On Personal Libraries and Book Collecting

I visited a used bookstore in Oxford yesterday.  While I worked assiduously to fight off my desire to buy the whole shop, I came away with a nice collection of old, hardcover books: Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition; Walter Lippmann’s The Good Society; and Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, to name a few.  Upon returning to my flat, I made room for these new purchases on my bookshelf and realized just how elated I was with them.  It is manifest that I love books; yet, this experience was different.  What was it about a used bookstore that augmented my experience of purchasing books for my personal library?

Investing Illusions and Delusions

The latest issue of my company’s newsletter, Chiefist Positions, went out today. In it, we examine “investing illusions and delusions,” through the lens of two powerful and outstanding books:

• Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
• The Halo Effect, by Phil Rosenzweig

You can find Kahneman’s book on Amazon or in most bookstores. You can find Rosenzweig’s book in used bookstores, Amazon marketplace, Alibris.com, Abebooks.com or Bookfinder.com. With shipping, it will cost you about $6, which will be the best $6 you spend all year. Get them both, and read them.

Tide Triumphs

For everyone who thinks the National Championship game was a snoozer last night, you’re only partially right. The game wasn’t competitive — although it remained closer than it should have because of Alabama’s inability to score touchdowns. But we witnessed one of the very best defensive performances in football — ever, period. LSU passed the 50-yard line once, and Alabama had one penalty, with three minute to go in the 4th quarter. Coach Nick Saban had his team supremely ready, and it showed. Stellar performance, and it made the game much more compelling than some might lead you to believe.

Internal Action of the Old West Revealed

Always a source for excellent books, especially Westerns, my uncle gave me Heart of the Country, by Greg Matthews, for Christmas. Anticipating the receipt of a good book for the holiday, I uncharacteristically brought no books on my travel to Louisville, and began reading it immediately. From the start, I could not put it down.

2011 Book List

I enjoyed another fantastic year of reading. Friends and family members gave me some outstanding book suggestions, including Lonesome Dove, which became one of my all-time favorite books. Other highlight’s included: Chernow’s biography of George Washington, Four Steps to the Epiphany, my introduction to Pat Conroy, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, re-reading Thucydides, Poor Charlie’s Almanack, and Kahneman on thinking. See the complete list of my 2011 reading below:

Review: Field Notes Brand Memo Books — They’re a Must Carry

Ever since I went full-time on Chiefist last year, I wanted to find a small, easy-to-carry notebook to record thoughts, jot down ideas, and keep my To-Do list in. Reading the Art of Manliness site, I ran across Field Notes Brand products and have used them ever since.

Review: Robert Morgan’s Boone

My uncle recommended Boone: A Biography by Robert Morgan to me. Morgan has crafted that rare biography in which the critical lessons of the subject do not become lost in the details of his life. Indeed, Morgan evokes those lessons in the best pieces of writing in the book; the lessons seem to haunt the pages.

On the Unfortunate Decline of the Idea and the Public Intellectual

Concomitant with the rise of new forms of mass media are new tools for expressing one’s opinion—on everything, but especially political matters.  Twitter, Facebook, other social media sites and the Internet in general now make it easy to eviscerate traditional media’s role in opinion dissemination and political commentary: to wit, the guardians of quality, allowing for the distinction, as it were, between good art and bad artifice.  To be sure, mass media affords the common American a hitherto unprecedented voice in American politics, not to mention an opportunity to stay informed at a high level, but it also thrusts her into the position of political commentator, whose opinions we value often at a level previously reserved for the public intellectual, the social commentator, or the essayist (a long lost art after George Orwell).  Doubtless, mass media has opened the space for the culture of political “pundits,” operatives, commentators, polling experts, psephologists, and strategists.  Indeed, these individuals inhabit our airwaves, engaging in their pseudo-intellectual vocation, caviling and carping over trifling matters—the tie someone sported and the “message” it either consciously or subconsciously sent, the meaning of an official’s particular gesticulations as she delivered a speech, or the recent “beltway” canards and calumnies—with the constant benefit of infallible hindsight.  While the American polity chugs along with historic problems, one finds these ubiquitous individuals continually missing the forest for the trees.

The Body, Riches and Virtue from Plato’s Apology of Socrates

“I think no greater good has ever befallen you in the city than my zeal for the service of the god. For I go about doing nothing else than persuading you to take no care either of the body or for riches, prior so much as for the soul, how that it may be made most perfect, telling you that virtue does not spring from riches, but riches and all other human blessings, both private and public, from virtue.”
— Socrates, The Apology by Plato

Book Review: Primo Levi’s Drowned and the Saved

Now that it is summer time, my reading schedule is in full swing—and Levi’s books were in my queue for a while.  Born in Turin, Levi trained as a chemist before joining an anti-Fascist resistance movement.  In early 1944, the Nazis captured and imprisoned Levi at Auschwitz where he witnessed the horrors of the German Lager.  Under normal circumstances, the Germans would spare political prisoners the fate of Auschwitz’s concentrationary system, instead placing them in better-fed, better-kept gaols with their fellow ‘conspirators.’  But Levi was Jewish.