Book Reviews

Book Review: “Hillbilly Elegy” by JD Vance

by Ben Zornes · Mar 6, 2023

https://amzn.to/3kOyMzN

Book Review – “The Rise & Triumph of the Modern Self” by Carl Trueman

by Ben Zornes · Feb 21, 2023

Another one minute book review. Enjoy!

Get a copy here:

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Book Review – “How Football Explains America” by Sal Paolantonio

by Ben Zornes · Feb 10, 2023

Gonna start doing short reviews of books I’m reading. Here’s the first.

Book Review: “Black Rednecks & White Liberals” by Thomas Sowell

by Ben Zornes · Apr 8, 2021

Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Sowell was like a skilled chef, everything cooked to perfection, seasoned beautifully, and something for every palette. If you can’t enjoy it, it’s because you choose to hate great food, and you probably prefer Kale chips to potato chips, and would somehow enjoy eating bread made from sawdust. There is a multitude of fascinating takeaways, and Sowell takes us back through history to show that “black culture” is really Scottish clan culture. He makes a compelling defense of why America isn’t an inherently racist country, and explains why the Founders weren’t perpetuating racism by not ending slavery at our founding. Contrary to the statue smashers over in Portland, the Founders laid the groundwork for ending slavery.

Perhaps the most poignant point which Sowell makes is that while every ethnicity has at one time been enslaved, and in turn enslaved others, it was only in the West that this temptation to enslave our fellow man was overcome. It was the cause of liberty which ensured the eventual end of slavery not only in the West but (almost) throughout the whole world. Ironically, it is in places where Western values are not predominant that slavery still exists (I would assert it would be more accurate to say Christian ethics). However, current narratives regarding race/slavery would have us believe that America’s founders simply perpetuated/entrenched slavery, rather than planting the seeds of liberty which would grow the fruit of abolition of the institution of slavery. This book is a potent antidote to the woke-sorcery which has beguiled our universities, press, and culture.

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Book Review: “1984” by George Orwell

by Ben Zornes · Jan 15, 2021

1984 by George Orwell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Finally got around to reading this classic (is it a classic?). Terrible timing on my part. Basically, reading 1984 it is just like scrolling through a newsfeed in 2021.

Orwell was a prophet in many ways. He saw the temptation of authoritarianism. He saw the danger of what he termed “the mutability of the past.” He was right that the direction our culture is headed is towards the proliferation of sex to the point where sexual enjoyment is nonexistent. Orwell sees that the intimacy which sexual union creates also brings loyalty to an entity outside of the State’s oversight and authority.

He couldn’t have foreseen that Big Brother would be an example of using gendered (and oppressive) language and thus would be guilty of ThoughtCrime, but the Ministry of Truth would correct that in a future edition of the Newspeak dictionary. Big Sibling will suffice, comrade.

The story was well told. It isn’t a warm fuzzy ending. It doesn’t really offer any solutions, only warnings. The solution, I would submit, is hot Gospel. Jesus died for your sins; so love your wife, raise your kids, go to church, work hard.

Some of my highlights:

“It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.”

“Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.”

“Now that he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible.”

“You donâ€™t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?â€

“The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act.”

“The heresy of heresies was common sense.”

“But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred.”

“â€¦the object was not to stay alive but to stay humanâ€¦”

Book Review: â€œItâ€™s Better Than it Looksâ€ by Gregg Easterbrook

by Ben Zornes · Dec 17, 2020

Itâ€™s Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear by Gregg Easterbrook
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Contrary to the media, the politicians, and many preachers of doom and gloom, things are getting better. Easterbrook lays out in well documented detail how every metric shows that the standard of living is getting better for every human on planet earth. Yes, incrementally. Yes, not at the same pace in every place. But things are getting better.

Easterbrook is no conservative, and not sure if he’d call himself a liberal; but either way, he offers equal opportunity critique of the doom and gloom prophets of the left and right. He advances a position he calls dynamism.

I would call it postmillennial optimism without the Gospel. As such, where he is able to see the wonderful advances in technology, medicine, agriculture, manufacturing, rising incomes, less crime, etc., he isn’t able to see that without Christ, it is all so much chaff and stubble.

The problem he lays out is that, all too often, we are told how bad things are. Politicians love to talk of some bygone golden age, which we have fallen away from and need to recover, or else everything will spiral into chaos. They love to talk of emergencies (cough COVID), cataclysms, and other nations stealing our jobs. Environmentalist loons warn that we have like 14 minutes until the planet combusts into a flaming ball. Conservatives bemoan rampant crime in the cities. Left and right, politicians try to tell the middle class that they’ve got it real bad.

