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Best and Worst Books, 2024

I read another 50 or so books in 2024, and these are the ones that stood out--the good and the not so good. Each link below will take you to my review and discussion notes.

If you'd like to support my work here, you can feel free to use this Amazon link to do your shopping, I'll be paid a modest affiliate fee at no extra cost to you.

Thank you for reading, and all the best for 2025!


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Best (5/5 stars or close):
The Odds Against Me by John Scarne
The Art of Contrary Thinking by Humphrey Bancroft Neill
The Shipping Man by Matthew McCleery
Animal Farm by George Orwell
The Story of Silver by William L. Silber


Worst (1/5 stars or close):
How Civil Wars Start by Barbara F. Walter
Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautreamont (trans. Alexis Lykiard)
End Times by Peter Turchin

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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 defi...
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The Fourth Turning is Here by Neil Howe

If you've read the original  The Fourth Turning , much of this book will be review. However, this book explains the Forth Turning framework more cogently and tightly than the original, so if you  haven't  read the original book, I recommend just reading this and skipping the original. You'll walk away with the same central ideas plus the author's additional new (and slightly-adjusted) conclusions. The most profound takeaway from the overall Fourth Turning paradigm is that it teaches you to remember your place in the grand scheme of things. Sadly, modernity teaches the exact opposite: it persuades us to think we humans are bigger than history, that we can ignore it, be oblivious to it, and yet not repeat it. Worst of all, modernity teaches us to believe we've somehow managed to defeat history with our SOYANCE!!! and tEcHNologY--ironically none of which we can understand, replicate or repair. These "modren" beliefs, as arrogant and wrong as they are, conflic...
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Anatomy of the State by Murray Rothbard

Tight, concise discussion of what the State really is and what it really does, not what we would like it to be. Thanks to the recent pandemic response, most of us lost once and for all our delusive belief that governments are a force for good, a force for fairness and justice. In this short book, Murray Rothbard shows how the State--no matter how "limited" a government you might set up in the beginning--always, always abrogates its citizens' rights and freedoms. It's just a matter of time. We also come to understand why the State loves war. It loves it. It gives the State far more power. It provides an easy justification to abrogate still more freedoms. And of course those in the State apparatus who profit politically or economically from war never seem to send their own sons to fight it. An all-too-typical example: note how Benjamin Netanyahu's military-age son lives safely and luxuriously in Miami, his security paid for by Israeli taxpayers . The fourth chap...
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