Black Rednecks and White Liberals is a collection of six essays by American economist and social philosopher Thomas Sowell. Sowell is a traditional conservative in that he views moral character, cultural values, and individual habits as the primary determinants of one’s fate in society. He is sharply critical of the liberal notion that group identity and inter-group social dynamics primarily determine one’s fate.

Each of the six essays refutes, with varying success, the traditional liberal interpretations of history. Whether you agree with Sowell or not, he will make you think about events and issues that are generally not even addressed in current history and cultural studies courses. Though at times he seems to cherry pick facts to support his preferred interpretations, he nevertheless forces readers to confront historical facts that are difficult to reconcile with the current canonical liberal interpretation of history.

Ava Gardner, The Secret Conversations, is a book about a writer trying to write a book about Ava Gardner. In 1988, Gardner was recovering from a pair of strokes that had left her with a limp and immobilized one side of her face. She was sixty-five years old, nearly broke, and living as a recluse in her London apartment. The damage from her strokes had ended her acting career, and it looked like her last shot at earning money was to write a memoir.

Peter Evans, a veteran London journalist, was assigned to be her ghostwriter. This book chronicles Evans’ many intimate conversations with the actress. By then, Gardner was an alcoholic suffering the ill effects of decades of heavy smoking.

Fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross sets out to avenge the murder of her father in 1880s Arkansas. She hires the hardened and hard-drinking US Marshal Rooster Cogburn to track the murderer, Tom Chaney, through Indian country and bring him to justice. Along the way, they pick up a Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf who is seeking Chaney for crimes committed in Texas.

Mattie is iron-willed, single-minded, guileless and pure in her intentions. She comes from a salt-of-the-earth Christian family, which puts her at odds with the jaded Cogburn who has spent his career hunting down men who have proven themselves immune to ordinary justice. Both characters are practical and unsentimental, though their temperaments have evolved from very different experiences.

IndieReader announced its 2024 Discovery Award winners yesterday, and The Sellout topped the list in the humor category. Their take on the novel:

THE SELLOUT by Andrew Diamond intricately weaves together the struggles of an author torn between literary integrity and financial success. With elements of satire and noir fiction, Diamond crafts a compelling narrative that effortlessly transitions between the comedy, drama, romance, mystery, and thriller genres. As protagonist McElwee finds himself stuck in a mediocre crime novel, readers are drawn into a captivating tale of self-discovery filled with twists, turns, and valuable insights with an unexpected but satisfying ending.

This book is a classic among fans of hard-boiled crime fiction. Stephen King called it the hardest of the hard-boiled, and I have to agree with him on that. The plotting is relentless and so is the main character. I’ve never seen a character who so purely embodies animosity and determination.

The story opens with Earl Drake and his partner Bunny robbing a bank in Arizona. Things go awry halfway through the job, and Earl shoots several guards before getting shot himself. To make things worse, their getaway driver loses his nerve just as they’re exiting, and he winds up taking a bullet too.

I’m not sure why this book is called The Beach Girls. It actually takes place at a marina and it’s not really about girls.

The setting is the ramshackle Stebbins Marina in fictional Elihu, Florida, on the Gold Coast just north of Miami. The time is 1959. The owners of most of the boats on D dock live aboard their boats year-round. For various reasons, they have rejected the staid, conventional lifestyle of the middle class in favor of a more carefree bohemian existence that involves lots of drinking and lots of sex.

The Courage to Be Disliked is an introduction to Adlerian psychology in the form of a Socratic dialog. A young man who feels stuck and is unhappy with himself seeks the counsel of an older philosopher. He wants to know how he can find happiness and meaning in world where he never seems to measure up to the expectations of himself or others, a world in which the paths forward seem to both limited and uninviting and may lead to a life he ultimately doesn’t even want.

In 1945, an Egyptian peasant discovered a huge clay jar just beneath the soil near a cliff in Nag Hammadi, Egypt. Hoping to find treasure inside, he broke it open and, to his disappointment, found nothing but books.

Scholars and theologians had known for centuries of the early Christian Gnostic sects. Surviving letters and manuscripts of early church fathers railed against the beliefs and practices of these “heretics,” decried their “false” scriptures, and eventually succeeded in suppressing and destroying the writings that laid out their faith and described their practices.

Note: This review contains spoilers, outlining most of the plot. But also note that Permutation City is not genre fiction, so the plot is not the point. The value of this book lies in its deep exploration of ideas.

Greg Egan’s 1994 novel Permutation City is, first and foremost, the product of a brilliant mind. The story opens, more or less, around the year 2050. The rich have taken to scanning their minds before death and then running their digital consciousness as “Copies” inside of computer-generated virtual realities. They can edit their scans as they please, so they are young and vigorous in the virtual world, and they can even edit out the less pleasant parts of their psyches, if they please–for example, removing negative personality traits like resentment, excessive fear, etc.

This is one of the best novels I’ve ever read. The author, Humphrey Cobb, fought with the Canadian army on the front lines in France in World War I. While he points out that the events of the novel are fiction, much of what he describes is obviously based on what he witnessed in the trenches, and the core of the book’s horrifying plot comes from actual historical events.

The book opens with two soldiers watching the tired march of a bedraggled infantry unit. Duval is fresh out of school and has not yet seen any action on the front lines. He’s excited to blaze a path to glory. Langlois is a veteran who has already served with this unit, the 181st Infantry. He has no illusions about the nature of the war.