The holiday season was too busy for me to compile this sort of list, especially with a move to a new home thrown in, an event that always makes one ambivalent about book ownership anyhow. “Isn’t time to invest in a Kindle?” was the crack my younger economist friend made as we filled yet another box to the brim with the heavy pulpy matter—I guess those guys can live career-wise on journal articles, even if I’m sure the academic’s hoard will creep up on him eventually. I can’t claim that my list reflects comprehensive knowledge of the current book market, or even my own reading from 2012, which as per usual was more engaged with older books, but it seems unusual enough to be worth sharing. Not a few of these were published in 2011, or even 2010, and my categorization here reflects my judgment of quality more than my numerical ordering.
Really good books:
1) Ralph Hancock, Calvin and the Foundation of Modern Politics
2) Elizabeth Kantor, The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After
3) Richard Brookhiser, James Madison
4) Lucid Mind, Intrepid Spirit, Essays on the Thought of Chantal Delsol. Contributors include yours truly, Paul Seaton, Peter Lawler, Lauren Hall, and Delsol herself.
Non-top-flight books that I nonetheless was fascinated by:
5) Simon Reynolds, Retromania
6) Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia
7) Charles Portis, Escape Velocity: A Miscellany
8) Tocqueville, Letters from America, edited by Frederick Brown
9) Gary Bruce, The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi
One Pretty Bad Book that I still read 80% of:
10) Pete Townsend, Who I Am
Two Books that I’ve only read a quarter of, but which look to be great:
11) David Mayer, Liberty of Contract: Rediscovering a Lost Constitutional Right
12) Alan Gibson, Understanding the Founding, 2nd edition
*******************************************
I’ll comment on a few of these this time…more in another post.
1) Ralph Hancock, Calvin and the Foundation of Modern Politics
Yes, this is a reprint of a book first released in the early 90s. As Peter mentioned below, I have a new review of it in Perspectives. Not an easy read, but one that will school you mightily about Christian political thought, and about Ralph’s grand Strauss-rivaling theory of modernity. Read it alongside his even more impressive new book, the book which I guess is the real top-dog of this list: The Responsibility of Reason.
2) Elizabeth Kantor, The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After
I’ve said plenty about it here. Don’t let the pink-trimmings and bullet-points put you off. Its practical advice is so sound and so needed you will want to give to every even marginally bookish young person you know, and it will additionally inspire you to re-read half of the Austen corpus. Here’s a Weekly Standard intro.
3) Richard Brookhiser, James Madison
The usual Brookhiser virtue of a short biography. I talked about a few of its other virtues in my Founder’s Fight Club post. What I appreciate most is the way a sense of Madison’s fine-toothed political “deviousness” or prudence/calculation emerges, while the sense of his greatness, a truly beneficent greatness that each and every American owes much to, remains intact. A couple other less-than-fully-flattering aspects of the statesman, such as his life-long aversion to truly dealing with the slavery issue, do emerge, but never in a tendentious way. And Brookhiser largely praises his presidency and his conduct in the War of 1812, not a typical assessment.
4) Lucid Mind, Intrepid Spirit
All the essays here are great, but to toot my own horn a bit, my essay gives you my fullest published discussion of Democratic Inconstancy, a major theme for my work.
5) Simon Reynolds, Retromania
I dealt with it rather thoroughly in Songbook #s 48-52. Go to #52 for my concluding remarks and links to the rest. There I only gave it a B+ as a book of rock criticism, partly on the basis of its too-encyclopedic style, but in retrospect, my sense is the power of its basic ideas will make it something of a classic of the genre. And toot some more, my Songbook gave you the only thorough consideration and refutation of those ideas I know of.
More to come…meanwhile, any pomocon commenters or bloggers want to share their lists?
January 19th, 2013 | 1:41 pm
Good list. The companion piece to Gibson’s Understaning–Interpreting the Founding–is also worth reading. It offers a pretty full view of the historical-political science-philosophical interpretations. Gibson doesn’t discuss the “built better than they knew” case, but it was an instructive book.
I got about halfway through both Retromania and Who I Am. Don’t know if I’ll pick them up again.
The Responsibility of Reason is insightful. I’ll have check out the Calvin book (and read your review in Perspectives).
I’ve been wanting to read the Pankaj Mishra book.
Enrique Krauze’s book Redeemers (Redentores) offers some insightful short biographical-intellectual portraits (brief and parallel lives) of various Latin American writers and political actors from the late 19th century to today. Krauze compares his book (of essays) to both Plutarch (!) and Isaiah Berlin’s Russian Thinkers.
Tom Wolfe’s Back to Blood was a bit of a disappointment. It has it’s hilarious moments, but I had basically read this before in his earlier books.
