Monday, January 16, 2017

Bibliophile in chief

From our most literate and reflective president to the least. Sad.
Not since Lincoln has there been a president as fundamentally shaped — in his life, convictions and outlook on the world — by reading and writing as Barack Obama.
Last Friday, seven days before his departure from the White House, Mr. Obama sat down in the Oval Office and talked about the indispensable role that books have played during his presidency and throughout his life — from his peripatetic and sometimes lonely boyhood, when “these worlds that were portable” provided companionship, to his youth when they helped him to figure out who he was, what he thought and what was important.
During his eight years in the White House — in a noisy era of information overload, extreme partisanship and knee-jerk reactions — books were a sustaining source of ideas and inspiration, and gave him a renewed appreciation for the complexities and ambiguities of the human condition.
“At a time when events move so quickly and so much information is transmitted,” he said, reading gave him the ability to occasionally “slow down and get perspective” and “the ability to get in somebody else’s shoes.” These two things, he added, “have been invaluable to me. Whether they’ve made me a better president I can’t say. But what I can say is that they have allowed me to sort of maintain my balance during the course of eight years, because this is a place that comes at you hard and fast and doesn’t let up.”
...during his last two years in college, he spent a focused period of deep self-reflection and study, methodically reading philosophers from St. Augustine to Nietzsche, Emerson to Sartre to Niebuhr, to strip down and test his own beliefs.
To this day, reading has remained an essential part of his daily life. He recently gave his daughter Malia a Kindle filled with books he wanted to share with her (including “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” “The Golden Notebook” and “The Woman Warrior”). And most every night in the White House, he would read for an hour or so late at night... 
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Celebrating two centuries of Thoreau

For someone generally associated with serenity, Henry David Thoreau can get people riled up. In a 2015 essay in The New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz wrote that the transcendentalist and his work had become “simplified and inspirational,” and that our beatific vision of him “cannot survive any serious reading of ‘Walden,’ ” which reveals a writer “in the fullest sense of the word, self-obsessed: narcissistic, fanatical about self-control, adamant that he required nothing beyond himself to understand and thrive in the world.” Donovan Hohn counterargued at length in The New Republic, saying that Schulz simply replaced “the distortions of hagiography with those of caricature, and the caricature has been drawn before.”

Many political observers have recently noted the renewed relevance of the essay “Civil Disobedience” with Donald Drumpf moving into the White House, but that’s not the only reason the 19th-century thinker is on our minds. In 2017, if the air at Walden had been really, really health-giving, Thoreau would have turned 200. With the bicentennial arrive several books about the naturalist. (Kevin Dann’s “Expect Great Things: The Life and Search of Henry David Thoreau” is reviewed on Page 13 this week by John Kaag.) This spring will see a focus on narrow slices of his work, like Richard Higgins’s “Thoreau and the Language of Trees,” and “Thoreau’s Animals,” edited by Geoff Wisner. Robert M. Thorson’s “The Boatman,” about Thoreau’s relationship to the Concord River and alterations made to it during his lifetime, promises what the publisher, Harvard University, calls, “the most complete account to date of this ‘flowage controversy.’ ”

An ambitious new full biography by Laura Dassow Walls, an English professor at Notre Dame, will be published in July — the month when Thoreau officially turns the big 2-0-0. 

Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Buchanan's scholarship

Jane Mayer's Dark Money confirms that our school's most distinguished and celebrated alum was cozy with the dark side, "lambasted for reducing 'all human behavior to simple self-interest.'"



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The beliefs of economist James Buchanan conflict with basic ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../the-beliefs-of-economist-james-buchanan-conflict-w...
Jul 25, 2017 - Controversy has recently arisen around James M. Buchanan, the economist .... I have publicly lauded the books of George Mason economics ...

Buchanan, James M. James M. Buchanan Papers, 1920-2013

scrc.gmu.edu/finding_aids/buchanan.html

Descriptive Summary. Repository, George Mason University. Libraries.Special Collections Research Center. Creator, BuchananJames M. Title, James M.

A despot in disguise: one man's mission to rip up democracy | George ...

https://www.theguardian.com/.../despot-disguise-democracy-james-mcgill-buchanan-tota...
Jul 19, 2017 - James McGill Buchanan's vision of totalitarian capitalism has infected public ... house on the campus of George Mason University in Virginia.

James M. Buchanan, Economic Scholar, Dies at 93 - The New York ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/.../james-m-buchanan-economic-scholar-dies-at-93.html
Jan 9, 2013 - Alex Tabarrok, the director of the Center for Study of Public Choice at George MasonUniversity, which Mr. Buchanan founded, confirmed his ...
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Democracy in Chains, CoPhi...

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