I don’t know how Chuck Klosterman can get away with it. In his recent book Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto, he presents some of the most scattered, whimsical, subjective, and infuriatingly delightful musings on pop culture. The collected essays cover the gamut, jumping from the Lakers/Celtics rivalry, Pamela Anderson, the life of a Van Halen tribute band, and one on the classic afternoon television show of my generation, Saved by the Bell, and more.
So we’ve got 200 pages of chatty memoir and Gen X riffing. It’s such a good balance of over-the-top opinion and declaration (e.g. “The desire to be cool isÄîultimatelyÄîthe desire to be rescued” or, “Clearly, video technology cages imagination”) that doesn’t so much convince but overwhelms with torrential amusement. Despite the thorough, detailed pop culture analyses, what Klosterman really does well is the personal side of things. Maybe that’s my human-ness speaking, but his writing about his own experiences is when his stories really pick up, whether it’s being fired from coaching Little League or discovering a bit of Life’s Meaning from playing the Sims videogame. If only there were more of it.
Category: books
Edward Stringham has compiled a new anthology, Anarchy and the Law: The Political Economy of Choice. Folks, that’s 700 pages of radical libertarian goodness:
Anarchy and the Law assembles for the first time in one volume the most important classic and contemporary studies exploring and debating non-state legal and political systems, especially involving the tradition of natural law and private contracts.
Should markets and contracts provide law, and can the rule of law itself be understood as a private institution? Are the state and its police powers benign societal forces, or are they a system of conquest, authoritarianism, occupation, and exploitation?
From the early works of Gustave de Molinari, Edmund Burke, Voltairine de Cleyre, Benjamin Tucker, David Lipscomb, and Lysander Spooner to the contemporary thinking of Murray Rothbard, David Friedman, Anthony De Jasay and Bruce Benson, Anarchy and the Law features the key studies exploring and debating the efficacy of individual choice and markets versus the shortfalls of coercive government power and bureaucracy. In so doing, the book also features debates involving Roderick LongÄôs argument against a nationalized military and Robert NozickÄôs critique of stateless legal systems, as well as the work of such scholars as Nobel Laureate economist Douglass North, Tyler Cowen, Robert Ellickson, Randall Holcombe, Randy Barnett, Barry Weingast, Terry Anderson, Andrew Rutten, Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, and others.
Whereas liberals and conservatives argue in favor of political constraints, Anarchy and the Law examines whether to check against abuse, government power must be replaced by a social order of self-government based on contracts.
Letter to a Christian Nation (review: 3.5/5)
Atheism seems to have caught a little buzz in recent years, I’m not sure how. There was that unfortunate survey, and books by Dawkins and others made a little splash, and there’s the cover story on a recent issue of Wired magazine, in particular. Sam Harris’ extended essay, Letter to a Christian Nation, joins the crowd with a missive to “demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms.”
Harris has some really great moments in this book, and it’s a pretty compelling read. He starts with a heavy does of scripture, analyzing the Christian moral paradigm, delighting in the Bible’s weaknesses and cherry-picking the incriminating and contradictory parts. I’m certainly (absolutely) not a Bible scholar, but I think he’s a bit too reliant on quoting from the Old Testament, where Big Bad God and the harshness and shortcomings of ancient civilizational mores are far too easy to pick on. You have to keep in mind that he’s targeting the literalists more so than religious liberals and moderates. But there’s also some interesting sociological examination of religion: “Religion raises the stakes of human conflict much higher than tribalism, racism, or politics ever can, as it is the only form of in-group/ out-group thinking that casts the differences between people in terms of eternal rewards and punishments.”
I think he’s effective when he’s talking about the practical, day-to-day implications of religion more so than his examination of the particulars of doctrine. He has a nice section on the ethics of life, discussing abortion, cloning, and biomedical research. And of course, there’s an obligatory passage on evolution and intelligent design. Here’s one line that really got me: “The core of science is not controlled experiment or mathematical modeling; it’s intellectual honesty.”
The last section is a gloomy look to mankind’s future on an increasingly religious, conflict-ridden planet.
It is easy, of course, for the representatives of the major religions to occasionally meet and agree that there should be peace on earth, or that compassion is the common thread that unites all the world’s faiths. But there is no escaping the fact that a person’s religious beliefs uniquely determine what he thinks peace is good for, as well as what he means by a term like “compassion.”
Practically, is there really room for tolerance? He wraps up with a big, brilliant question, “How can interfaith dialogue, even at the highest level, reconcile worldviews that are fundamentally incompatible and, in principle, immune to revision?” The stakes are indeed very high.
Umberto Eco’s 1994 essay on the Future of the Book.
