Josh C. > Recent Status Updates

page count for paperback isn't right, the text finishes at 330 and even the index only goes to 423

I'll likely try to finish this out, but the reviewer who assessed it with "I eventually stopped reading because it started to sound like whining more than anything else" has a point. I'm not totally unsympathetic to his argument about liberal-democratic society having a totalizing nature, but so far this seems to be a dressed-up lament for his vision of a monolithically ethno-Catholic Poland.

Early reaction: they're awfully convinced that they're not the modern Charles Reep. However, their conviction that a) they have all the numbers, b) the numbers they have tell all and c) they understand all that the numbers tell them is, at a minimum, quite similar to Reep's approach in its triumphalism.

So far: man, Fukuyama hates him some Rousseau. Recognizes his deep influence, stops just short of calling it fundamentally malign.

"What passed for cokehead logic in the early eighties is now conventional wisdom." Not even a quarter of the way in, but Hyden's pull of a Boogie Nights scene to condemn the Spotify-era mass market shift from albums to self-selected playlists has made the whole book worth buying already.

Found this at Green Valley Book Fair. Originally published in 1999, and it's jarring how dated the framing is already – I suspect a manuscript like this today would be kicked back as insensitive and culturally condescending, though the author's intent is nothing of the sort. It's more that the acceptable terms of cultural dialogue in America, at least among educated people, have shifted significantly left.

It's compelling and hilarious, but reading even a satire written as Hitler first-person is difficult after a while for conscience reasons.

Buried on the back of my bottom shelf after a library book sale pickup years ago. Worth the $2, it turns out!

This is astonishingly good for an "inside" book, especially given how quickly it was put together after Clarkson's producer-punching incident.

I'm apparently not as interested in baseball of 1908 as I thought I'd be.

I took a seminar by Dr. Thomas built on this book at a conference a few years ago -- glad to finally get a chance to read the foundation work.

It's breathtaking to read about the Inchon offensive knowing Seoul-Incheon personally only as the high-tech megalopolis of the 2010s.