Archive for 25 December 2006
Re: Christmas Reading
| Peter Klein |
I don’t like to compete with Nicolai in the “what-I’ve-been-reading” department — he consumes a dozen books for every one I manage to read (or color) — but he broke the ice so I might as well follow suit.
1. Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (Crown, 2004). Genghis is rehabilitated as not a barbarian at all, but a great military commander, skilled administrator, and “progressive” leader, at least by the standards of his age. The author much admires the Great Khan for practicing religious toleration, funding universal public education, establishing a post office, and the like (what else would you expect from an American college professor?). Plenty of plunder and pillage too, of course. Anyway, an interesting and well-written piece of revisionist history.
2. Orhan Pamuk, The White Castle (George Braziller, 1991). A thoughtful and engaging meditation on the nature of identity, wrapped inside a historical novel about a 17th-century Venetian captured by Turks and sent to Constantinople as a slave and tutor to a young Turkish scholar. Good reading for the identity theory crowd.
3. Michael Ruhlman, The Soul of a Chef: The Journey Toward Perfection (Viking, 2000). You’ve heard of chick lit? Now there’s food lit, a new genre for foodies. A group of chefs spends a grueling week at the CIA (no, not that one, the Culinary Institute of America) seeking the title Certified Master Chef. The exams make comprensive PhD examinations look easy by comparison. Perhaps you have to be a foodie to enjoy the book fully, but there’s interesting information on the economic organization of the food and restaurant industry.
4. Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver (William Morrow, 2003). A prequel, of sorts, to Stephenson’s highly successful Cryptonomicon, which I enjoyed tremendously. Interesting historical fiction about the birth of modern science. At nearly a thousand pages — and just volume 1 of the three-volume Baroque Cycle — it makes Human Action and Foundations of Social Theory look like novellas.
Christmas Reading
| Nicolai Foss |
Not much is usually happening during Christmas, so why not engage a bit in the narcissistic (and non-creative) blogger’s delight — the “what I am reading at the moment” list:
1. Charles C. Ragin and Howard S. Becker, eds. 1992. What is a Case? Exploring the Foundations of Social Inquiry. This is a collection, mainly by thoughtful (in fact, extremely thoughtful) sociologists (yes, they do exist) on the methodological/ philosophical foundations of qualitative research, a subject that I have become increasingly interested in.
2. Yoram Barzel. 2002. A Theory of the State. As the resident Barzel fan here at O&M, I have surely waited too long before I began reading this book, published back in 2002. Barzel applies his highly original ideas on property rights economics to the state. However, the result strikes me as less original than Barzel’s other work.
3. Steve Berry: The Templar Legacy. Yes, I do have a weakness for this kind of templar pulp (this one comes endorsed by Dan Brown, so you know it is going to be bad). The Templar Legacy is one of the better ones (certainly better than this one). And parts of the story takes place in Denmark. I have toyed with writing a Templar novel myself. The title? Frank Knight’s Templars.
4. Rodney Stark. 1996. The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries. I enjoyed The Victory of Reason and this one is perhaps better. It is certainly less speculative, its reasoning seems stronger.
Steyn on Government Failures of Fighting Terrorism
| Nicolai Foss |
My favorite conservative commentator, Mark Steyn, has these acute observations on how private entrepreneurship may trump government action in the fighting of terrorism:
Most of what went wrong on September 11 we knew about in the first days after. Generally, it falls into two categories:
1. Government agencies didn’t enforce their own rules (as in the terrorists’ laughably inadequate visa applications.
or
2. The agencies’s rules were out of date — three out of those four planes reached their targets because their crews, passengers and ground staff all blindly followed the FAA’s 1970 hijack procedures until it was too late, as the terrorists knew they would.
… But on the fourth plane, they didn’t follow the seventies hijack rituals. On Flight 93, they used their cell phones, discovered that FAA regulations weren’t going to save them, and then acted as free men, rising up against the terrorists and, at the cost of their own lives, preventing that flight carrying on to its target in Washington. On a morning when big government failed, the only good news came from private individuals. The first three planes were effectively an airborne European Union, where the rights of the citizens had been appropriated by the FAA’s flying nanny state. Up there where the air is rarified, all your liberties have been regulated away: there’s no smoking, there’s 100 percent gun control, you’re obliged by law to do everything the cabin crew tell you … For thirty years, passengers surrendered their more and more rights for the illusion of security, and, as a result, thousands died. On the fourth plane, Todd Beamer and others reclaimed those rights, and demonstrated that they could exercise them more efficiently than government” (pp. 184-85, America Alone).
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