Category Archive: Non-Fiction
The Art of War, Peace and Palaver
(By Paul Brennan) (Amazon, 2018) Over 23 hundred years ago, a dynastic militia in China wrote down their collective thoughts on the strategic management of conflict. The Art of War (aka Sun Tzu, after the Order’s paterfamilias – see main image) is recognised as a classic handbook for modern problems (whether in war, business or interpersonal quarrels). Litigation and legal negotiations are often referred to as war (or business) by other means, and can arise or be ignited from clashes of personality as well. Thus, some 23 hundred years later, experienced Queensland Lawyer Paul Brennan gives us a legal take…
Continue Reading →Pandemia
How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives (by Alex Berenson) (2021) This splendid book is both a comprehensive review of how the world got everything wrong about Covid-19 (or, if you have a conspiratorial bent, how the plague was weaponized by authoritarian forces to cow and terrify us into submission), and a story of how one man kept yelling from the back of the truck that this emperor had a spiked crown but no clothes. Or in his words, “how media hysteria, political partisanship, overreliance on unproven technology, and scientific illiteracy brought the United States and the…
Continue Reading →The Coddling of the American Mind
By Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt (2018) The Guardian hated this book, so it must be good, right? Not necessarily. it is a bit like Mr. Haidt’s The Righteous Mind – an excellent book – transferred onto campus, where, the authors argue, i-Gen or Gen Z students are being programmed by social media and their professors into fragile, hysterical, blind little snowflakes. This resolves into the ludicrous examples seen in recent years of safe spaces (current example: Arizona State socialist students seeking to bar Kyle Rittenhouse from attending an online course!), cancel-culture and witch-hunts, all vivified by helicopter parents, university bureaucrats,…
Continue Reading →The Long Slide
(By Tucker Carlson) (2021) An anthology of magazine pieces by Carlson, author of the fairly recent Ship of Fools, serves not so much as exhibits for an argument against the decline of journalism; rather, as the author points out in an introduction, they are historical markers from times when political differences were perhaps more nuanced, less toxic and bellicose than our present discontent. Or, to put it another way, it is “a collection of nostalgic writings that underscore America’s long slide from innocence to orthodoxy.” (We’re not so sure about innocence, but still). From abortion issues to cancel culture, from…
Continue Reading →Moot
“Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t, and Why it Matters” By Steven E. Koonin (2021) “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” This book posits facts, hypotheses, and urging which we are not qualified to judge. It is also full of graphs that gave us acute conjunctivitis. So what we will do here is attempt a summary of what Mr. Koonin is saying, much of which he says very well, and attempt to explain our reaction to the work, located somewhere on the spectrum between skepticism and a resigned…
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