The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language, John H. McWhorter
Chinese has an extraordinary number of verbs meaning “carry.” If I carry something on a hanging arm, like a briefcase, the verb is ti; on an outstretched palm, tuo; using both palms, peng; gripped between upper arm and body, xie; in my hand, like a stick,wo; embraced, like a baby, bao; on my back, bei;...
Read MorePredisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences, by John R. Hibbing,...
The sentry in Iolanthe wondered at how “Nature always does contrive / That every boy and every gal / That’s born into the world alive / Is either a little Liberal / Or else a little Conservative!” He was right to wonder. For most of the past few decades, however, his suggestion that our personal...
Read MoreThe Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us, by Noson S. Yanofsky
How rarely Reason guides the stubborn Choice / Rules the bold Hand, or prompts the suppliant Voice.” Dr. Johnson didn’t know the half of it. Not only does reason play a dismayingly small part in human affairs, but reason itself has built-in limitations that prevent our employing it in many cases where we should like...
Read MoreSincerity: How a Moral Ideal Born Five Hundred Years Ago Inspired Religious Wars, Modern Art, Hipster Chic, and...
The word “sincere” first showed up in written English in 1533, the author of this useful book tells us. It came with, or soon acquired, a very pretty etymology, from the Latin sine cera, “without wax”—the wax that dishonest masons and sculptors used to disguise defects in their products. Alas, the etymology is false: “Sincere”...
Read MoreGettysburg: The Last Invasion, by Allen C. Guelzo
To write a book about the Battle of Gettysburg is as audacious an enterprise as Robert E. Lee's Pennsylvania campaign itself. Allen Guelzo, in this book's Acknowledgments, tells us that the 2004 edition of a standard bibliography lists 6,193 "books, articles, chapters, and pamphlets on the battle," along with a 128-page magazine, published twice yearly...
Read MoreHeaven: The Heart's Deepest Longing, by Peter Kreeft
Seeing that the first sentence in the first paragraph of the first chapter of Peter Kreeft's book Heaven: The Heart's Deepest Longing is a quote from C.S. Lewis, my suspicions were aroused right away. Kreeft hastened to confirm them, quoting Lewis again four pages further on, and again eleven pages after that, then four pages...
Read MoreTuring's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe, by George Dyson
This year marks the centenary of British mathematician Alan Turing, whose researches in the unlikely and very abstruse field of mathematical logic did much to create the world in which we now live. In 1936 Turing published a paper titled "On Computable Numbers" in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. The paper received almost...
Read MoreCrusader: The Life and Tumultuous Times of Pat Buchanan, by Timothy Stanley
Has Pat Buchanan been fired from MSNBC, or hasn't he? Pat hasn't been seen on the channel since October, when his last book came out. (I reviewed it for TakiMag here.) MSNBC president Phil Griffin said a month ago that Pat was being kept off the air because of things Griffin found objectionable in the...
Read MoreThe Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by Steven Pinker
In this, his most ambitious book to date, Steven Pinker describes, and attempts to explain, a curious historical phenomenon: the decline in all kinds of violence among human beings, from pre-civilized times to the present. The first thing one wants to ask is: Has there actually been such a decline? Given the tremendous wars and...
Read MoreCrazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kids Into College, by Andrew Ferguson
In...
One of the strongest pieces of evidence that our civilization has descended into madness was offered by National Public Radio in April 2007. NPR's Robert Siegel was interviewing Melinda Gates, wife of Bill Gates and custodian of a new $60 million education reform initiative the Gates foundation was launching. "Can we reasonably expect 100 percent...
Read MoreSuicide of a Superpower, by Patrick J. Buchanan
One of the schoolmasters in charge of my Religious Instruction — Anglican, of course — used to say that a good hymn is one that leaves you feeling absolutely terrible. I feel the same way about Pat Buchanan's books. By this measure, Suicide of a Superpower is a very good Buchanan book indeed. With chapter...
Read MoreAll our fashionable blather about "diversity" notwithstanding, we live in an age of ethnic disaggregation. Czechs and Slovaks, Serbs and Croats, Greek and Turkish Cypriots, Abkhazians and Ossetians and Georgians, have all separated after centuries of cohabitation. The Flemish and Walloons of Belgium look set fair to do the same. The Jews are long gone...
Read MoreUnnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, by Mara...
One of history's more curious encounters occurred in early March 1766 at a country estate in southern England, near Dorking. The estate belonged to Daniel Malthus, a gentleman of independent means and wide intellectual interests. The philosophers David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were traveling in the neighborhood, seeking a house for Rousseau, who had just...
Read MoreSuch Is This World@sars.come, by Hu Fayun
There has never been a good time to be an honest writer in Communist China, but the present is an exceptionally bad time. Spooked by the "Arab Spring" and jostling for position in next year's scheduled leadership changes, the Party bosses have been coming down hard on every kind of independent thinking. The cases of...
Read MoreThe House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance, by Jim...
I used to attend regularly at an office of the New York City government to transact some business with a very pleasant young female African American city employee. On the wall of her office was a poster listing, in quite small print, all the scores of inventions and discoveries that, according to the poster, African...
