Mitch Albom “life lessons” thing, you’ll dig it.
So the story didn’t really catch my interest too much, but the writing is as sharp as ever. It’s not every day you can find a sentences like this:

The cake stood like a magnificent Alp upon the kitchen table.

There are many other fine phrases that I wish I could write and/or would love to steal. If you’re looking for yummy Bradbury narrative goodness, I’d turn to something like The Illustrated Man or Something Wicked This Way Comes.

The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness (review: 3.5/5)

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

Stephen Levy’s very readable story of the obscenely popular iPod came just after I bought my new computer, and served a welcome distraction as I imported all my music. As an interesting publishing twist on the ‘shuffle’ idea, various editions of this book have the self-contained chapters (with titles like “Cool” and “Apple” and “Personal”) re-arranged in different orders, sandwiched between the intro and the coda. Kind of cool.
Luckily, this book is more biography than love letter. There’s a lot of industry history, delving into early portable music hits like Sony’s Walkman, a bit of the sordid history of the music publishing industry in the midst of the mp3 revolution, insider perspectives on Apple’s development process, whether or not shuffle mode is really random, and so on.

And of course, there’s a lot about infatuation with the iPod itself. Levy cites Virginia Postrel’s book on industrial design:

Having spent a century or more focused primarily on other goals–solving manufacturing problems, lowering costs, making goods and services widely available, saving energy–we are increasingly engaged in making our world special. More people in more aspects of life are drawing pleasure and meaning from he way their persons, places, and things look and feel.

Thank you, Capitalism. Of course, recognizing that progress is one of the reasons the iPod is so successful amid products with better specs. “More” isn’t always more. It’s just a beautifully designed object that’s a joy to use, in the way we choose. As Levy says:

shuffle turns out to be the techna franca of the digital era–not just a feature on a gadget but an entire way of viewing the world, representing the power that comes from aggregating content from a variety of sources and playing it back in an order that render irrelevant the intended ordering by those who produced or first distributed the content.

Yes, we like control. More, please.

Blankets (review 3.5/5)

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

I really liked Goodbye, Chunky Rice, so I was looking forward to Blankets. Craig Thompson’s more recent graphic novel is a coming-of-age sort of story of love and religion and obsession and companionship, mostly hopping between vignettes in the childhood and teen years, from boyhood to first love and after. It is, in fact, Thompson’s own story rendered with impressive honesty.
The artwork is fantastic and the dialogue is great, and Thompson really has a way with body language. From my layman’s I’m-not-a-graphic-novelist perspective, I can see how a graphic medium can make it so difficult to be subtle. There are times when the relationships in Blankets seem too clich?©. On the other hand, that sort of awkward transparency seems appropriate for melodramatic young love, and I really like how he just lets loose and puts it all on the page.

Housekeeping vs. The Dirt (review: 3.5/5)

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

I sincerely hope that Nick Hornby’s writing isn’t as effortless and carefree as it reads. It just wouldn’t be fair. Especially because all he had to do for this book was read books (which he already does), and write about them (albeit under the cracking whips of the Polysyllabic Spree).
This book was especially good in light of the interview I read two days ago, where Chuck Klosterman mentions how criticism is really autobiography. There’s a lot to learn from Housekeeping. I really like how Hornby weaves his comments with a little background about how he came across the book, what kind of reading phase he was in, etc. Mix in a little self-effacing Britishness or some affectatious declarations (e.g. “I decided today that from now on I will only read books recommended by…”), and you’ve got a really fun package.

Ghost World (review: 3/5)

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

I wonder what if there is a world that equates to a small-town version of a pastorale? Suburbanale? Anyway, in Ghost World Daniel Clowes presents a few days in the life of two teenage girls as they piss away a small-town summer. The first time I tried to read this, I was bored to tears. Really, nothing happens. On second read, what actually impresses is the way Clowes can craft those micro-moments and give a full characterization with minimal material. This parallels the restrained artwork, using only black, white, and a pale blue for all the panels. The dialogue is shockingly foul and absolutely hilarious at times. High drama it is not, but there are worse ways to kill an hour. Keep an eye out for Enid’s shifting hairstyles.

