These are the best of times and the worst of times, to coin a phrase. For conservatives, I mean. These are the worst of times because a dedicated band of people is doing quite a demolition job on the republic, and it really takes a lot of work to get that much damage done. Impressive, …
Not Cool at All
I just recently finished reading Not Cool by Greg Gutfeld. It is a book filled with astounding insights and unnecessary crassness, and all from someone who describes himself as a “troubled agnostic.” Gutfeld sees, as few other people do, that our politics is a matter of preening, and that the whole country is a maladministered …
Book of the Month/April 2014
I have been blessed by David Wells for many years. This book, God in the Whirlwind, is the capstone of a particular writing project, one that began with No Place for Truth. I read that book in 1994, and have been faithfully reading his other contributions as they came out. The other books, well worth …
Book of the Month/March 2014
This small accessible book is a very sane and very good introduction to a much controverted subject. I write this review as an observer of rap, and admittedly not as a devotee. In fact, I recently told a friend that if I write about it too much, I will undoubtedly commit a howler or two, …
Book of the Month/February 2014
I have enjoyed Virginia Postrel’s writing for years. Her first book, The Future and Its Enemies, was a great treatment of our modern Luddites, our quasi-Luddites, our neo-Luddites, and our Luddites in denial. It was really good. In The Substance of Style, she showed an acute aesthetic sense in her survey of modern technology and …
Book of the Month/January 2014
Charles Krauthammer has noted, more than once, and I have quoted him, I also think more than once, that liberals don’t care what you do, so long as it is mandatory. This coercive spirit driving them applies to everything, and what once used to be used as a reductio ad absurdum in our debates with …
A Purpose Driven Book Review
I won’t go into it now, but as a result of a series of odd events, I decided that at some point I needed to read a book by Rick Warren. I had picked up a copy of his Purpose Driven Life at a used bookstore, and despite the fact that California evangelical megachurch land …
Book of the Month/December
A month or two ago, I got a book recommendation from Nate, of a kind that was worth paying attention to. He had spoken at a conference for Christian artists together with a writer named Leif Enger, and was really impressed with him. As a result he got and read one of Enger’s books titled …
Book of the Month/November
This book is only available in electronic form, but given the nature of the book, I want to make it my book of the month anyway. It is the kind of book that every church that practices church discipline (which should be all of them) ought to have on the premises. Correction: there is …
Book of the Month/October 2013
Reading is an odd thing. If it is a delight, as it clearly should be, then reading a book that is about reading should be like . . . eating ice cream that is about ice cream. Except that it is not like that. The failure of that metaphor is probably one of those imponderables, …