Read MoreThe Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, by David Brooks
If the proper study of mankind is man, it has taken a remarkably long time to get that study on a truly scientific footing. From the founding of the Royal Society to the present has been more than 350 years, yet only in the last 50 of those years have quantified, replicable results about human...
Read MoreGalileo: Watcher of the Skies, by David Wootton
Galileo, by J.L. Heilbron
I didn't make it to the First Annual Catholic Conference on Geocentrism, held in South Bend, Indiana on the November 6 weekend. I was interested, and badgered some editors to expense the trip, but no one thought it worth their funds. Nor have I read the 1,048-page, two-volume book Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was...
Read MoreThe Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III, by Peter Byrne
Quantum mechanics (hereinafter QM) is famously odd. As Peter Byrne notes in this book: The measurement problem is especially knotty. Down in the subatomic realm, each of the particles that constitute matter is smeared out over a volume of space in a manner described mathematically by a "wave function." When an observer interacts with this...
Read MoreMen versus the Man: A Correspondence between Robert Rives La Monte, Socialist, and H.L. Mencken,...
————————— ————————— Let me do a little scene-setting here. It is March of 1910 — just 100 years and change ago. William Howard Taft is in the White House; Edward the Seventh, very nearly Taft's equal in girth, was on the British throne. China's last Emperor was in the Forbidden City, and the Russian Empress...
Read MoreThe High Tide of American Conservatism: Davis, Coolidge, and the 1924 Election, by Garland S. Tucker III
The 1924 presidential election was, on the face of it, a snoozer. The major-party candidates were Calvin Coolidge (Republican) and John W. Davis (Democrat). Both were conservative — sensationally so by today's standards. As Garland Tucker notes in this enjoyable and informative book: "There were … very few philosophical differences between Davis and Coolidge." Both...
Read MoreThe Uses of Pessimism, by Roger Scruton
Pessimism and optimism are the two ends of a spectrum that spans one of the many dimensions of the individual human personality. We observe that any given human being has a disposition that does not stray far from some particular point on that spectrum; that this disposition appears early in life, and may very well...
Read MoreThe Movie: Waiting for Superman, directed by Davis Guggenheim
Being at a loose end Monday afternoon, I took a subway down to the Landmark Sunshine movie theater on East Houston Street, nostalgically close to my first foothold in the U.S.A. I was curious to see this new education movie, Waiting for Superman, and Landmark Sunshine was one of only two theaters in New York...
Read MoreKoestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic, by Michael Scammell
Coming face to face with one's favorite author, Arthur Koestler warned an admirer in 1975, is "a bit like having a wonderful meal of goose liver and then meeting the goose." Something similar applies to reading a really thorough biography of a writer one has long admired. Michael Scammell's new biography of Koestler was ten...
Read MoreShall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, by Eric Kaufmann
Did you know that Osama bin Laden has twenty-five children? And that his Dad had fifty-four? (Osama seems to be number 17.) Bin Laden Sr. was careful never to have more than four wives at a time, though, divorcing older wives in order to marry younger ones, thus staying within the proper Koranic bounds. Like...
Read More————————— 1. Gulliver's Travels By Jonathan Swift 1726 One component of curmudgeonliness is the Cold Eye, seeing humanity plain. Jonathan Swift saw us rather too plain. The "savage indignation" he wrote of in his own epitaph was rooted in the disgust, physical and moral, he felt toward people. His famous satire Gulliver's Travels — about...
Read MoreBad Students, Not Bad Schools, by Robert Weissberg
Front page headline in my New York Post this morning: The accompanying story describes a further dumbing-down of state math tests for kids in grades 3 to 8. Half marks are given for fragments of work; also for wrong answers arrived at via correct methods: "A kid who answers that a 2-foot-long skateboard is 48...
Read MoreOne of my National Review colleagues recently declared himself "flummoxed by the fact that Two and a Half Men is the top sitcom in America." If any TakiMag readers are in a similar case, let me try to deflummox you. T&aHM has been running on CBS since the fall of 2003. It is the brainchild...
Read MoreIt's always stimulating to discover a quality writer you didn't know before. For a conservative, it's doubly stimulating if the discoveree is of the same persuasion. And in an age when the middlebrow novel is as close to extinction as … well, as the Book of the Month Club, a conservative middlebrow novelist is water...
Read MoreIntellectuals and Society, by Thomas Sowell
It is a commonplace observation that very smart people often have no sense. Writers since Aristophanes have been making sport of their intellectual superiors. Jonathan Swift had the academicians of Lagado striving to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. Twenty years ago Paul Johnson wrote a fine book titled Intellectuals, in which he tossed and gored such...
Read MoreThe Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures, by Nicholas Wade
With this new book, New York Times science reporter Nicholas Wade positions himself as a serious challenger to Steven Pinker for the title Best Living Popularizer of the Human Sciences. Wade's 2006 book Before the Dawn was a masterly survey of current knowledge about our deep ancestry, informed by recent discoveries in genetics and archeology....
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