Last week, I devoured Reid Hoffman & Ben Casnocha’s brand new book, “The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform your Career.” It couldn’t have come out at a more appropriate time for me personally, given that I have abandoned academic aspirations, left grad school, quit a boring publishing job, …
Category Archives: book reviews
book review: Vivian Gornick's "Revolution as a Way of Life"
Last month, I read the article “Love and Anarchy” by Vivan Gornick in The Chronicle of Higher Education. It was adapted from a recently released book titled “Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life” by the same author. Because the essay was intriguing and, honestly, quite sexy, I quickly purchased the full book on …
book review: Schmidtz and Brennan's "A Brief History of Liberty"
Actually, this is more of a book recommendation than a book review. David Schmidtz is one of my favorite philosophers; it was his book “Social Welfare and Individual Responsibility: For and Against” (written with Robert Goodin) that first began to wake me from my dogmatic political slumbers circa 2006, when I was an undergrad back …
book review: Ivan Illich's "Deschooling Society"
Ivan Illich’s “Deschooling Society” is a classic in the alternative education scene, so I had been meaning to read it for ages and finally did. The book has seven shortish chapters, and is a pretty quick read. The first chapter, “Why We Must Disestablish School,” is very clearly the strongest one. Illich argues that institutionalized schooling …
book review: James Tooley's "The Beautiful Tree"
I just finished James Tooley’s “The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves,” which I had been meaning to read ever since it received some publicity from The Cato Institute upon their publishing it last year. Tooley is a lovely writer and an obviously thoughtful man, whose research in India, …
book review: Diane Ravitch's "The Death and Life of the Great American School System"
I recently finished Diane Ravitch’s book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education.” This book has been getting quite a bit of attention even outside of educational circles so I figured I should read it. Ravitch is an historian of education and, viewed as a history, …
book review: Lierre Keith's "The Vegetarian Myth"
Somewhere between my ex-vegan interview at Let Them Eat Meat, the blog Hunt.Gather.Love, and Paleohacks, it was at least once recommended to me that I read Lierre Keith’s “The Vegetarian Myth.” So, I did. The author spent 20 years as a vegan. Understandably, veganism became ever nearer and dearer to her identity, but it also ruined …