Two popular politics books worth reading were Jay Cost’s Spoiled Rotten and Sean Trende’s The Lost Majority.
Richard Velkley’s Heidegger, Strauss and the Premises of Political Philosophy was probing.
And I’m attempting to make my way through Kant (again).This time with help of recordings of Strauss’ Kant lectures–two separate courses that were taught about a decade apart.
January 19th, 2013 | 4:21 pm
[...] Recommended Article FROM http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/postmodernconservative/2013/01/19/notable-new-books-i-read-in-2012-… [...]
January 19th, 2013 | 6:24 pm
Here are a handful of books published since 2010 that I really liked:
1.”The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law” (2010), by Steven Teles. Interesting from several standpoints: intrest groups, economics, law.
2. “Reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue” (2012), by Christopher Lutz. I’m currently writing a dissertation on MacIntyre’s critique of rights, and this was the best secondary literature that I found. Extremely clear and insightful.
3. “From Plato to Wittgenstein: Essays by GEM Anscombe” (2011). Elizabeth Anscombe is my favorite philosophers of the 20th century. Fortunately her family kept all her papers, many of which are absolute gems of insight. This is the third NEW Anscombe volume published by St. Andrews since 2008. I contacted the series editor, and apparently there are still more volumes to come!
4.”Philosophy Before Socrates (Second Edition) (2011),” translated by Richard McKirahan. If you have any interest in the Presocratic philosophers, this is the book to get. I had the pleasure of sitting in on McKirahan’s class, and I can attest that he has his head on straight at all times and is a good interpreter. The reason to get the 2nd edition is that new fragments and testimonia have been discovered by archeologists which weren’t available for the 1st edition (1994)
5. “Commando: The Autobiography of Johnny Ramone” (2012)- You know who Johnny Ramone is Carl, so you should know why this one is good
January 19th, 2013 | 8:23 pm
Thanks John and CJ! And let’s hear from others…my list on its own isn’t much to write home about, but a collective pomocon list would be something!
Any thoughts CJ, on the widely-known J. Barnes book on the pre-Socratics?
January 19th, 2013 | 9:23 pm
Well Carl, Jonathan Barnes book “The Presocratic Philosophers” (1983) was an important book because it was one of the first SENSITIVE attempts by an analytic philosopher to translate the arguments of the presocratics into symbolic logic and check for validity. Many earlier attempts by analytic philosophers were downright meanspirited and didn’t even try to make sense of the arguments in ancient philosophy, especially those involving necessity/possibility (modal logic). Barnes isn’t like that, he really tries to give the ancients the benefit of the doubt. We looked at his stuff alot in the class I took with McKirahan.
However, there is a problem with some of Barnes’ TRANSLATIONS of Greek into English, before he even translates that into predicate logic; his translations sometimes lack appropriate HISTORICAL and PHILOLOGICAL evidence, and that completely changes the nature of the arguments. This criticism is more of a problem for his Presocratic stuff than his stuff on Aristotle, since a) we have much less of what the Presocratics wrote b) the state of the text is much more corrupt. We’re really relying on just a few shards of papyrus and testimonials from later authors with the Presocratics (alot of the testimonia actually come from Aristotle himself); that can REALLY change the sense of the arguments. McKirahan keeps up with all the latest historical and philolocial data in his book, and I think that’s important. I get the sense that this is the kind of field where you really must have the latest in historical research, more so than most other fields in the history of philosophy
January 19th, 2013 | 9:36 pm
Hmm. Not much of a fiction reader, huh?
Hands down the best book I read last year (and the best in many years, actually) was The Orphan Master’s Son, by Adam Johnson. A spectacular book set in North Korea that is bizarre and surreal and probably not even a fraction as weird as real life in that horrific place. It’s like science fiction, but like I said, if anything is probably not nearly off-the-wall enough. There’s a line in the last few pages that is something like “This is how I would have felt every moment of my life if you had never lived” that is like a massive punch in the gut. (Actually this line may only resonate for we idealists, and mean nothing to realists, sadly for them.)
Other than that I spent most of the year reading stuff like Joel Salatin and James Schall, which undoubtedly strongly affected my views on the proper perspective to have regarding the major events of the year…
PS. Whatever happened to the songbook?
January 19th, 2013 | 9:40 pm
CJ, u know Zuckert’s MacIntyrade, I’m sure, but if u read French u need to get the late Emile Perreau-Saussine’s book on AM.
January 20th, 2013 | 1:47 am
I actually remember reading Barnes’ treatment on the Pre-Socratics a long time ago when I was determined to get myself edumacated (as a common poster here likes to say) on the Greeks. Hands down for this non-expert, one of the best books I’ve read on the Ancient Greeks was Victor Davis Hanson’s book about its yeomen farmers titled “The Other Greeks”. He argues in a spirit similar to Jefferson and Tocqueville that the vitality of ancient Greece didn’t come from its Poets, Philosophers or Warriors, but from the cultural vitality and resourcefulness of its agrarian class.
