"Not all opinions are created equal. Some are a great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others." Douglas Adams
On a scale of 1 to 10, this book is junk.
It’s rare that I would waste space blasting a book. Life is short and time is a scarce resource. I’d rather just drop a book unworthy of finishing and move on to a new one. This time, though, I think 1421 merits further explanation because of the sensational success it has experienced worldwide.
Simply put, 1421 is junk history posing as “real history.” [cont…]
“The Mystery of Edwin Drood” was Charles Dickens last novel, but he died before it could be finished. Dan Simmons picks up the mystery, not to solve and finish Dickens’ work, but to provide a back story, the real source of Drood. The result is a tale that is tragic, eerie, and mysterious.
Simmons starts out with heavy foreshadowing. Told in the voice of protagonist Wilkie Collins, friend and confidant of Charles Dickens, [cont…]
I recently read the short brochure “A Free-Market Monetary System,” a compilation of Friedrich A. Hayak’s 1974 Nobel Prize speech “A Pretense of Knowledge” and a short essay on proposing a free-market monetary system (hence, the name, see?). Both are short, and neither waste any time proposing radical changes to what was then, and indeed what is still, the status quo in monetary and economic policy.
Both the essay and the speech are worth reading.
In “A Free Market Monetary System,” [cont…]
It’s a rare day that I’m willing to give a full five out of five stars to a book. It’s rarer still that I’ll give the five stars, and then put it back on my bed-stand for continual reference in my future reading.
It’s just that kind of a book, and every bibliophile should read it. [cont…]
You’ve been watching the debates (except for that one at 7 AM on Sunday morning), and you keep hearing references to Austrian economics. They keep mentioning names like Hayek, Friedman, and Mises. What’s with all these German sounding sames, you say. And why is Ron Paul staying up to read an economics textbook while the rest of these bozos are watching college football? [cont…]
Objectivism: an extreme philosophy that is to the free market what communism is to liberalism, just in the opposite direction. Instead of glorifying collective action, it glorifies the individual, the ego, denigrating all else–love, charity, God, and any kind of shared effort or brotherhood. I’m all about independence, freedom, and self-reliance, but Rand sees no need for sacrifice, charity, or love. [cont…]
For those of us who have never known war, there’s something chilling about the post-war experience of those who have. For all the bullet-dodging action heroes that Hollywood produces and America consumes, we rarely get a taste for the horrors that the scarred veteran must face upon return to the home-front. Even when a movie does try to convey that horror, it remains a visual experience.
Robert Cormier’s “Heroes” has no such problems. {cont…}
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