Plato was expressing a fear that still survived in his day. Thinking is an internal affair; the real thinker would not allow books to think instead of him. Nowadays, nobody shares these fears, for two very simple reasons. First of all, we know that books are not ways of making somebody else think in our place; on the contrary they are machines that provoke further thoughts.
It reads a bit dated now, but it’s still pretty good.
50 Things Every Young Gentleman Should Know (review: 3/5)
John Bridges and Bryan Curtis offer a succinct guidebook targeted towards the young and clueless: 50 Things Every Young Gentleman Should Know: What to Do, When to Do It, and Why. It’s certainly a tidy little volume, with 200 pages of guidelines in an almost-pocketable 5×8 inch format. It covers the basics from saying “please” and “thank you,” proper silverware & napkin management, asking permission, giving compliments, tying a tie, accepting bad gifts, opening the door for people, and it even covers topics like “winning well.” Each section comes with a tidy format:
- A description of the situation
- You Do
- You Don’t
- Why
If I have any complaint, it is only that the book is a little boring. The book reads like it was aimed for those perhaps 12Äì16 years old, but most of the humor fell a bit flat. And I’m not sure why a middle-schooler would be reading an etiquette book, anyway. But those who do find it will hopefully learn a little something. It only takes maybe a half hour to get through it, so never hurts to have a little refresher on what you should have learned already.
The New York Times has a good profile of comics writers Robert and Aline Crumb.
The God Delusion (review: dnf)
Comprehensive, but a bit scatterbrained. I made it about 1/3 of the way through.
Cory Doctorow writes about giving away his books for free.
Here’s a great essay exploring the connections between comics, games, and world-building.
Perhaps when we find ourselves disturbed or bewildered by the popularity of a new genre or medium, itÄôs precisely by giving it that “serious consideration” that we will begin to get to grips with what it is and how it works. But how do we do this, when the new work often seems to have so little to do with our existing aesthetic criteria?
Scanned images from Astrology: A New and Complete Illustration of the Occult Sciences, by Ebenezer Sibly, 1806.
Lisa Carver on the current batch of chick lit: I’d like to take all these books, pile them up and throw gasoline and a lit match onto them. [via bookslut]
“With the deceptive, exciting, children-friendly packaging of witchcraft in the Harry Potter series, our youth today view witchcraft not only as good and fun, but also as harmless fantasy.” Myth versus truth in the Harry Potter caseÄìat least she’s persistent. [via librarycrunch]
If you liked Flatland the book, you’ll be glad to know there will soon be an animated movie for it. Alan Nelson links to several places you can read the book online (or get the gist of it anyway). [via seat 1a]
“This past Christmas Vacation my brothers, sister, myself and my girlfriend built a scale replica of the battle of Helms Deep, from the second book of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, The Two Towers penned by the late, great, J.R.R. Tolkien.” And it’s made mostly of gummi bears, licorice, and other confections. [via rebecca blood]
“I am so tired of books about World War II and the Holocaust being tarted up as nostalgia porn.” Bookslut picks the worst book covers from last year.
Marc Singer reviews the MOME Spring/Summer 2006 comics anthology, and riffs on the state of today’s independent comics: “When comics aspire to the stature of literature or art they have to succeed as literature or art, not as not superheroes.” There’s some great discussion there in the comments, where Kevin Huizenga and some others weigh in.
This website features extensive speculation on Batman’s religion, who is most likely a lapsed Catholic or Episcopalian. There are also features on other comics characters.
The British Library lets you browse some classic primary texts online. They’ve got works like Carroll’s original Alice story with his own handwriting and illustrations, Mercatur’s first maps of Europe, and one of Mozart’s last notebooks.
Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century (review: 3/5)
I’ve been sitting on this one for a while. I’m not really sure how you review something like this, so I’ll just say it’s a cool, encyclopedic book. Bruce Sterling calls it a “dizzyingly comprehensive chunk of treeware,” which sounds about right. Worldchanging is the meatworld reference book associated with the collaborative Worldchanging website.
Inside, you’ll find short articles on about a million green-related topics. Let’s see… forestry, women’s rights, microfinance, product design, DIY, bioplastics, sustainable ranching, social entrepreneurship, climate change, etc. It is a very pretty book: full-color throughout, nicely designed on heavy paper, and with lots of photos (though woefully short of cool, original infographics). The obvious problem is inherent to an encyclopedia, where no topic is covered in depth, and no entry can be as refined or nuanced as it ought to be (e.g., only 7 pages on “Understanding Trade”). It’s an honest start, and there’s some inspiration to be found if you’re already inclined.
Mark Larson 