The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry

The book's earnest environmental message resonated with me, and I share the author's sincere concern about our nation losing the "glue" of agricultural and village life (something which bonded us as a nation for centuries, but is now long gone after decades of urbanization, centralization, regulation and sociocultural atomization).

At the same time I was concerned with a lack of rigor in the book, both in the case of various unsubstantiated and/or incorrect facts and statistics in this book [an example: "It is estimated that it now costs (by erosion) two bushels of Iowa topsoil to grow one bushel of corn" something that if true would suggest that by 2020 there would be no topsoil left in the entire state], as well as the general Malthusian lens the author uses to perceive reality.

The embarrassing thing about Malthusianism: at some point the author has to look at the scoreboard and admit his predictions of doom never happened. You can't always just push things out into the future and excuse being wrong by claiming, "I'm still right, I'm just a little early. We're still doomed, just wait!" By that logic Thomas Malthus himself would be "not wrong, just early" in calling for horrendous famines and widespread starvation in late 18th Century England (which never happened, not even close).

Even a book as sincere and earnest as this one has to be held to some standard of rigor and logic, otherwise we give away ammunition to an anti-environmentalist opposition, who can point out the unwarranted statistics and the garden-variety Malthusianism and declare an easy victory.

Stress Without Distress by Hans Selye

A short book distilling Hans Selye's groundbreaking technical work The Stress of Life into practical principles for handling daily life. Articulates a basic philosophy that can be boiled down to "earn thy neighbor's love." Selye calls this "altruistic egotism" and argues that satisfaction in life can be achieved by seeking genuinely satisfying work, earning the goodwill and gratitude of others through that work, and by living with a philosophy of gratitude. Not his finest book, but it is interesting and useful to hear the values and prescriptive statements of one of biology's most eminent scientists. The ideas in this book are not original--the author candidly admits as much--but offer helpful guideposts for how to live. Notes: 1) The first chapter is essentially a layperson's summary of Selye's main work The Stress of Life , defining key terms, what he means (in biological terms) when he talks about stress, describing the evolution of the stres

The Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche (trans. Francis Golffing)

Of the three essays of The Genealogy of Morals I recommend the first two. Skim the third. Collectively, they are extremely useful reading for citizens of the West to see clearly the oligarchic power dynamics under which we live. Show me a modern Western nation-state where there isn't an increasing concentration of power among the elites--and a reduction in freedom for everyone else. You can't find one. Today we live in an increasingly neo-feudal system, where elites control more and more of the wealth, the actions, even the thoughts of the masses. Perhaps we should see the rare flowerings of genuine democratic freedom (6th century BC Athens, Republic-era Rome, and possibly pre-1913 USA ) for what they really are: extreme outliers, quickly replaced with tyranny. The first essay inverts the entire debate about morality, as Nietzsche nukes centuries of philosophical ethics by simply saying the powerful simply do what they do , and thus those things are good by definition. La

The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750 by Peter Brown

Late Antiquity is a rich, messy and complicated era of history, with periods of both decline and mini-renaissances of Roman culture and power, along with a period of astounding growth and dispersion of Christianity. And it was an era of extremely complex geopolitical engagements across three separate continents, as the Roman Empire's power center shifted from Rome to Constantinople. There's a lot that went on in this era, and this book will help you get your arms around it. And Christianity didn't just grow during this period, it was a tremendous driver of political and cultural change. It changed everything--and to be fair, really destabilized and even wrecked a lot of the existing cultural foundation underlying Mediterranean civilization. But then, paradoxically, the Christian church later provided the support structure to help Rome (temporarily) recover from extreme security problems and near collapse in the mid-third century. But that recovery was an all-too-brief min

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