Our List of Christmas Holiday Readings and Books of the Year for 2016
Brought to you by the friends of and contributors to Voegelinview!
Jacqueline Pfeffer-Merrill (Fund for Academic Renewal)
Dickens’ other fine Christmas pieces besides A Christmas Carol – the best is surely The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, but worthwhile too is The Goblins Who Stole a Sexton.
Tilo Schabert (University of Erlangen)
Sir Walter Scott’s Old Mortality
The novel deals with the conflict between religious fundamentalism, on the one hand, and common sense and a culture of chivalry, on the other.
Scott Robinson (King University)
This thorough collection of Abigail Adams’ correspondence throughout her life provides an eloquent and enjoyable review of the American Revolution, Founding, and early years of the Republic. Adams’ political philosophy also offers fertile ground for critical reflection of various salient contemporary issues, especially the “party spirit” that characterizes America of late – from which her writing offers a pleasant respite that is appropriate to the Christmas season.
Leah Bradshaw (Brock University)
Charlie LeDuff’s Detroit: An American Autopsy
Because I just spent a weekend in Detroit. Read this and be scared.
Matthew Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
Crawford is one of my favorite contemporary writers. He has a rare understanding of grounding oneself in the modern world. The final lines of this book read: “Education requires a certain capacity for asceticism, but more fundamentally, it is erotic. Only beautiful things lead us to join the world beyond our heads.” Read this and be encouraged.
Barry Cooper (University of Calgary)
Joel Dicker’s The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair
Randall Woods’ Shadow Warrior
Annie Proulx’s Barkskins
David James Brown’s The Boys in the Boat
George M Fraser’s Quartered Safe Out Here
Robert D. Kaplan’s In Europe’s Shadow
Thomas Heilke (University of British Columbia-Okanagan)
Augustine’s The Confessions
What better book to prepare oneself for what comes at the end of the Advent season?
Stanley Hauerwas’ Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics, and Life
Reflections toward the end of life of one of the most important and provocative theologians of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Again, in the mode of Advent, a fitting book.
Lee Trepanier (Saginaw Valley State University)
Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt (1821-1849), The Year of Ordeal (1850-1859), The Stir of Liberation (1860-1865), The Miraculous Years (1865-1871), The Mantle of the Prophet (1871-1881)
If you think your life is tough, just read about Dostoevsky’s: both parents dead by the time he was eighteen (his father was killed by his own serfs); epileptic fits that haunted him for the rest of his life; joined a revolutionary group only to be arrested, have a mocked execution, and put into prison and Siberian exile for a decade; inheriting the debts of his brother and first wife after they had died, which forced him to flee to Europe to escape their creditors; a gambling problem, the death of his daughter from his second marriage, and unbelievable pressure to write in order to eat, even at times risking the rights to his books to eke out an advance to live. And from this life he managed to publish some of the greatest novels in Russian literature, if not in literature itself: Crime and Punishment, The Demons, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov. If you want to feel better about yourself and your life this winter, just read this five-book biography that took over a quarter of century to finish. It is the definitive account of Dostoevsky’s life and the times in which he lived.
Steven Millies (University of South Carolina-Aiken)
Don DeLillo’s Zero K
DeLillo has spent his writing life exploring the underbelly of the American imagination, from Libra to White Noise to Cosmopolis. He understands what makes us tick, for worse (mostly) and for better. Perhaps Zero K struck me so much because I had just seen the Neolithic burial mounds at New Grange (Ireland) when I picked it up. This not-quite sci-fi imagining of an “Ark” where the wealthiest of a near-future globalized world submit themselves to cryogenic freezing, ceremonially stored to overcome death in a de-sacralized expectation of eternity, speaks to the instinct toward ritual and the confounding fact of death that are as entirely human in the internet age as they were in the stone age.
Shusako Endo’s Silence
Of course, I am reading this because the forthcoming Martin Scorsese film has drawn my attention to it. I wish I had known about it sooner. Silence is a product of the sixties, I suppose, in the sense that it abides in the excitement of intercultural encounter within the Roman Catholic Church, a spirit identified with John Paul II but which began in the era of Paul VI. More, it is preoccupied by the lonely, existential challenge of faith. It indulges the guilty fact of doubt. From the Arians through the Kakure Kirishitan in Silence to the identify fixations of our time, authenticity has been the double-edged sword of Christianity. We praise the saints and martyrs for their constancy of faith, we are less trusting of the “doubting Thomases.” In silence we find how short is the distance between those perceived extremes. It is there we find real faith.
