Recent Books -- Words Like Loaded Pistols, Ideas Have Consequences, New Wilderness, Nuclear Express
27 January 2022
- Words Like Loaded Pistols: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama by Sam Leith. Gosh I wish I had read this earlier in my life, or studied rhetoric. So much I don’t know about effective communication.
- Ideas Have Consequences by Richard M. Weaver. So, there are some seriously dated and bad cultural takes in here, but the core ideas are provocative – the Western world has slowly lost its sense of shared mission and values, which has resulted in our current political morass. Published in 1948, but just as relevant today, as long as you can get past some of the objectionable content.
- The New Wilderness by Diane Cook. I like speculative fiction when it shows real people adapting to a new situation. These kind of thought experiments can teach us something. But when the characters don’t seem like real people at all, and behave in weird-ass ways, I lose interest.
- The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and Its Proliferation by Thomas Reed and Danny Stillman. Interesting details on how proliferation has happened. The political conjecturing is weak and spy thriller-ish.
