Catalog of 480 book reviews, and some forgotten aphorisms. Back to work!

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I have As you readers have noticed, I like to refer to book reviews as I write.  Preparing to forge ahead with writing on the sexes, I decided to get systematic and make a catalog.  I was able to locate most of the 558 reviews Amazon credits to me.

Discounting irrelevant foreign language books, kids’ books, music books and those I found worthless, I was left with 480. 

Categorizing books is a challenging task for bookstores – they have to be forced into a single category.  Since I work by computer, I was able to assign them to multiple categories.  What you see in my catalog are about 700 entries.

I include 19 books I have read and consider important but have not reviewed.  The review dates are marked “none.”

Both the review and publication dates are relevant.  My views have evolved over time, as have those of science and society.  Often, you will wryly note, diverging rather than converging.  The more science tells us about climate, sex, race and economics, the more distance there is between what the researchers, media, bloggers and the politicians are telling us. 

Here is a link to the catalog.

Along the way I of course read what I had written.  It was kind of an audit of how my views have changed.  Fifteen years ago I found many reasons to prefer speaking Russian to Ukrainian.  Now I go the other way. 

There were some surprises.  From my 2017 review of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.

Any proposition is true if your paycheck depends on its being true.

Any proposition is politically incorrect if it threatens your paycheck.

Success is not a matter of finding an interesting job; it is a matter of finding your job interesting.

A fundamentalist doesn’t believe in evolution.
A liberal believes evolution among humans stopped cold 50,000 years ago, when we migrated out of Africa.
A realist believes in evolution.

Deism posits the supreme moral authority as a cosmic hippy shambling down a hill with ten suggestions written in icing on sugar cookies about celebrating diversity and not eating animals or littering.

Liberalism starts with a world-view and attempts to force reality into its perspective. Conservatism is empirical: look at the facts and see where they lead. This is why people inevitably drift to the right as they gain experience in life.

Have you ever met a hungry bureaucrat? For food, that is – hunger for control over you and your money is a given.

It beats me why the self-styled better people want to fertilize the dandelions in the garden of life rather than the dahlias. Dandelions are doing all right without our encouragement, and few of them turn out to be very ornamental.

What profiteth it a WASP, if he giveth his whole life for the world, and the world dumpeth on him anyhow?

I take a tragic view of mankind. Herbert Spencer said a century ago"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools." We do and will repeat our mistakes, and it is the height of hubris to imagine that government can change human nature. Just as allowing deadwood to accumulate only exacerbates the inevitable forest fire, the welfare state’s attempt to raise people above where their native talents would take them will result in chaos when it falls apart.

Jews are the most aggressive victims in history. They cajoled and browbeat me into granting a lot of sympathy over the years. If they want more, they can return the favor by showing a bit of sympathy for us beleaguered WASP males.

Women chose to make men their peers, that they and society might prosper financially. They could have chosen to make us their true spouses, that society would blossom through our children. As with the serpent in the garden, they chose badly -- the poisoned apple of material success.

Women have finally won the right to do whatever they want in life --- now if they could just make up their minds!

The long-term interests of society are never aligned with the short-term interests of politicians.

When gold is the standard, economies experience both inflation and deflation. People may, but political systems do not handle deflation well. Conversely, politicians love printing money – because they are the ones who get to spend it.

People who feel a God-given right to be angry seldom have the God-given wit to know when.

Tolerance is the virtue of working through recognized differences. Multiculturalism is the sin of failing to recognize that they exist in the first place.

If these seem unfamiliar, it is because Bartlett never saw them.  They are my own.

That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the persistent man is finally going to get back to the business of reading and writing.  But even there, not so fast!  My time will be divided. I’ve bought three more books over the past week.  Besides which, I’ve been somewhat neglecting Eddie.

Graham