The problem is that at every turn and by every measure, our projections are usually not only off, but very off. We use less land to grow more food. We have higher life expectancy than ever, thanks to the reduction of deadly diseases and effective treatments for such infirmities. Crime is trending downward almost everywhere in the world. Incomes are rising worldwide. Cars & factories run more efficiently than ever anticipated. Acid rain has become a non-issue.

The list could go on, but the long and short is that we tend to focus on bad things, and exaggerate them. Instead, we ought to recognize that there are still plenty of “issues” to solve, but also be able to do so optimistically. Easterbrook, rightly, points out that human ingenuity should be seen as a resource for solving our problems, not as a drag on our attempt to solve problems. An important point to be sure.

The first half of the book deserves 5/5 stars. There are some laugh out loud stats, which cut across the grain of the prevailing media narratives on various topics. However, the second half was 1.5/5 stars. Easterbrook floats some ideas that just need to be round filed (i.e. UBI, same-sex parenting as a good thing, and some other stinkers). That said, he does a great job of pointing out that a pessimistic outlook would make us think that everything is going to the dogs. I’ll leave off with this insightful quote:

Groups that sink into siege mentality usually wind up on the margins, while optimists slowly achieve their goals.
Gregg Easterbrook.

Also, here’s an interview with Easterbrook at the start of the COVID-craziness.

Book Review: “The Madness of Crowds” by Douglas Murray

by Ben Zornes · Sep 23, 2020

The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity by Douglas Murray
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I quite enjoyed this one, but I couldn’t help but feeling like there was a big gaping hole right in the middle of it (more on that in a minute). As Reb Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof once said:

As the Good Book says, “Heal us, O Lord, and we shall be healed. ” In other words, send us the cure. We’ve got the sickness already.

Murray points towards our cultural problems with deftness and clarity…like a resident of Las Vegas in the 1950s could point to the mushroom clouds of the atomic bomb tests. Anyone with eyes can see these major problems and conflicts within our culture. Not everyone has the solution.

Douglas Murray is a gay atheist. So, he’s not my typical co-belligerent, you might say. However, he sees our current cultural madness with great clarity. The old adage about blind squirrels finding acorns seems apropos here. His clear identification of the problematic trends in our cultural adoption of the various insanities is an indictment against many professing Christian leaders who’ve simply coasted along with the crowds, adopting all the “new orthodoxies” of feminism, anti-racism, and trans issues.

That is the main point of Murray’s project, pointing out how rapidly Western culture has adopted “new orthodoxies” without weighing why things had been the way they were. He also points out the numerous falsehoods which parade as truth (i.e. that men earn more than women, that racism only goes in the direction of whites towards blacks, that being concerned about gender reassignment surgeries necessarily makes one transphobic, etc.). The main takeaway is to always remember that crowds pick up steam as they go, and it takes great courage to stand against the stampeding hordes.

The hole, however, which is missing in Murray’s book is that he has, of course, left the center of history out of the picture: Christ on the cross. Murray identifies the problems. But his answer/solution is necessarily void of a true and lasting resolution to our cultural enmity. All of our delusions, all of our cultural tensions will only escalate into greater madness and vengeance on each other until we repent and come to Christ.

Murray gives example after example of how our culture has rapidly adopted new views on gender, sexuality, and race, but Murray notes how little reflection has been done on why the rules, norms, mores were there in the first place. He is concerned that society is moving too fast in its adoption of these new orthodoxies, and cautions against the vitriol that is poured out upon those who differ with the new orthodoxy. He points out how dangerous cancel-culture can be by showing examples of how ostensibly progressive people have transgressed the new views and then been summarily condemned as racists, bigots, transphobic, etc. This cancelling happened simply because they expressed an opinion that had only ten minutes earlier had fallen out of fashion. He notes that as a gay man he might not agree with the Christians who want to counsel people out of the gay lifestyle, but he wants to strive to understand why they believe what they believe before banishing them to societal Siberia.

Murray is a good writer, and excellent on the analysis. He doesn’t offer much by the way of solution (as I mentioned already). He seems to think we just need to do more studies (on things like the trans issue) before we condemn people who object to the rapid acceptance of gender reassignment surgeries as a positive good. He does appeal for patience and forgiveness for each other. He is an atheist who seems to really wants there to be a Gospel which can truly forgive our sins against each other, and give us grace to love our neighbor truly. He just doesn’t see it as the true answer to all the maladies we face.

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