Noise (review: 1.5/5)

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

I love the jacket design for Noise, so I really had high hopes for this one. I really wanted another cool pop science book like Chaos or Linked, one that would take a fringe science and make it sparkle. Now, don’t get me wrong. There’s a ton of information here (a full 40% of the book is notes and indices), and it touches on how a range of fields like mathematics, law, engineering, and information theory deal with “unwanted signals.” But this latest work by Bart Kosko came off a bit dry, no flesh. Or maybe I’m just a less patient reader lately. Probably both.

In the Shadow of No Towers (review 2.5/5)

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

I can’t remember the last time I read a book less than 50 pages–In the Shadow of No Towers weighs in at 42 huge, colorful spreads. Art Spiegelman’s recent book brings together a collection of broadsheets illustrated in the years following 9/11, and also shares the notable cover from the September 23, 2001 issue of the New Yorker. It feels like Woody Allen meets Charles Schulz, a jittery sort of memoir on the nature of terror and the stress of memory. There’s a recurring motif of the towers’ metal structure glowing red, just before their collapse. So there’s this palpable sense of anticipation that to some degree lasts even today, just waiting for the other shoe to drop. The work is bookended with a couple essays on his relationship with cartooning and politics.
Bonus material: Spiegelman has a nice dialogue with NPR about 9/11 and cartooning.

The Ghost Map (review: 4/5)

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

Here we have the tale of the 1854 cholera outbreak in London. A silent killer is out there, generally freaking people out. Microbiology has yet to exist, so it’s a story of man versus mystery. Two men actually, who start out independently and eventually come to know and respect each other. And it’s a story of science, with all its contentious fits and starts and stumbles in the general direction of progress. And it’s also the story of society, at once enthusiastic and fearful of the magnificient beast they’ve brought to the planet: the modern city.
Compared with the other two Steven Johnson books I read, this one was my least favorite. I originally gave it a 3–but I’ve grown to like it more and more as I’ve thought about the ideas inside.

I think one of the best/worst things about Johnson’s writing is that he can suggest a tantalizing idea, and then carry on with his main argument as if nothing ever happened. Every so often in The Ghost Map he’ll turn a delightful aside, a flash of brilliance… oh, then continue on talking about excrement and miasma and pumps and drainage systems. Many of these nuggets are pretty clearly beyond the scope of the book, but they’re so good, I’d love to see some follow-up. I love it when a book can set me off enthusiastically on new investigations, perhaps unrelated to the book itself. And it’s in this area where The Ghost Map shines. A few examples that I’m still mulling over…

In talking about the history of ideas and the struggle involved in paradigm shifts, we face the recurring questions:

How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline–the sociology of error.1

I love the idea of a “sociology of error.” I like the combination of individual psychology and basic cost-benefit decisions (e.g. “Can I still get funding if I promote this dangerous concept?”), with the idea of groupthink. This makes me think of praxeology in the Austrian tradition. There have to be some fundamental traits for how we select and endorse ideas, right?

When discussing one the challenges of epidemiology–its generally undocumented nature–Johnson suggests a contrast: “Most world-historic events–great military battles, political revolutions–are self-consciously historic to participants living through them.”2 I think the idea of “self-conscious history” could explain a lot in modern politics and economics. Surely this self-consciousness affects decision making, introducing an element of chutzpah that’s largely absent from everyday life. Maybe this leads to a kind of semiotics for events, how they are perceived, communicated, and given response.

Lastly, Johnson’s last quarter of the book is circles around the “triumph of urbanism.”3 You can see some of his current work peeking out here–recently manifested in his writing about the Long Zoom, the web service outside.in, and his new column Urban Planet ($). I don’t think I’m as optimistic as Johnson is about urban society (probably because I’m more politically cynical), but there are some cool thoughts about the metropolis providing a critical mass of local knowledge, expertise, spontaneity, economies of scale, etc.

Hm. There’s a lot of food for thought here. It’s a keeper.

