Instead of tracing evolution forward from the primeval slime to the emergence of homo sapiens, it traces it backwards, from homo sapiens to the primeval slime, via a series of branching points on the evolutionary tree, or rather bush, where we meet hypothetical common ancestors, or "concestors" in Dawkins's terminology. The first concestor is the creature from which both man and chimpanzee (man's nearest biological relative) were descended; the second concestor is the creature from which the first concestor and gorillas were descended; the third concestor is the creature from which the second concestor, the gorillas and orang-utans were descended; and so on and so forth, back to the origins of life itself. According to Dawkins, about 40 such concestors (each of which is the subject of a chapter) are sufficient to take us back to the origin of life itself.
But how do they manage to include all 68,647 cartoons ever published in the magazine? Well, the book comes with a searchable double CD set. The massive book itself includes merely the "2,004 best" cartoon ever published in the magazine, which is the largest collection ever assembled. OK, here's a hint. The book is less than 1,000 pages ..
The desire for and pursuit of liberty is a key thread in both human and intellectual history, argues Novak who goes on to say that despite the relative lack of liberty in the Muslim world, the concept of liberty has deep roots in Islam .. The intellectual bulk of the book lies in his assessment of the philosophical, theological and economic values that drive liberal democratic capitalism. Novak, also the author of The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, shines when fleshing out these concepts, including "moral ecology" .. using it as a way to engage the much-debated "clash of civilizations." Novak is particularly keen in .. gauging the extent to which religion will play an increasingly large role in world affairs during the 21st century. He cogently compares Catholicism's relative incorporation of democracy to the differing applications of Islamic law today.This also looks significant:
Fewer : How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future by Ben Wattenberg
And if your getting me a book for Christmas, this would be it:
An Empire of Wealth : The Epic History of American Economic Power by John Gordon.
ADDED LATER -- Here's another one on a similar theme: They Made America: Two Centuries of Innovators from the Steam Engine to the Search Engine by Harold Evans
I've liked books about entrepreneurial creativity and success since I was a kid. I ate them up by the handful mixed in with books about explorers, athletes and statesmen. I don't know why, there are many more books for adults on all these later topics, and very few on the people who really made the material life of the country. I find the story of Singer or Hershey or Borden a much better tale than the life of most sports stars and politicians.
One more I'd like to see under the Chrismas tree:
My Life as a Quant : Reflections on Physics and Finance by Emanuel Derman, the story of "one of the first high-energy particle physicists to migrate to Wall Street."
UPDATE: Add this one to the list:
The Pentagon's New Map by Thomas Barnett.
In stores next week: How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must) by Ann Coulter -- already #19 at Amazon.
And this looks fun: The Know-It-All : One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by Esquire editor A. J. Jacobs:
Imagine, the original Berserkers were "savage Norse soldiers" of the Middle Ages who went into battle stark naked! .. Intrigued? Well, either hunker down with your own Encyclop�dia Britannica, or buy Esquire editor Jacobs's memoir of the year he spent reading all 32 volumes of the 2002 edition � that's 33,000 pages with some 44 million words .. Apart from the sheer pleasure of scaling a major intellectual mountain, Jacobs figured reading the encyclopedia from beginning to end would fill some gaps in his formal education and greatly increase his "quirkiness factor." .. As his wife shunned him and cocktail party guests edged away, Jacobs started testing his knowledge ..But isn't this odd. Simon & Schuster's Michael Korda has written a biography of Ulysses S. Grant.
Rathergate is a microcosm of the main idea of this book, which is that ideology makes smart people fall for stupid ideas. Had Dan Rather and his underlings at CBS been motivated by getting at the truth rather than advancing a specific political agenda, they would have never fallen for the forged memos.And this:
Intellectual Morons breaks new ground in a number of areas. Specifically, all of Margaret Sanger�s major biographers fail to mention her very detailed plan for American concentration camps housing millions. I do. None of Alfred Kinsey�s biographers even bothers to interview one of Kinsey�s child victims. I do.And this:
The individuals discussed in the book all have massive cultural import, and have fallen for or propagated foolish ideas. Sex pervert Alfred Kinsey�s reports helped launch the sexual revolution. The modern feminist movement began as a result of Betty Friedan�s Feminine Mystique. Stalinist W.E.B. Du Bois finds his face on a U.S. postage stamp, his life the subject of two Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies, and his name gracing the tallest library in the world at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst .. Paul Ehrlich touted a coming environmental apocalypse and received foundation prizes and bequests well into the seven figures; appeared frequently on The Tonight Show, Today, and other widely watched television shows; and sold millions of books .. Herbert Marcuse, the guru of the New Left of the 1960s, waged war on language by renaming intolerance as tolerance, violence as nonviolence, and dictatorship as democracy. Marcuse�s Newspeak led to the Left rationalizing censorship, acts of violence by radicals, and support of totalitarians like Castro or the Palestinian terrorists�all while claiming to advocate tolerance, non-violence, and democracy .. Leo Strauss is the Right�s deconstructionist. He saw the entire history of philosophy as a massive conspiracy theory, in which nearly all of the world�s great thinkers � Plato, Machiavelli, Locke, etc. � dishonestly advanced one message suitable to the masses while encoding their real message �between the lines� to other wise men. Strauss purports to find these hidden messages by using a form of numerology, searching for implied contradictions, projecting special meaning on the first and last words of a text, and adding importance to passages in certain locations of a book.Daniel Flynn is also the author of Why the Left Hates America.
