Maybe it was a factor of exhaustion with everything going on – trying to orchestrate my mother’s rescue from Florida, plus navigating a forthcoming job change – but I have not recorded but one podcast episode since last Wednesday when I found out my mother was in the midst of Hurricane Ian.
However, I have just listened to five audiobooks over this past weekend. And now that I am feeling a bit more rested and settled, with my brother on his way to Florida even now to get our mother and bring her back here to Colorado while things get settled with cleanup and insurance, et cetera, I would like to get back into podcasting.
And, yes, I did listen to five audiobooks over the weekend. This was good to get my mind off other things, but not tiring to hear so much as I was feeling tired from speaking for a bit. So what did I listen to, and what did I make of what I heard? Let me tell you all about it.
First, I listened to 'The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity' by Carlo M. Cipolla. I found his work here, published in 1988, to be mean, unfunny, and condescending, though I was lead to believe on the front-end that it was supposed to be humorous. It reminded me too much of ‘Nudge’ and ‘The Undoing Project,’ and I suppose it could be seen as a cousin to those works. This is a short book, but that’s hardly as much a redeeming quality as a mercy. I did not like it, and it got on my nerves. The fact that there are so many stupid people is too obvious. How we talk about this fact, and relate to it – that is my concern.
Second, I took in 'Beauty: A Very Short Introduction' by Roger Scruton. Published in 2009, this work by Scruton – esteemed British conservative political philosopher is indeed philosophical, and much more contemporary. Scruton references Burke’s earlier work, of course, which I have also read and reviewed, and admittedly liked better, as much or more because of it being older. But this treatment by Scruton is high-minded, very British, and intellectual, as well as more academic in a way that is less forgivable for having been written in 2009 instead of 1757.
Next was 'The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics' by Kevin D. Williamson. This work reminded me of Tom Wolfe in Radical Chic and Mau-mauing the Flak-Catchers, but it was not as pleasant a work as either of those. But Williamson is not as good a writer as Wolfe by a long shot. One of the most annoying features of this book, published in 2019, was the constant pandering potshots at Trump and his supporters. The final word on him to my way of thinking is that he reminds me too much of the atheist kid in high school trying to mock and argue everyone into renouncing Christianity.
After that was 'Science and Technology,' a collection of interviews with Neil Postman, Jane Metcalfe, Howard Rheingold, Mark Slouka, Andrew Kimbrell, Doug Groothius, Dean Kenyon, Philip Johnson, and Michael Behe. If I have two criticisms of this collection of interviews, it is that they are too short and more thinking out loud to frame the problem than prescribing what we can do about any of it. This is more a chronicle than a tonic, perhaps.
Last, but certainly not least, I read 'A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland,' by Samuel Johnson and James Boswell. And when I say this was not least, what I really mean is that this was my favorite by a good bit of the five books I read this weekend. Written first-hand by both men, then compiled together after their traveling in 1773, this was a charming and elegantly phrased collection of character sketches of the people and places and country. Johnson comments on the migration of Scots to America, for instance. And I know the Acts of Union, plus other related contentions, drove a lot of Scots to emigrate to America. This having been true of my MacFarlane ancestors on my maternal grandmother’s side, he has my undivided attention.
