Alec Russell – After Mandela, The Battle for the Soul of South Africa (2009)

Essays on the post-apartheid challenges of South Africa: ANC’s slide towards autocratic incompetence and populism, Thabo Mbeki’s late-night surfing on AIDS-denialist websites, and Afrikaner nostalgia. But also the disasters that didn’t happen. An apparently even-handed picture of a country that could have done better, but also worse, and may go either way in the future.

Recommended: Yes.

George R. R. Martin – A Clash of Kings (1998) / A Storm of Swords (2000)

Reading A Song of Ice and Fire is like watching fireworks that go on and on, forming more and more intricate patterns, steadily increasing the light and the volume until there’s no resistance left and you bend your knees to Martin, King of all Fantasy Epics. To be fair, the trick that separates Martin from the rest, making them shadows of his ideal form, is that he destroys as much as he creates: Characters who no longer belong, and all those hundreds of pages where people wander about in the New Zealand wilderness. What’s left is so good that getting to the end is irrelevant. It’s already perfect at every level: As individual chapters, each a short story in its own right, and as individual books. Perhaps Martin will one day bring it all together as a perfect whole, but if not, you can still reread the early books – like I did now with book two.

Recommended: Oh yes. And/or try the HBO version of book one, Game of Thrones. It’s good too.

Christopher Caldwell – Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West (2009)

Immigration poses two challenges to Europe: The formation of a separate, oppositional identity among muslims, who make demands European social models are unprepared for, and the inability of the native cultures to deal honestly with the challenges this causes.

Recommended: Yes, even obligatory. Hardly anything written about European immigration is both relevant and sane, but this is an outstanding exception. My own view at the moment is close to Caldwell’s, but even if yours isn’t, this book is where the debate must continue, or remain irrelevant, a mere exercise in misdirection.

Adeline Yen Mah – Falling Leaves (1997)

Growing up in Shanghai and Hong Kong, the author has a Harry Potter childhood, but there’s no magic, and no rescue.

Recommended: Yes.  I’m skeptical of anyone who shares their family feuds with the world, but it is an impressive revenge for an unloved daughter to turn writer late in life, and, in front of a million readers, elevate her stepmother to the ranks of China’s evil old dragon ladies.

Mattias Svensson – Glädjedödarna, En bok om förmynderi (2011)

A survey of failed and misguided moral crusades, from alcohol and comic books to prostitution and drugs.

Recommended: Yes.  And isn’t it interesting how many of these principled rebuttals of social democratic overreach come out of Sweden these days?

Clive James – Cultural Amnesia (2007)

I put away this collection of essays on half-forgotten artists and intellectuals four years ago, because it put more books on my to-read list than I knew what to do with.  Now I try again, better than I was before at dealing with the pressure of unread books.  My plan was to continue where I left off, halfway, but I got sucked in and read it all over again.  This is a fantastic survey of cultural pillars, the informal kind that one moment evokes the lost café culture of pre-Anschluss Vienna, and the next distracts itself with the implausibility of Richard Burton’s hairdo in Where Eagles Dare.

Recommended: Hell yes.

Charles Perrow – Normal Accidents (1984/1999)

Perrow’s warnings about the dangers of nuclear power haven’t held up too well, but his overall point has: That complex systems suffer complex failures, where parts interact in unpredictable ways.  A sufficiently complex system can never be safe.  Nassim Taleb has taken this idea further by encouraging systems and behavioral patterns that are designed so that unexpected events benefit us instead of harm us.

Read: 200 pages.

Recommended: No.  The subject is interesting, but the treatment dry.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb – The Bed of Procrustes (2010)

The tweet-length maxims collected in this book are made from four parts wisdom, one part self-aggrandizement.  I forgive this from the author of perhaps the most important book of the previous decade, but I also forgive the reader who wonders why they should be made to watch.

Recommended: Weakly, for the less self-obsessed moments.

Jeg har en bokomtale av I trygghnetsnarkomanernas land av David Eberhard hos Minerva:

Historien har spilt oss et puss: Vi lever tryggere enn noensinne, men er stadig reddere for de farene som er igjen.  Tidligere var vi redde fordi vi hadde noe å være redde for: Tuberkulose, lungebetennelse, underernæring.  I dag er vi redde fordi redselen vår mater seg selv.  Den livnærer seg ikke på ekte farer, men på selve muligheten for at noe kan gå galt.

Les resten her.

Eventually, in the West, we emerged from the age in which people paid with their lives for a religious allegiance. We emerged into another age in which they were murdered by the million for other reasons, but not for that one. Though the religious might hate to hear it said, the West graduated from its nightmare only because religion ceased to matter in any way except privately. At the time of writing, we are in the uncomfortable position of hoping that the same thing can come true for Islam, and do so in a briefer time than the span of centuries it took to come true for us. While we are waiting, it might be of some help, although of little comfort, to realize that an Islamic fundamentalist doesn’t have to share the psychotic certitudes of Torquemada in order to be dangerous: it is enough for him to share the civilized attitudes of Queen Elizabeth I, who wanted every invading priest tortured as soon as caught, and gruesomely executed soon after that.