—
Footnotes, for those following along at home.
1. page 15, more on 126
2. page 32
3. page 203

“Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman (review: 2.5/5)

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

Back in the 60s, Harlan Ellison wrote this story in one 6-hour session. That original draft became the final published document, almost entirely unchanged, and went on to earn both the Hugo and the Nebula award for short stories. So this one has street cred. Fast-forward to modern times, the oversized illustrated version of this story caught my eye. I’m a sucker for books of outrageous proportions.
The story is set in one of those oppressive future societies that we just might be hurtling towards. In this one, it is Time that is under the most strict control of the Ticktockman. Life is run by the clock. Tardiness is punished by proportional reduction in own’s one lifespan. Of course, there’s a hero, the Harlequin, who skitters about making merry and getting things off schedule. It’s a light, breezy read.

I ended this book feeling pretty well unaffected. Eh. I don’t normally read short stories, so maybe my expectations are out of whack. The illustrations are interesting as you flip through the story, but not really worth going back to examine. As a stand-alone title, I don’t think it holds up. But it would be nice as part of a collection.

Reinventing Comics (review: 3/5)

~ Mark ~ 1 Comment

Reinventing Comics is the middle child in the McCloud comics trilogy. I found it to be the weakest and least interesting of the three. (see my reviews of Making Comics and Understanding Comics) Not bad, but nothing special. McCloud himself sums up nicely:

I believe that Reinventing Comics has genuine flaws. The two halves don’t always work well together, the storytelling is frequently stiffer and less convincing, and my enthusiastic advocacy of online comics is rarely tempered by some of the bleaker, more pessimistic scenarios offered by other writers in recent years. It was a harder book to write than Understanding Comics and, from all reports, a harder book to read.

Reinventing Comics came about in the midst of the dot-com boom, and you can see the e-nthusiasm popping out every which way in this book. The book discusses the 12 “revolutions” that comics will have to go through to achieve maturity and (ideally) financial stability. One really cool thing is that McCloud seems to anticipate the arrival of Long Tail economics, with the web giving comics the ability to penetrate down to ever smaller niches.

I have to absolutely agree with McCloud’s idea that “the digital delivery of comics has the potential to revolutionize the industry, and that the aesthetic opportunities of digital comics are enormous.” Unfortunately, I think RC shortchanges itself. It’s this business bias that caught me off-guard–RC is very much focused on the structure of the industry, rather than the art it delivers. That’s a shame, because it’s always been McCloud’s thoughts on comics theory that caught my attention. And there are certainly more prescient business writers out there.

Perhaps his surface treatment of the artistic potential of web comics is a side effect of the medium. That is, it can be really difficult to talk about webspace ideas on the zero-interaction surface of a sheet of paper. I’d like to hear his thoughts on the aesthetics of digital delivery now that the technology has matured a bit, and after he’s had more time to experiment.

Lincoln Unmasked (review: 2.5/5)

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

I was a bit underwhelmed with this latest book from Thomas DiLorenzo. In Lincoln Unmasked, you’ll find a collection of criticism of one of the most-worshipped Presidents. DiLorenzo offers up a variety of evidence against the common coin Lincoln legacy: that he was a railroad lobbyist entrenched in big business politics; he was willing to compromise on the slavery issue; he first introduced the era of the President qua dictator; etc.
Fair enough. I won’t dispute those facts. Revealing and fleshing out those issues would have been plenty, and I think DiLorenzo is at his best when he’s doing that kind of nut-and-bolts history. I really like this kind of counter-cultural, libertarian guerrilla criticism. But it’s easy to get distracted while attacking the totem. In the course of his arguments, DiLorenzo also delivers a fair amount of invective against the “Cult of Lincoln,” and much of the book is not really about Lincoln himself but about the ancillary politics of Lincoln study. At less than 200 pages, there’s not a whole lot of room for both editorial and and for deep, nuanced research. I think this one comes up a little thin on both counts. In other words, I wanted more. I might check out his other books.

Making Comics (review: 4.5/5)

~ Mark ~ 3 Comments

Scott McCloud’s latest is all about story-telling secrets and how to shape your own vision for comics. It mimics the style of his earlier book, Understanding Comics, using the form to explain itself, and expands a bit more on the theories he presented there.
I think it’s wonderful to see how much more mature McCloud’s own work is in this book. The art is better; the layouts are cleaner and more interesting. The visuals are all just more inventive and lively. I was glad that McCloud seemed to stretch himself and take the opportunity to demonstrate his competence by illustrating in a lot of different styles–you can tell that he really put a lot of work into these panels. All that effort pays off, especially in the chapters devoted to backgrounds and to facial expressions.

