Skip to main content

The Deep Blue Good-By by John D. MacDonald

Mournful, mid-1960s-era mystery with an even more mournful ending. This is the first "Travis McGee" novel (of twenty-one!), and it's diverting enough to make me read maybe a few more.

I think of Travis McGee as a sort of proto-Jack Reacher (see Lee Child's novels and short stories), although McGee is less perfect, less imposing and more believable. 

The author also has a knack for dropping a cute noirish quote here and there ("Never sit in the first row at the ballet" and "Let's just start by assuming it's hopeless and go on from there"), and he occasionally sings out in passages showing how life really grinds people down, especially the young and unlucky:


This novel is competently done with good pacing, accelerating right to a surprise ending.

To Read:
Mark Harris: The Southpaw; Bang the Drum Slowly; A Ticket for a Seamstitch; It Looked Like For Ever  (four part "Henry Wiggin" novel series)

More Posts

How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World by Harry Browne

This book is a praxis: a set of real-world practices for navigating reality as it is, rather than how we wish it to be. The language is clear and direct, and the book aggregates into a highly robust and coherent work of practical, livable philosophy. Author Harry Browne developed this philosophy over the course of many years, and it's inspiring to hear him talk about his mistakes, his refinements in thinking over time, and the surprising and often liberating benefits that came his way as he followed his own practices. This author eats his own cooking, and the result is a generous gift to readers. This does not mean you'll agree with everything the author writes! In fact, Browne encourages readers to disagree with him as we sort out  our specific values, rules and boundaries. He wants volitional readers, not readers looking to be told what to think and do. We'll come back to this idea. [A quick  affiliate link to Amazon  for those readers who would like to support my wor...
Read more

Generative Energy: Restoring the Wholeness of Life by Ray Peat

A disorganized book by a highly-censored medical iconoclast. Despite its sloppiness, it will still send you down a lot of good rabbit holes. I don't recommend a labored, close reading of this book: just use it as an introduction to Ray Peat's dissident health and physiology ideas. In certain ways, we can think of Ray Peat, along with Robert Mendelsohn and Ivan Illich , as direct ancestors of the courageous COVID-era medical dissidents: doctors like Peter McCullough, Mary Talley Bowden, Pierre Kory, Kirk and Kimberly Milhoan, Paul Marik, Meryl Nass and Peter Gotszche, among others, who bravely spoke out against foolish lockdowns, hospital protocols, government mandates and the use of risky (but of course highly lucrative) therapeutics like Remdesivir--and were censored, suspended or fired for it. [1] As a general rule: in any knowledge domain you should always know who the dissident thinkers are. They are usually the ones who were right all along. [2] [A quick  affiliate link ...
Read more

Deflation and Liberty by Jorg Guido Hulsmann

In the modern centralized monetary system, all values are inverted. Debt masquerades as money, the system imposes structural inflation and monetary debasement on everyone, and GDP "growth" is increasingly an economic illusion because of that inflation and debasement. Nearly everyone gets fooled into thinking their wages, home values and stock portfolios are "rising"--and this is yet another illusion thanks to the steady debasement of the money. In such a system, anyone living off wage income, who isn't (yet) an asset owner, gets squeezed a little tighter every year. And this is the primary reason we have a so-called K-shaped economy, where asset owners do well, while those living off their labor value don't. It all comes from steady, deliberate monetary debasement. Our author believes this is immoral, and he's right. He believes that the institution behind our monetary system (the US Federal Reserve) is immoral, and he's right. Further, he believes ...
Read more