It's been over a month since I did one of these. Do the math. At that rate I would never catch up.
The month was very big for book reviews and commentaries, apparently. I complained about Freakonomics. I had some praise for the language book The Way We Talk Now. I liked Theodore Dalrymple's Our Culture, What's Left Of It and had some further comments on Virginia Woolf.
I even discovered a similarity in the relationship between JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis and between Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell while reading The Narnian and The Rivals.
It's hard to believe that few people believed there was a Religious Left just three years ago, but the conventional wisdom was exactly that. I had a lengthy, rather irritated post arguing that there is indeed a powerful Religious Left. Don't read the whole thing, just browse it.
I wrote of yet another example of how Monty Python provides absurd situations which actually turn out to be true in politics, comparing Middle-East negotiations to The Cheese Shop.
Why cultural values are more worth preserving than ecosystems.
And the obligatory linguistics post summarising Merritt Ruhlen's list of words still identifiable from mankind's original language.
1 comment:
Interesting commentary about economics writing and Freakonomics.
I have found Thomas Sowell to be incredibly clear-minded in his writing about economics. Sometimes, he is so good at explaining economics in simple terms that I wonder why I paid money to learn what I already knew (or should have known).
However, Sowell's writing can be boring. In some of his books, the reader succumbs to an avalanche of raw data covering a wide range of ways to approach whatever subject is at hand.
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