- Clive James, Cultural Amnesia (2007)

Nick Cohen – Waiting for the Etonians, Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England (2009)

This little England, it’s dingy and it’s mean

I’ve flirted with her mewling gods and petty jealousies

These edited-reader rebels with their simulated causes

Their weak-chinned snarls and red guitars I disregard them all

Recommended: Yes.

Niall Ferguson – Colossus, The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (2004)

The United States is an empire, although often an incompetent one, and should embrace their burden, because the alternative is worse.

Though it cuts me to my soul that

It must be America

It must be America

Or nothing at all

Read: 116 pages.

Recommended: No. This is an argument, not a history.  I don’t care about the conclusion, I want the details.

Richard Wiseman – Paranormality, Why We See What Isn’t There (2011)

Not only are paranormal phenomenons bunk, the natural explanations for them are more interesting than any supernatural ones could be.  (And oh, it’s better to know. Okay, I’ll stop now.)

Recommended: Yes.  This is in fact the perfect approach to this subject.

Thomas Sowell – Intellectuals and Society

Intellectuals are often wrong, especially leftist ones.

Read: 45 pages.

Recommended: No. Alongside Hayek, it’s superflous.

Min relativt partiske anmeldelse av Bård Larsens relativt partiske bok om diktatorflørten på ytre venstre, Idealistene, kan du nå lese hos Humanist.

Etter noen tiår med jevnlige oppgjør med 70-tallets røde synder, er de gamle synderne lei av å bli spurt om de angrer, og vi tilskuere finner det ikke så lett å finne entusiasmen vi heller. Selv på den rampete høyresiden føler vel mange at moroa har gått ut av skadefryden.

Bård Larsens Idealistene. Den norske venstresidens reise i det autoritære kommer derfor på litt feil tidspunkt, men det er den riktige boken, og den tilfører noe nytt: Et bredere fokus, ut over AKP(ml) og over i SVs og AUFs rekker, fra 70-tallet og fram til i dag. I stedet for nye historier om ml’ernes absurde eventyr, handler Idealistene om den radikale venstresiden i helhet.

Les resten her.

Evgeny Morozov – The Net Delusion (2011)

The entire vocabulary of Western cyber-utopians, from “Twitter revolutions” to “the Great Firewall of China” is the product of a mythology that has no connection with the role technology actually plays in modern dictatorships, which have found diverse and clever ways to use technology to their advantage.  Iranians aren’t on Twitter, internet access is often more a safety valve than a foothold for freedom, and your local security police would like you to reveal your social network on Facebook thank you very much.

Recommended: Yes.  Morozov makes the same point, but in a more rational way, as Adam Curtis in All Watched Over..: Cyber-utopianism is worse than useless, it actively benefits the true power holders in a society.

Frank Rossavik – SV, Fra Kings Bay til Kongens bord (2011)

The rise and eventual taming of Norway’s Socialist Left Party.  A good history uses its subject as a lens to see its world through.  This one gets bogged down in names and dates, and has no vision, which is a shame, because whatever else you can say about SV’s tortured attempt at finding a third way between social democracy and communism, at least it was interesting, especially in its early newspaper incarnation.  This isn’t.

Read: 60 pages, + the apologetic chapter on their flirtation with Communist dictators, a story that can’t be told honestly without at least offending someone.  Rossavik seems unwilling to do that.

Recommended: No.

Discussing a new book (The Lucifer Effect) by Philip Zimbardo, the social psychologist Professor Nussbaum ended on an upbeat note: “Let us hope that The Lucifer Effect, which confronts us with the worst in ourselves, stimulates a critical conversation that will lead to more sensible and less arrogant strategies for coping with our human weakness.”

I don’t quite know what “sensible and less arrogant strategies” might be, but I do know that while humility generates some virtues, there is also a vital connection between arrogance and virtue. Why is it that most people behave decently? No doubt in part because of the fact that they are decent and virtuous people. They may well also fear the consequences of bad conduct. “The passion to be reckoned on,” as Hobbes remarks, “is fear.” But one of the other main bases of virtue lies in the fact that people think, with a certain contempt and derision: “I wouldn’t do that evil (base, etc.) kind of thing. I am above such conduct.” Some moralists consider such moral arrogance as itself a vice. The ability to understand oneself in such moral terms, however – as a “lady” (rather than merely a woman), or as a “gentleman”, or even as an honest person, indeed even as being merely common or garden decent – commonly rests in part on feeling superior to others. In other words, virtue often depends not on humility but on arrogance.

- Kenneth Minogue, The Servile Mind (2010)

It is a conspicous feature of democracy, as it evolves from generation to generation, that it leads people increasingly to take up public positions on the private affairs of others. Wherever people discover that money is being spent, either privately or by public officials, they commonly develop opinions on how it ought to be spent. In a state increasingly managed right down to small details of conduct, each person thus becomes his own fantasy despot, disposing of others and their resources as he or she thinks desirable. And this tendency itself results from another feature of the moral revolution. Democracy demands, or at least seems to demand, that its subjects should have opinions on most matters of public discussion. But public policy is a complicated matter and few intelligent comments can be made without a great deal of time being spent on the detail. On the other hand, every public policy may be judged in terms of its desirability. However ignorant a person may be, he or she can always  moralize. And it is the propensity to moralize that takes up most of the space for public discussion in contemporary democracy.

- Kenneth Minogue, The Servile Mind (2010)