William Petropolous (Voegelin Archiv, Munich)
Jürgen Gebhardt’s Americanism: Revolutionary Order and Social Self-Interpretation in the American Republic
I re-read it. Naturally the book has nothing directly to say about the recent presidential election, but its discussion of the symbolic forms of American self-interpretation provides one with categories that, among other things, also help one think about current events without the risk of drowning in the shallow discussions that swirl about them.
Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Intended to complement his with other writings, but all together they were to make up a prose equivalent to Wordsworth’s “Prelude” (“Poem on the Growth of a Poet’s Mind”). De Quincey was unable to carry out this ambitious plan. Among other things debtors’ prison got in the way. Scholars still argue which other writings and fragments (that he had shored against his ruins) would have been included in the projected work. The Oxford World’s Classics’ edition, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other writings, Introduction and Notes by Grevel Lindop, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), helps the reader follow and understand De Quincey’s broader, but only partially realized, intention.
Luigi Bradizza (Salve Regina University)
Too tired for philosophy? Here are some second tier books to help you unwind this Christmas break. They would also make great gifts for that teenage boy on your Christmas list.
Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle
PKD is the most intellectually respectable science fiction author. In this alternate history, America has lost World War II and is suffering under German and Japanese occupation. This complex and thought-provoking novel anticipates the postmodern assault on objective truth.
Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander
Before the film came the novel. Follow the Royal Navy’s Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin as they battle the French during the Napoleonic Wars. O’Brian creates a compelling moral universe. This is the first in a series of 20 novels, all superbly well-written.
Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff
This is a work of non-fiction written in Wolfe’s trademark “New Journalism” style. Test pilots and astronauts put their thumos on full display. And it is all true. A paean to manliness and patriotism, and an antidote to today’s “Pajama Boy”.
Christopher S. Morrissey (Seminary of Christ the King, British Columbia)
Edwin Curley’s The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume II
Ron Dart’s The North American High Tory Tradition
John Deely’s Umberto Eco and Semiotics: The Postmodern Dawn in Philosophy
Mark Dooley’s Conversations with Roger Scruton
Samuel Gregg’s For God and Profit: How Banking and Finance Can Serve the Common Good
John von Heyking’s The Form of Politics: Aristotle and Plato on Friendship
Pierre Manent’s Beyond Radical Secularism: How France and the Christian West Should Respond to the Islamic Challenge
Marshall McLuhan’s On the Nature of Media: Essays, 1952–1978
Douglas Rushkoff’s Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity
Roger Scruton’s The Ring of Truth: The Wisdom of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung
Charles Embry (Texas A&M University-Commerce)
Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales
This is a wonderful—and short—remembrance to read to one’s children and grandchildren at Christmas. If one can still find it, Dylan Thomas recorded it in 1952. This too is quite wonderful. We listened to his reading it every Christmas when my children were young—they seemed not to be listening. But now that they are adults they remember it fondly.
James Joyce’s “The Dead”
A short story from The Dubliners, this is the story of Gabriel and Greta attending a Feast of the Epiphany celebration at home of Gabriel’s in early 20th century Dublin. An additional treat would be to watch the movie that was a Huston family production: John Huston directed (it was his last movie); Tony Huston adapted the story for the movie; and, Angelica Huston starred.
Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw
Voegelin interpreted this novella in a 1947 Letter to his friend Robert B. Heilman and in 1971 published an expanded interpretation as “Postscript: Paradise and Revolution” in The Southern Review. The two pieces were published as “On Henry James’s Turn of the Screw” in volume 12 of the Collected Works. Voegelin’s postscript is quite illuminating.
Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome
Edith Wharton and Henry James were great friends. Although the themes of the two stories differ, when I re-read the two recently I felt intuitively that they were somehow related. Perhaps the similarity is to be found in the mood of diffidence that underlies the writing.
John C. Van Dyke’s The Desert
In 1898 and 1899, Van Dyke wandered in the “desert world that stretch[ed] down the Pacific Coast and across Arizona and Sonora.” He wrote: “The desert has gone a-begging for a word of praise these many years. It never had a sacred poet; it has in me only a lover.” Van Dyke was an observant wanderer whose descriptions approach the poetic and whose meditations on Nature and humans are provocative.