One of my complaints about UC was that he didn’t give enough examples–but Making Comics absolutely makes up for that. To boot, there’s an excellent bibliography, and every chapter has some supplementary wrap-up content. Each chapter ends with a couple pages of footnotes, commentary, and also exercises to help you flex your comics skillz. Very impressive, and a lot of fun to read.

Small is the New Big: and 183 Other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas (review: 3.5/5)

~ Mark ~ 1 Comment

I love the jacket design Small is the New Big. Really, how could you not pick it up? And luckily, the contents of Seth Godin’s collection don’t disappoint too much.
This is one of those books I like to call “toilet books”–a collection of short, snappy sparks to get you thinking about how to be better. Sort of a daily devotional for marketing and entrepreneurial nerds. It’s hard to summarize because he zips (or is that zooms?) from topic to topic, but you’ll find that Godin is obsessed with: freebies, lagniappe, surprises; JetBlue; change; agility; remarkableness; customer advocacy; etc. And he’s similarly frustrated with: protocol, American Airlines, stagnation, old-school advertising, risk aversion. Worship is reserved for the relentlessly focused who are doing special work on their own terms. Cool. It’s a nice little anthology, Godin has some great ideas and thought experiments, and I had some truly ‘eureka’ moments. But is it remarkable? It’s worth a glance or two.

The 9/11 Report: A Graphical Adaptation (review: 2/5)

~ Mark ~ 2 Comments

At the least, I can say that I’m now more interested in the original 9/11 Report than I was before. I really wanted this one to be good; it was just frustrating.
Jacobson and Col??n got off to such a good start with a slick 10 page fold-out timeline that tracks the four flights concurrently. It was a truly powerful experience to juxtapose the events of my own morning with what happened in the air. But it all went down from there. The illustration was disappointingly inconsistent, mixing some really clever, accurately rendered scenes next to some that are just a little sloppy. I’m not sure if scattershot, somewhat arbitrary imagery is due to the nature of the original Report. The lettering and narrative boxes really killed me, though. The box geography was awkward, so I ended up stumbling around the page. Out of hundreds of comics I’ve consumed, I’ve never had so much trouble doing the basic task of reading.

Regarding the actual Report material, it’s not so bad. For someone like me, who generally steers clear of popular politics, it’s a nice intro to the history, who is who among the terrorists, and who is who among the white men in suits. Here’s my #1 piece of loveably laughable advice the Commission offers: “It is crucial to offer a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination.”1 Oh, I really wanted this to be good.

Some other links for your curiosity… here’s a good review over at Salon, an NPR interview with Jacobson and Col??n, and Slate offers an excerpted version online & an interview as well.

—
1*ahem* Some other important thoughts on bureaucracy…

Understanding Comics (review: 4.5/5)

~ Mark ~ 1 Comment

Understanding Comics is both an excellent treatise on comics and a working example of the form. Scott McCloud explains the medium within the medium–highlighting one of the unique strengths that comics have.
McCloud makes the argument that comics fill the gap on the scale that has purely representational images on one end (visual ‘high art’), and on the other end, the realm of purely arbitrary images (aka words, as ‘literature’). But the comics niche has been trivialized as a mere diversion of pop culture, and that ain’t right. (See Highbrow/Lowbrow for similar cultural divisions and how they came about)

McCloud traces the roots of comics back to the early days of literacy, before literature and art went their separate ways. Drawing on this union is where comics set themselves apart as a unique form of visual communication. I see a parallel here with Beautiful Evidence (my review), where Tufte has a whole chapter called “Words, Numbers, Images, Together.” Those were the good ol’ days when words and doodles got along just fine without ridicule.

After the history, there’s an extended analysis of form and style and structural elements.
It’s interesting to see McCloud use an argument that is revived in Steven Johnson’s Everything Good is Bad for You (my review). Namely, that comics are more demanding of the reader. The storyline isn’t completely spelled out for you. The selected elements of the story are presented together, but you have to fill in the gaps between frozen moments in time, to give them life. As McCloud says, the comics reader becomes a participant.