Books: Bringing the Jobs Home: How the Left Created the Outsourcing Crisis -- And How We Can Fix It
Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography by William F. Buckley. Currently #63 at Amazon.
A better title might have been "Carter -- the Unknown President" judging from reader reviews. Example: "According to Steven Hayward Jimmy Carter is a .. man with a mean streak a mile wide." Who knew?
I certainly didn't know this: "[Carter] was the guy who carried his garment bag on board Air Force 1 to try to appear like a normal guy when in fact the garment bag was empty."
Or this: "To win in Georgia, he sold himself as a Redneck and a segregationist and switched faces when it suited his ambitions for power." .. "Carter's campaign smears and race-baiting are by far the dirtiest campaigns of the 20th Century."
One reader titles his review "Machiavelli meets Mr. Rogers"
Hayward is author of The Age of Reagan, 1964-1980: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order.
You might also enjoy "I Agree With Me".
Kelly, of course, was the Atlantic Monthly war correspondent killed during the taking of Baghdad.
Worth a read -- Ron Rosenbaum, "We Miss Mike Kelly". Quotable: "I�m still bitter about Michael Kelly�s death. This is something I realized when I went to an event in his memory on March 17, nearly a year after he was killed in a Humvee while covering the war in Iraq. I didn�t expect to get as upset as did. I hardly knew Mike Kelly; we shared an editor, Robert Vare, and our paths had crossed while writing for him. In addition, I�d written a couple of pieces for Mike (and Vare) when Mike was editing The Atlantic. But I think I know from those few encounters why he meant so much to the people who really did know him well. There are some people who strike you immediately by a kind of natural goodness that goes beyond good nature. Like obscenity in the Supreme Court opinion, natural goodness is something that�s hard to define, but you know it when you see it .. ". More Ron Rosenbaum.
UPDATE: USNews has an interview with Kelly's widow.
And here is Atlantic Monthly editor Robert Vare on Kelly.
Also. The Atlantic Monthly has this: "It was Koppel who brought Mike's personal effects, including those notebooks, back to his family. He writes [in the introduction to Things Worth Fighting For]:
"The sacrifices that both Michael and I had imposed on our wives and children had been the subject of one long, late-night conversation in the desert. Many marriages in our profession don't survive the separations and the accumulated pressures of lengthy and dangerous assignments. We marveled at the enormous generosity and toughness of our wives and how fortunate we were in the freedom they had given us. There's never a truly equitable payback, but as we talked that night, I don't think it occurred to either of us that Michael might be denied even the opportunity to try."It is impossible for someone with young kids not to be moved by those like Kelly -- good men with a purpose -- who died leaving young kids.
BOOKS. "Why [did] Hiss persisted in his lying and why [did] he managed to fool so many Americans for so long .. ?". more MAX FRANKEL -- a review of Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars by Edward White. And one more question -- why was the NY Times and the NY Times Book Review so often and long on the side of those who whitewashed Hiss?
BOOKS. The Drudge-like power of InstaPundit -- Glenn mentions a book he's blurped, and the thing rockets to the Amazon top 25. I guess it's hard to resist a book with a title like this: Hollywood, Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon -- The Case Against Celebrity.
Books. Robert Nozick's long time friend David Gordon reviews Edward Feser's highly recommended On Nozick. Quotable:
.. to my mind the best of the many fine things in [On Nozick] is Feser's brilliant defense of the view that taxation amounts to forced labor. The programs of the welfare state entail that "the state and its beneficiaries have an entitlement or enforceable claim to, and thus a partial property right in, your labor, and thus of you. They are, in short, part-owners of you .. ".
