“A room without books is like a body without a soul,” said Cicero … or so I read once in a book.
My love for books started when Sister Agatha, my third-grade teacher, gave me a 1931 edition of Cram’s Unrivaled Atlas. Over the years I spent hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours pouring over the large pages of that book, reading the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, biographies of all the presidents (up to Hoover), and the “Story of the World’s War.” I still own and cherish that book.
Fewer people, it seems, read books these days, or at least the nonfiction that I love. To those who have not succumbed entirely to the Sirens of cable television and video games, I recommend the following.
New Books
The March of Unreason: Science, Democracy, and the New Fundamentalism, by Dick Taverne (2005), traces the role of reason and science in the creation of free and democratic societies, and then warns that radical environmentalism (what he calls “eco-fundamentalism”), by standing in opposition to reason and science, poses a grave threat to our freedoms. The author covers a wide range of topics but is especially good on biotechnology, where he carefully presents the cases for and against this new application of science … and concludes the former is the stronger.
Make a Difference, by Gary MacDougal (2005, second revised edition), is part autobiography and part handbook on how to reform a state’s social services agencies. I can’t think of another book that attempts such a synthesis, but by the end you realize that understanding the author’s values and personal quest to “make a difference” is just as important as learning the strategies he used and the allies he recruited to make Illinois a national model for welfare reform.
Parental Choice as an Education Reform Catalyst: Global Lessons, by John Merrifield (2005), is a small book that compares the economic requirements of a true competitive marketplace with school choice programs in the U.S. and three other countries. He finds all the real-world programs come up lacking, though they show some of the promise of introducing competition and choice in schooling.
If you are interested in third-party politics, consider reading The Formation of National Party Systems by Pradeep Chhibber and Ken Kollman (2004). The authors use empirical data from four countries to predict when and where it is likely that more than two national political parties will emerge. I relied on this book as background for my recent Heartlander essay on the possibility of the country electing a libertarian president.
An Analytic Assessment of U.S. Drug Policy, by David Boyum and Peter Reuter (2005), puts between two covers what many of us have been thinking and saying about the “war on drugs” for years: It ain’t working. The country is spending $35 billion a year in public funds (and hundreds of billions of dollars in private costs) waging a war it cannot win, destroying countless lives in the process. Boyum and Reuter recommend legalizing marijuana, focusing police resources on users of hard-core drugs who pose a threat to others, and investing more in treatment.
On the Lighter Side
Frank Buckley, who I’ve come to know over the past year, examines the uses and meaning of laughter in a book titled The Morality of Laughter (2005). While it is about the lighthearted, this is not light reading. It is a thorough academic treatment of a topic that has captured the attention of deep thinkers from Aristotle and Nietzsche to Freud. By the end of it you will know much better why people tell jokes and who laughs at them.
Michael Crichton’s latest novel, State of Fear (2004), is a wonderful book because its heroes are advocates of sound science and market-based solutions to environmental problems, while the bad guys are bungling radical environmentalists out to destroy civilization. Crichton does a good job summarizing the main flaws in the theory of anthropogenic global warming and some of the other myths and falsifications that lay at the foundation of environmentalism today.
Another fun book is No Smoking by Luc Sante (2004), which I received as a gift from Joel Sherman, the third-generation CEO of Nat Sherman International, a maker of premium cigarettes and cigars in New York City. The book is a celebration of the golden era of smoking, a time when smoking was allowed everywhere and what you smoked and how you smoked it communicated everything from your occupation and income to your mood and hobbies.
No Smoking is one of the most unusual books I’ve ever owned. It comes in a box made to resemble a cigarette hard-pack, complete with hinged top and gold foil liner. The book contains hundreds of pictures of smokers: movie stars, sports figures, politicians, gangsters, nudes, and even a dog. The opening essay is priceless.
Oldies but Goodies
I recently re-read Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), a treatise on “the decline of the Age of Typography and the ascendancy of the Age of Television.” According to Postman, “this change-over has dramatically and irreversibly shifted the content and meaning of public discourse, since two media so vastly different cannot accommodate the same ideas.” The consequences for our culture, economy, and politics, says Postman, will be profoundly negative.
The change Postman describes poses an enormous challenge to people like me. I grew up reading books and thinking in ways determined by the nature of books. Now I must make my livelihood communicating with people who grew up watching television and playing video games and thinking in ways determined by those media.
Frank Buckley sent me an antidote to Amusing Ourselves to Death, a book titled Everything Bad Is Good For You, by Steven Johnson (2005). The demise of reading, says Johnson, poses no threat to the Good Society. Television shows and video games have become far more complex and sophisticated over time, forcing their watchers/players to become mentally agile and “comfortable with ambiguity.” Members of the new generation, he says, are good at multi-tasking, exploring, and solving problems. I found some of this persuasive, but I wonder how this generation knows what to explore or which problems to solve without reading books.
Two other books I re-read recently are Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) and Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (1962). Both are available in inexpensive anniversary paperback editions from The Heartland Institute. One might think such “old” books would show their age, but these two do not.
Every sentence in The Road to Serfdom, it seems to me, could have been written yesterday, or tomorrow for that matter. Similarly, Friedman packs so much into every sentence of the first two chapters of Capitalism and Freedom that sometimes you just have to pause and think, “wow, that’s exactly it!” before starting the next sentence, which is likely to deliver still another epiphany.
Atlas Shrugged Again
A fourth book I recently revisited was Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957). Like countless other free-market advocates, I first read this novel and Rand’s other writings as a high school senior and was deeply moved by its celebration of individualism and condemnation of collectivism.
This time I listened to Atlas Shrugged on tape, a completely new experience for me. (I’m not a complete Luddite, you see.) It was a pure delight. Rand’s shortcomings as a novelist are widely noted, but since I seldom read fiction they aren’t much apparent to me.
Among the many scenes I had forgotten was one near the end where Dagny Taggart, the heroine, confronts a soldier guarding the bad guys’ secret laboratory. The guard refuses to choose between following his orders and surrendering to her. “Calmly and impersonally, she, who would have hesitated to fire at an animal, pulled the trigger and fired straight at the heart of a man who had wanted to exist without the responsibility of consciousness.”
Awesome! Just like a video game.