Though it is probably beyond the scope of the work, I’d only ding McCloud for not going into enough depth. I’m sure there would be some copyright issues (grrr!), but I wish he were able to do a longer work with more case studies and analysis of the form. That task, however, is left for the newly-educated participant-reader. Which is perhaps how it should be.

Ordinary People (review: 4.5/5)

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

“The problem of connecting is partly that of fitting mood with opportunity.” Judith Guest‘s book was such a pleasant surprise. In a nutshell, it’s about a family dealing with tragedy, focusing on that odd relationship of individual and family. Nothing new there, but the writing is so tight and so focused. What I really like is that Guest can slide so smoothly from narration to thought to dialogue and every which other way. The writing as much as the style makes it a compulsive page-turner. Add in some great male characters whose internal world feels really genuine, and some genuinely laugh-out-loud moments balance the more patient, reflective meditation on family. This bit was perfect:

He would do it, too, if it were not for a frenetic-butterfly manner that she radiates. It grates on his nerves. She has an endless supply of nervous energy. Tiny women are often like this, he thinks. They never run down. They overwhelm him, make him feel lumpish and stupid. Too large.

Another priceless bit of craft was husband and wife driving out to a dinner party. Within their routine dialogue, Guest makes the next scene transfer so seamlessly…

“We’ll go in the spring,” he says. “I promise.”
She doesn’t answer.
“Who’s going to be there tonight?” Testing. Her tone when she answers will tell him if she is angry.
“Well, the Murrays. It’s their house.” She slides over next to him. Happily grateful, he squeezes her hand. Wonderful, unpredictable girl. “And Mac and Ann Kline, Ed and Marty Genthe. And us.”
“Why us? We hardly know the Murrays.”
“That’s why. That’s why you have people over, darling. To get to know them better.”

(thanks for the recommendation, Kelli)

Envisioning Information (review: 4/5)

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

After finishing up Beautiful Evidence, I was impressed enough to check out one of Edward Tufte’s earlier works. Envisioning Information is mostly targeted to the display of complex, multi-dimensional data within the constraints of our merely 2-dimensional presentation media like paper and computer screens.
While I really liked it, it was missing some things I really liked seeing in Beautiful Evidence. For one, there didn’t seem to be as much original material in this book. Tufte seemed to stay in the background more, displaying best practices and analyzing effective examples. What I really missed was his criticism and revisions of faltering works. As he points out, comparing and contrasting is one of the purposes of good analytic design–I don’t think he took enough opportunity to do so. Some other minor quibbles would be the omni-present transporation timetables, and some recycled graphics from chapter to chapter.

On the upside, I really liked two of the more user-oriented chapters. ‘Layering and Separation’ was all about human perception. It branched off from Albersian ideas about how sometimes 1+1=3, moir?© patterns, and other unintended effects. Tufte makes good use of examples and suggests some corrections in that chapter. Seeing the clumsy “before” and the polished “after” versions is a huge help. The other section I liked was ‘Color and Information’, dedicated to use of color in distinguishing marks and values, and the ways color be a cognitive aid (and distraction).

I wish Tufte could work more quickly. As it is, his books take quite a while to work on (understandably so). I’m looking forward to what he’ll come up with another 6-7 years down the line.

Beautiful Evidence (review: 4.5/5)

~ Mark ~ 5 Comments

This is such an excellent book. Just a couple days after finishing Beautiful Evidence, I decided to invoke my alumni privileges at Emory’s Woodruff Library so I could get my hands on his earlier books. I’m in the midst of Envisioning Information right now, and it’s looking to be just as good.
Edward Tufte has crafted a reputation as something of a guru of analytic design and information display. His latest work, Beautiful Evidence is about the act of visual communication in all its forms–using image, word, number, line, or otherwise. He’s talking about the transformation of observation to presentation, “how seeing turns into showing”. This comes out in chapters dedicated to mapped images; links, arrows & causation; corrupted evidence; and more, all calling on case studies from modern science back to ye olden days.