John Stossel's Give Me a Break : How I .. Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media reviewed on NRO by Ethan Wallison. Quotable:
Stossel suggests that political bias within the profession means that liberal groups have a reliable pipeline to the top news outlets and journalists, who are prone to accepting the information they are provided uncritically. The Washington Post, among others, reports that 150,000 women die every year from the eating disorder anorexia � a number that, as Stossel points out, is absurd on its face. ("Triple the number killed in cars?") Dan Rather, citing a report, suggests that one in four American children under age 12 is "in danger of starving." (The actual source material, based on a highly misleading survey, said nothing of the sort. But either way, Stossel notes, isn't our real problem obesity?) The New York Times winds up having to correct a piece that says, erroneously, that the North Pole is melting � but not before the story is picked up by other major media who also interview the same "global warming expert" quoted in the Times story.The fourth estate is not the real focus of this book, however. Give Me a Break is a capitalist's manifesto, a paean to the power of self-interest to regulate human affairs. Stossel makes no apologies for his faith in free markets as the surest source of wealth, justice, innovation, and efficiency. He's a crusader who comes across as a populist F. A. Hayek or Milton Friedman. "Calcutta is poor because of your stupid policies," he tells a top official of the local Socialist party, which has run that Indian city for years. Elsewhere, he corners Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf, who's demanding that the city government pony up for a new stadium. "Let's have a debate," Stossel says. "You're a freeloader. You're taking money from poor taxpayers to make you, a rich guy, richer." That must have been cathartic. It's no surprise that one school teacher from Kansas writes Stossel, after his interview with the Calcutta official aired, to complain that he was "rude" to his subject. Stossel's response: "I was rude. This man wrecked people's lives.... Someone ought to be rude to him."
Peter Hitchens reviews Jean-Fran�ois Revel's Anti-Americanism. Quotable:
Living amidst [the anti-American ravings of French "intellectuals"], simultaneously pretentious and offensive to any well-tuned mind, it is easy to understand why the good Jean-Fran�ois finds it hard to accept any criticisms of the USA. Condemnation from such curdled brains and such flapping mouths almost always amounts to praise. But that is what is wrong with this otherwise excellent and lucid book. It cannot recognize that a criticism of the USA may be true even though a French leftist has made it ...
2004 is only days old and we already have a solid nominee for the "Worst of the NY Times 2004" awards -- the NY Times Book Review gives a positive review to the latest ravings of Noam Chomsky, perhaps the most dishonest academic writing today. Utterly revolting, utterly The NY Times.
Virginia Postrel's latest, The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness is now available for order on Amazon. Her earlier The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress was one of the more important popular political theory books of the last few years. Postrel's writing has the great virtue of including lots of very helpful examples giving content to abstract ideas, a virtue every good writers genuinely respects because they know it takes hard work. The book also had the virtue of discussing ideas from Hayek in a fresh and compelling way.
Be the first to order David Bernstein's You Can't Say That! The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties from Antidiscrimination Laws
Ann Coulter gets a first class fisking from Dorothy Rabinowitz. An instant classic. Rabinowitz calls Coulter "the Maureen Dowd of the conservatives". Ouch.
Joseph Ellis (yes, that Joseph Ellis) gives Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin a glowing review. Quotable:
Isaacson recognizes from the start that the character portrayed in the ''Autobiography'' is one of Franklin's most artful inventions. He argues persuasively that Franklin's sharpest critics, from Max Weber to D. H. Lawrence, have directed their fire more at his masks than at the man beneath them.
Isaacson's 4th of July TIME magazine piece on Franklin is worth reading. Franklin -- and Isaacson -- get at the core of American liberalism in a very few well chosen words:
At age 12, Franklin became an apprentice at the printshop of his older brother James, who tended to be quite tough as a master. "I fancy his harsh and tyrannical treatment of me," Franklin later speculated, had the effect of "impressing me with that aversion to arbitrary power that has stuck to me through my whole life."
And this:
The literary character Franklin invented was a triumph of imagination. Silence Dogood was a slightly prudish widow from a rural area, created by a spunky unmarried Boston 16-year-old who had never spent a night outside of the city. He imbued Mrs. Dogood with that spirited aversion to tyranny that he would help to make part of the American character. "I am," she wrote, "a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power. I am naturally very jealous for the rights and liberties of my country; and the least appearance of an encroachment on those invaluable privileges is apt to make my blood boil exceedingly." It was as good a description of the real Benjamin Franklin�and, indeed, of a typical American�as is likely to be found anywhere.
