What I’ve been reading

1. Andrea Dworkin, Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant.  Published in 2002, this sure sounds like 2017.  Your mileage may vary, but it has a strong, unique voice and it looks more relevant than ever.  It reminds me of the in-your-face directness of Amiri Baraka, another underrated figure who ought to be rediscovered just about now.  If you are going to read only one Dworkin book, this is the one.

2. Gordon S. Wood, Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.  This is a high quality work, as you might expect.  Still, I am numb from the oversupply of material on the Founding Fathers, and so I could read no more than a third of this one.  If only it had come out twenty years ago.

3. George William Van Cleve, We Have Not a Government: The Articles of Confederation and the Road to the Constitution.  The best book I’ve read on the Articles period, most of all a revision of Merrill Jensen.  Van Cleve details clearly and analytically why the Articles did a poor job on fiscal, trade, foreign policy, and Western settlement issues.

4. Augustine, Confessions, new translation by Sarah Ruden.  This is the most readable translation I have encountered.  While I cannot vouch for the accuracy, Ruden has very strong qualifications as a classical translator.

5. c n lester, Trans Like Me: a journey for all us.  A memoir of sorts, might this be the best introductory book on its topic?  It is already out in the UK, not until June in the US.

Jason Brennan, Bas van der Vossen, and David Schmidtz, editors, The Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism, my blurb reads: “This is the best contemporary anthology introducing the reader to the basics of libertarianism.”

Joshua Clark Davis, From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs.  Covers African American bookstores, head shops, businesses in the women’s movement, and natural foods stores, a good revision of Milton Friedman on the social responsibility of business.

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