John von Heyking (University of Lethbridge)
2016 was a fruitful year for members of the Voegelin Society. I offer two books by Society members as worthwhile reads at Christmastime or anytime.
Tilo Schabert’s, The Second Birth of Man: On the Political Beginnings of Human Existence
Tilo Schabert is one of the great proponents of “empirical political philosophy.” In this book he draws from his empirical work on former Boston mayor Kevin White and on François Mitterand to provide a conceptual restatement, under modern conditions, of Aristotle’s claim that politics is an “architectonic science.” Schabert’s discussion of creativity, of bodies, of soul, of God, of freedom, and of friendship creates a synthetic account of political action in its fundamental sense.
David Walsh’s Politics of the Person as the Politics of Being
The other offering by a Voegelin Society member is a profound reflection upon the nature of the person as the goal and precondition of thinking and of action. Among the many insights of the book, the reader learns the implications of how scientific investigation is about giving an account of something as if it could give its own account. In terms of ethics and politics, Walsh traces how the person is the “opening toward the other.”
J. Edward Chamberlin’s The Banker and the Blackfoot: A Memoir of My Grandfather in Chinook Country
Finally, a wonderful book about my neck of the woods but whose importance extends to how we think about our common life on the North American continent. The author’s grandfather was a banker in Fort McLeod, a dusty town in southern Alberta whose main historical significance was as one of the key outposts for Canadian imperial rule over the Canadian plains in the second half of the nineteenth century. Though the “Mounties” brought some law and order, genuine political order was secured through the friendships among settlers and First Nations, especially Blood (Kainai) and Peigan (Piikani). These friendships were facilitated by the respect each had on account of their being horse cultures. This memoir details life in southern Alberta “before the wire” and focuses upon the friendship between the author’s grandfather, John (Jack) Cowdry and Crop Eared Wolf, chief of the Kainai. Read about friendships among those who knew horses, and also about Jerry Potts, a Métis who straddled both the European and First Nations worlds, and whose Hermetic qualities the author, like Plato, treats as necessary for founding new civilizations.
Daniel J. Mahoney (Assumption College)
Mark Dooley’s Conversations With Roger Scruton
A narrated dialogue between the English philosopher and the Irish philosopher Mark Dooley, is an indispensable guide to Scruton’s life and work. It is eloquent and discerning from beginning to end, as are all of Scruton’s recent works. His sense of place, his love of England, his defense of humane national loyalty are all evident on every page of this lively book. His is a conservatism that speaks to the modern world and that does not hesitate to defend the integrity of the human soul, which is in no way reducible to a mere object in a world devoid of human freedom. In these captivating pages, we learn of Scruton’s work in the 1980’s to help the intellectual underground in Czechoslovakia and Poland (for which he has been decorated in both countries) and we witness his return to a Christianity informed by a compelling philosophical defense of human nature and the human soul. Conversations leave us anxious for the publication of Scruton’s On Human Nature (Princeton, 2017), his definitive response to “neurobabble” and sundry contemporary forms of materialist reductionism.
Tocqueville’s Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848 and its Aftermath (University of Virginia Press, 2016)
This is, as Raymond Aron once put it, an “absolutely thrilling book.” Ably edited by Olivier Zunz and beautifully translated by Arthur Goldhammer, we witness Tocqueville confronting the specters of both socialist revolution and Bonapartist despotism. Ever the conservative-minded liberal, Tocqueville had the good sense and courage to avoid the extremes and to remain steadfast in his defense of “liberty and human dignity.” We also see him briefly as French foreign minister (before the Second Republic succumbed to a new form of despotism). Tocqueville is the anti-Marx, resisting every form of historical determinism. As he quite suggestively puts it in the Recollections, “I hate absolute systems that see all historical events as dependent on grand first causes linked together in ineluctable sequence, thus banishing individual human beings from the history of the human race.” There are many such passages in this profound and moving book.