P.J. O'Rourke read Hillary's book so you don't have to. Quotable O'Rourke:
But George Washington and William F. Buckley Jr. put together could not have foreseen, in their gloomiest moments, the rise of Clinton-style �ber-mediocrity--with its soaring commonplaces, its pumped trifling, its platinum-grade triviality. The Alpha-dork husband, the super-twerp wife, and the hyper-wonk vice president--together with all their mega-weenie water carriers, such as vicious pit gerbil George Stephanopoulos and Eastern diamondback rattleworm Sidney Blumenthal--spent eight years trying to make America nothing to brag about.
And this tidbit -- Sen. Clinton failed her D.C. bar examination.
Roger Scruton reviews The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad by Fareed Zakaria. Quotable:
His argument is particularly pertinent now, when allied forces are attempting to bring freedom to Iraq by imposing democratic procedures on its people. As Zakaria points out, democracy could as well lead to an elected dictatorship of mullahs as to a modern civil society. For democracy without the rule of law is mob rule, and the rule of law is not built by democratic means.Elected dictatorships, which extinguish opposition, destroy the political process too. It is only where people are free to dissent that genuine democratic choice is possible. Hence liberty should come higher than democracy in the wish list of our politicians. You can have liberty without democracy, but not democracy without liberty: such is the lesson of European history. Before imposing democratic regimes, therefore, we should ensure that civil liberty is properly entrenched in a rule of law, a rotation of offices, and the freedom to dissent. These institutions tend to arise naturally, Zakaria argues, with the emergence of a socially mobile middle class. That is why the transition to democracy is successful in countries with a per capita GDP of $3,000 to $6,000 but not in countries where it is significantly less.
Drudge is hyping Ann Coulter's TREASON: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism. If it knocks Hillary of the top of the charts, I guess I'll hype it too.
Thomas Sowell on the late, great Eric Hoffer. Worth quoting:
How many people today even know of this remarkable man with no formal schooling, who spent his life in manual labor -- most of it as a longshoreman -- and who wrote some of the most insightful commentary on our society and trends in the world? You need only read one of his classics like The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements to realize that you are seeing the work of an intellectual giant.Having spent several years in blindness when most other children were in school, Hoffer could only do manual labor after he recovered his sight, but was determined to educate himself. He began by looking for a big book with small print to take with him as he set out on a job as a migratory farm worker. The book that turned out to fill this bill -- based on size and words -- was the essays of Montaigne .. If ever there was a walking advertisement for the Great Books approach to education, it was Eric Hoffer.
Among Hoffer's insights about mass movements was that they are an outlet for people whose individual significance is meager in the eyes of the world and -- more important -- in their own eyes. He pointed out that the leaders of the Nazi movement were men whose artistic and intellectual aspirations were wholly frustrated. Hoffer said: "The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause."
People who are fulfilled in their own lives and careers are not the ones attracted to mass movements: "A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding," Hoffer said. "When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business."
What Hoffer was describing was the political busybody, the zealot for a cause -- the "true believer," who filled the ranks of ideological movements that created the totalitarian tyrannies of the 20th century .. Contrary to the prevailing assumptions of his time, Eric Hoffer did not believe that revolutionary movements were based on the sufferings of the downtrodden. "Where people toil from sunrise to sunset for a bare living, they nurse no grievances and dream no dreams," he said. He had spent years living among such people and being one of them.
Hoffer's insights may help explain something that many of us have found very puzzling -- the offspring of wealthy families spending their lives and their inherited money backing radical movements. He said: "Unlimited opportunities can be as potent a cause of frustration as a paucity or lack of opportunities."
What can people with inherited fortunes do that is at all commensurate with their unlimited opportunities, much less what their parents or grandparents did to create the fortune in the first place, starting from far fewer opportunities?
Like the frustrated artists and failed intellectuals who turn to mass movements for fulfillment, rich heirs cannot win the game of comparison of individual achievements. So they must change the game. As zealots for radical movements, they often attack the very things that made their own good fortune possible, as well as undermining the freedom and well-being of other people.
Tom Palmer has read as many books on capitalism and freedom as anybody. Right now he's reading Jerry Muller's The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought -- which includes a great chapter on Friedrich Hayek. I'm pleased the Muller is a Hayek-L list member -- and I'll be looking for Palmer's review. In the mean time Tom gives us a helpful and very positive review to a collection of original reading on Commerce, Culture and Liberty collected by Henry Clark. Bonus: scroll down and you'll also find a link to Palmer's essay on why "Globalization Is Grrrreat".