The book itself sets a good model for what it discusses, as a beautifully printed book with thoughtful, purposeful design. Add in some lovely colors and inks on some really nice paper. I liked seeing the “footnotes” placed in the left and right margins vertically parallel with the corresponding phrase, so the commentary is but a glance away. And for the most part, each page represents a full argument. While it can make for some slightly terse writing, I have to admire the editorial restraint to not let the ideas run all over the pages.

I give petty demerits for a little bit of loose organization. The individual chapters and pages are really tight. On the other hand, at the macro-level the book is a wee jumbled. He expands on some incredibly cool ideas on sparklines; but then there’s also a reprint of an old pamphlet on PowerPoint; and then there’s also an odd dwarf chapter on sculpture. Hmm.

Later, Tufte offers a bit pseudo-inspirational advice on information design: “What would Richard Feynman think?” Well, gosh, Ed. I really don’t have a clue. How about a little help? I’m reading your book so you can tell me. Don’t make me think! Er…

But really, it’s easy to criticise because it’s kind of hard to choose which excellent parts to highlight. There’s a lot to learn here.

The Wisdom of Crowds (review: 4/5)

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

James Surowiecki’s recent book focuses on the problems faced by groups (namely, cognition, coordination, and cooperation), and exactly what makes good decisions possible (that is, diversity, independence, decentralization).
Like some other consilient books I’ve dabbled in, Surowiecki draws from a bunch of academic and popular work, and uses it to neatly package his ideas for human consumption. In his favor, I really like that he doesn’t stretch his research too far. The main idea seems more richly documented and better sculpted than in books like Blink and The Tipping Point. As an added bonus, his writing is more free from chummy background stories–i.e. not all research needs multi-paragraph introductions. Instead, we get a nice solid edifice of ideas–thank you, James.

If anything were missing, I’d say Surowiecki could have been a bit more bold in offering his own views. The writing flows so nicely from the research that a bit more conscious effort to bracket his own prognostication and advocacy wouldn’t hurt.

But, alas, one side effect of his thoughtful exposition is that he isn’t as entertaining and personable as, say, Steven Johnson. One bright exception was the few pages discussing the “gangster-film theory of business”. As a model of the corporation, we have The Godfather, Part II with the powerful Corleone dynasty directing a huge network of businesses (on both sides of the law). Heat provides a model for the agile, intimate workings of small-enterprise. And then we there are groups like in Reservoir Dogs, performing a simple one-off project and disbanding afterward. So perhaps none of those are models of success, but it’s great stuff nonetheless.

The Law (review: 5/5)

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

Frederic Bastiat was an economist and writer in France in the early 1800s. His short book/ long essay The Law is one of the best pieces of political science writing I’ve read in a while. I loved this book. The Law is about the purpose and place of law in society, and Bastiat makes his case so clearly it brings me to tears.
One of the sections I particularly enjoyed was his critiques of other well-known French political theorists like Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Condillac. He examines the pessimistic worldview that informs their visions of society, in the end saying,

Oh, sublime writers! Please remember sometimes that this clay, this sand, and this manure which you so arbitrarily dispose of, are men! They are your equals! They are intelligent and free human beings like yourselves! As you have, they too have received from God the faculty to observe, to plan ahead, to think, and to judge for themselves!

I also thought Bastiat’s critical look at classical education to be pretty perceptive. The case he makes is this: that classical education necessarily focuses on ancient thought, and that “antiquity presents everywhere ‚Äî in Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome ‚Äî the spectacle of a few men molding mankind according to their whims, thanks to the prestige of force and of fraud”. Learning about these ancient societies is not a problem per se. The problem arises when thinkers and teachers “offered them for the admiration and imitation of future generations… They took for granted the grandeur, dignity, morality, and happiness of the artificial societies of the ancient world.”

Some other great moments: the tired, dangerous notion of the “great man”; that “a science of economics must be developed before a science of politics can be logically formulated”; and some relevant, challenging words in light of our misadventures in Iraq and elsewhere:

I defy anyone to say how even the thought of revolution, of insurrection, of the slightest uprising could arise against a government whose organized force was confined only to suppressing injustice.

Read this book.