James V. Schall’ s Line Through the Human Heart: On Sinning & Being Forgiven
Father Schall is an intellectual treasure, a gifted thinker and writer who continues to illumine the intersection of Christianity and political philosophy. His new book takes its title from a classic passage from Solzhenitsyn about the drama of good and evil in the human soul. Schall’s striking meditations powerfully remind us that repentance (and the recognition of sin) are the precondition for human beings’ receiving God’s mercy and forgiveness. Punishment, too, is part of the “order of things” if we want to remain morally responsible persons. The appendix to the book, “Fifteen Lies at the Basis of Our Culture” is alone worth the price of admission (I will not spoil things for the readers by preempting Schall’s account). Schall reminds us that we need not accept these lies, that “no one needs to participate in the aberrations of his time,” as Eric Voegelin so eloquently put it.
Vladimir Solovyov’s “Short Tale about the Antichrist”
I am presently completing a book on why the Christian religion is not the religion of humanity, why it is not reducible to secular humanitarianism (as so many mistakenly think today). A powerfully prophetic resource for coming to terms with this “humanitarian temptation” can be found in the Russian religious philosopher Vladimir Solovyov’s “Short Tale about the Antichrist.” Published in 1900, Solvyov’s tale is set in the 21st century—at “the end of history.” The Antichrist in Solovyov’s account, is a pacifist, humanitarian, and vegetarian, and the author of a famous book called The Open Path to Universal Peace and Prosperity. He “falsifies the good,” in Solovyov’s apt formulation, fooling most Christians of his time. But a small remnant of Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox remain faithful to the person of Christ and to the truth of things. The consummation of the great battle between good and evil is set in Jerusalem and the Holy Land in an eschatological vision that is among the greatest spiritual and political writings of modern time. Perfectly timed for Christmas, I recommend the lucid and gripping translation by Boris Jakim in Sophia, God & A Short Tale About the AntiChrist (Semantron Press, 2014).
Joseph Knippenberg (Oglethorpe University)
As I begin to dig myself out from the mound of student papers I have to grade, my thoughts turn fleetingly to what I’d rather be doing—reading good books written or edited by people for whom I have the highest regard.
Let me start with a couple of books that deal with my own situation: inviting students—many of whom are, to put it mildly, resistant—to join the great conversation of the liberal arts.
Peter Lawler’s American Heresies and Higher Education
Peter Lawler is one of our smartest and deepest public intellectuals. It’s always nice to have his provocative musings on a variety of contemporary subjects in one bound volume. I’ve read many of these before, and look forward to doing so again, at my leisure.
Susan McWilliams’ and John Seery’s The Best Kind of College: An Insider’s Guide to America’s Small Liberal Arts College
McWilliams and Seery both teach at Pomona and both love their work, their colleagues, and their students. They have gathered a collection of like-minded writers from around the country to remind us of what we’re supposed to be doing.
Next semester, I’m teaching a course on the American Dream, which seems to be dwindling before our eyes. Here are a few of the books that we’ll be reading to contemplate our past, present, and future.
D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy
Vance is the articulate and thoughtful voice of the Trumpenproletariat, working class white Americans whose situations have for the most part not materially (let alone spiritually) improved since the Reagan Administration.
Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010
Murray provides some of the social scientific background and context for Vance’s personal memoir.
Robert Putnam’s Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis
The subtitle says it all.
Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism
Yuval Levin is another of our best public intellectuals. I don’t mean to suggest that what ails the American Dream is simply susceptible to a political solution, but it would be a mistake not to examine how the elites in the Capitol might be able productively to come to grips with one another and with those of us who live in the Districts (to borrow language from the otherwise forgettable Hunger Games books).
My last recommendations fall into the category of books I wish I could find an excuse to assign in a class.
Justin Buckley Dyer’s and Micah J. Watson’s C. S. Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law
Every year I require students in my sophomore core course to read The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength, along with works by Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Hobbes and Locke. Lewis brings to life the disagreement across the ages between the early modern Innovators and their classical and Christian predecessors. Dyer and Watson provide me with the crib notes I need in order finally to do Lewis justice in the classroom.
Patrick Deneen’s Conserving America?: Essays on Our Present Discontents
Writing recently in the New York Times, University of North Carolina historian Molly Worthen argued that liberals should follow the conservatives’ lead in paying attention to the philosophical and literary underpinnings of what she can’t help call their ideology. Patrick Deneen has long been a participant in those efforts on the conservative side, not because he’s an ideologist, but because he’s a contrarian, indeed one of our most articulate and thoughtful contrarians.
With that, I wish all my friends all the joy of the Christmas season!
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