Book Review: John Durant – The Paleo Manifesto

This , about Society, tagged , , , was written by for , on November 20, 2013 .4 Comments

“The Paleo Manifesto” by John Durant, published in 2013. Rating: 5/5. Most books on the paleo diet follow a set pattern: An inspirational story about how the author wrecked his health with junk food or vegetarianism before the caveman came riding on a white horse to the rescue; an explanation of why, contrary to the […]

Book Review: Howard Bloom – The Lucifer Principle

This , about History, tagged , , , , , was written by for , on July 15, 2010 .20 Comments

Depressingly fatalist, morbidly truthful, irresistibly Nietzschean. That’s Howard Bloom’s “The Lucifer Principle” in a nutshell: a meandering trawl through disciplines such as genetics, psychology and culture that culminates in a theory of evil, purporting to explain its historical necessity, its creative potential and the possibility of it ever being vanquished. The odds do not appear to […]

Book Review: Jared Diamond – Guns, Germs, and Steel

This about History, tagged , , , was written by for , on December 3, 2009 .2 Comments

While trawling through my computer archives, I stumbled across this book review of Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” from five years ago. Overall, it’s a great book, better than his follow-up “Collapse”, which is also interesting – especially in the psychological aspects of “collapse”, like creeping normalcy and “landscape amnesia” – but far from […]

Violence is Reality

This about History, tagged , , , was written by for on October 11, 2009 .15 Comments

Realism has been falling out of favor since the end of the Cold War, condemned by the Kumbaya crowd, avoided by the liberal, PC-gone-wild intelligentsia, and denigrated by “end of history” ideologues (many of whom all too cynically remain realists while cloaking it under the mantle of “liberal interventionism”). What they all have in common is […]