As far as reading goes from last year, I usually read a few books a year that are challenging enough that requires me to pull out my Mortimer Adler method of outlining. It’s sort of my version of Soduku.
Anyway, I’ve been enjoying David Walsh’s Modern Philosophical Revolution. I do sympathize with Lawler’s skepticism regarding Walsh’s optimistic take on the modern democratic project. But I do think Walsh describes nicely the paradox that healthy democratic societies require a willingness to acknowledge the tension that existence cannot be systematically reduced or mastered but must be lived out with eyes wide open. His chapter on Kierkegaard was particularly edifying.
I also enjoyed Bartlett and Collins’ new translation of Nichomachean Ethics.
And on theology, the Reformed theologian Michael Horton’s book Lord and Servant which is a study of the Doctrines of Soteriology, Creation and Anthropology in light of Covenant Theology.
And as one who is constantly attempting to impose organization on my disorganization David Allen’s Getting Things Done. Not very philosophical but helpful none the less.
A book that has my attention but I don’t know when I’ll have a chance to read it is Jaffa’s Crisis of the Strauss Divided. Maybe some of you Straussiophiles can tell me if its worth the effort.
On MacIntyre, I have fond memories of the book Kierkegaard after MacIntyre which was an amusing exercise in Kierkegaard experts poking holes in MacIntyre’s cartoonish take on the Dane. Theire premise was that it turns out Kierkegaard and MacIntyre had more in common than not. MacIntyre writes a response in the last chapter which, to say the least, suggested not a little annoyance on his part.
January 20th, 2013 | 3:21 pm
Most of the books I read are old, including copious amounts of older fiction. In any event, here are a few more recent titles, “recent” being applied generously to capture the recently translated and re-released:
Fiction
1. Skylark, by Dezső Kosztolányi (re-released by NYRB Books in 2010). Not No. 1 by accident. Set in a provincial Hungarian town c. 1900, the plot of Skylark works to put on display the quiet suffering and ambivalence experienced by us all through its exploration of ordinary folk & their ordinary lives. Other Kosztolányi titles available in English: Anna Édes and Kornél Esti (re-translated/released in 1993 and 2011, respectively), both of which are fine reads, esp. Anna Edes, which IMO rivals Skylark as DK’s best.
2. Perlmann’s Silence, by Pascal Mercier, the nom de plume of Swiss philosopher Peter Bieri. An academic thriller novel. Not as good as Mercier’s philosophical adventure tale Night Train to Lisbon, but worth reading. Apparently Night Train is coming out as a movie later this year, though it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that would necessarily translate well onto the screen.
Other:
1. Thomas Pangle’s The Theological Origins of Liberal Modernity in Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. Pangle focuses on what he takes to be Montesquieu’s subterranean philosophical/theological radicalism. Review forthcoming at some point in PPS.
2. Locke books by Lee Ward–John Locke and Modern Life, which has been much discussed on this blog–and Douglas Casson–Liberating Judgment. The latter offers a good account of the political or civic character of Locke’s natural rights philosophy.
3. Lucid Mind, Intrepid Spirit, the Chantal Delsol volume already mentioned by Carl.
January 20th, 2013 | 6:33 pm
PP, PPS (Perspectives on Political Science) had a symposium on Walsh’s book recently. Lots of people — e.g., Sara — who post here contribute as well. Shouldn’t you subscribe?
January 20th, 2013 | 6:39 pm
I’m struggling through Adrian Pabst’s majesterial “Metaphysics and the creation of hierarchy.” I owe a book review which looks far distant what with computer issues, screaming grandchildren, plus the inherent difficulties related to this magnificent text.
Dr. Pabst seeks to critique Aristotle by way of Plato, where the olde wrestler described the place of transcendence in the question of indivuation and relationality, as ‘the Good giving itself ecstatically to finitude in an original relation…”
And so, it is a brilliant analysis of first questions related to Creator and created, the ground of their metaleptic communion, the ‘unique’, individual, aspect of the being created ‘imago Dei.’
January 21st, 2013 | 6:57 pm
[...] off, the comment thread to the part 1 resulted in something of an informal pomocon booklist. Here are a few of the more interesting [...]
January 21st, 2013 | 7:37 pm
Pail, what’s the title of the McIntyrade? Thanks.
January 25th, 2013 | 11:55 am
[...] the third and final part of what I began with this 12-book-list. I knew my description of Mishra’s book would be the longest, which is why I changed order to [...]
January 25th, 2013 | 5:04 pm
Tom H., it’s an essay in Michael Zuckert’s book on Locke. The blue and yellow one.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact