book notes
C.S. Lewis biography
I’m thoroughly enjoying the biography of C.S. Lewis by Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper. I’ve been reading as much of Lewis’ as I can recently, starting with re-reading all the Narnian stories (I’m teaching two of them this year), and then reading some of his literary essays and lectures, followed by Till We Have [...]
Book notes – “My Antonia”
Image via Wikipedia Here are some brief notes and quotes on reading Willa Cather‘s “My Antonia“. This is the third Willa Cather story I’ve read, all within the last month. I’m enchanted. I was inspired by this chapter from Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture, a fresh approach to literary criticism [...]
Guitar lessons for the musically hopeless
Image via Wikipedia Cleaning out my cupboards, I came across an old copy of this great teach-yourself book: Country and Blues Guitar for the Musically Hopeless It’s simple, encouraging, full of humour that adds to and does not detract from the purpose of the book. Some great songs. Carol McComb gets you singing after learning [...]
Book Notes – Liar’s Poker
Cover via Amazon Michael Lewis, freshly graduated with a Master’s degree in economics from LSU, got a job working for investment bank Salomon Brothers in 1984 (how he got the job is a story to itself; as encouragement to read this witty book, I’ll just tell you it involves the late Queen Mother). Salomon Brothers [...]
C.S. Lewis and the Great Divide
C.S. Lewis via last.fm Recently, I’ve been reading as much of and about the British author C.S. Lewisas I can, as you can see from my Amazon reading list in the right-hand sidebar. My original reason was to inform myself as I will teach two of his Narnian stories next academic year. I found Selected [...]
Book Notes – The Shadow University (2)
Following on… Catherine MacKinnon and Stanley Fish… are explicit in their disdain for the First Amendment‘s absolutist and noncontextual approach. In her influential book Only Words, MacKinnon, a feminist legal scholar at the University of Michigan, introduced her chapter “Equality and Speech” with the blunt statement that “the law of equality and the law of [...]
Protected: Book Notes – After Liberalism
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Book Notes – Deschooling Society (2)
Image via Wikipedia Following on… For most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school. ((From the introduction.) the existence of the university is necessary to guarantee continued social criticism (p. 37) The man addicted to being taught seeks his security in compulsive teaching. (p. 39) once the self-taught man [...]
Book notes – The Shadow University
Cover via Amazon I heard about this book and was inspired to read it by a speech given by Ralph Raico on the occasion of his being awarded the Gary G. Schlarbaum Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Cause of Liberty. (Read the speech on the Mises Institute website.) Here’s the relevant section from the [...]
Book Notes – Deschooling society
Image via Wikipedia Here are some quotes from chapter 1 of Ivan Illich‘s classic Deschooling Society, which I recently re-read. The quotes are sentences or ideas that caught my attention. They are not necessarily representative, either of the book itself, nor of Illich’s or my thinking; that is, you won’t get an objective summary of [...]
