The previous week's reads: The Making of the Fittest, Sean B Carroll | Save the Males, Kathleen Parker | The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt
Dear readers:
This past week I read Trains and Lovers, a short novel in which four men and one woman recount stories of their lives' great loves to one another. Because of the age of the characters, the stories run from the late 19th to the late 20th centuries. The stories tend toward happy endings, and impart the general idea that love at first sight happens, it makes us do irrational things, and is worth taking chances for. The tales also incorporate travel into them, either because people leave their homes behind in pursuit of romance, or because love takes them on unexpected metaphorical journeys.
I'm currently in the middle of Radicals for Capitalism, which I bought because it seemed interesting and was something of a value: 800 pages for $20?, retail? I'd been hoping to learn more about men like F.A. Hayek and Murray Rothbard, whose names surface a lot in American libertarian writing. They appeared earlier, but Radicals for Capitalism could carry the subtitle "Ayn Rand in Context". There's a distressing amount on her. The chapter I'm on now is called "The Objectivist Crackup", so maybe she'll go away soon. At work, A People's History of the Supreme Courtis my lunch-time reading, and when my soul starts flat-lining from all of the economic policy, I'm enjoying Marlene Zuk's Paleofantasy. I have two more science books on order: Frans de Waal's Good-Natured: the Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, because it was selling $1 used on Amazon and I justified buying it on that and the fact that I have no de Waal in my personal library. I'm also expecting Two Sides of the Moon, a collaborative memoir of the Space Right penned by cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, the first man to walk in space, and David Scott, an astronaut who walked on the moon. A friend lent me Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus, which I plan on getting into as soon as I've wrapped up with Zuk.
Comments are still pending for Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish.
Well, happy reading!
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