Dear Reader …
Underneath Dan’s post about our special books issue, somebody called Angela has suggested that we invite @TAC readers to join in the “Best books you’ve never read” symposium. Great idea. What follows is a list of our contributors’ choices. Please, dear readers, comment on their nominations and add the names of your own favorite obscure books below.
David Bromwich — Two stories by Elizabeth Bowen, “Mysterious Kor” and “Sunday Afternoon.”
Nick Gillespie — In the American Grain, by William Carlos Williams.
Jacob Heilbrunn — The Nemesis of Power: The German Army in Politics, 1918-1945, by John Wheeler-Bennett.
Jeffrey Hart — Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
Florence King — Star Money by Kathleen Winsor
Michael Lind — The Next Million Years by Charles Galton Darwin.
John R MacArthur — All the Time in the World, by Hugo Williams.
Justin Raimondo — Ex America: The 50th Anniversary of the People’s Pottage, by Garet Garrett
Alfred S. Regnery — Adopted Son: The Life, Wit, and Wisdom of William Wirt, by Gregory Glassner.
George Scialabba — Fantasia of the Unconscious, by D.H. Lawrence
Sam Tanenhaus — The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, by James Burnham
Alexander Waugh – Chaldean Account of Genesis by George Smith; Mozart and the Wolf Gang by Anthony Burgess; and Roger’s Profanisaurus.
Chilton Williamson Jr –Travels in Arabia Deserta, by Charles M. Doughty.
Peter W. Wood — The American Beaver and His Works, by Lewis Henry Morgan
Peregrine Worsthorne — The London Dialogues and other books by David Hirst (Copies can be obtained by writing to David Hirst, 24 Kidmore Road, Caversham, Reading, Berkshire, RG4 7LU, England.)
Obviously, most of these titles are difficult to get hold of, but I’ve tried to help readers who want to buy copies by providing links. The author David Hirst has agreed that people who want to buy his books may write to him. Now over to you …
Truth and Social Reform- Vishal Mangalwadi
This Indian activist for caste equality infuriates most of his readers by saying that egalitarian, rights-based society is an exclusively, inextricably Christian invention and that nations possess it, gain it, or lose it in proportion with their stance towards Christianity. Not popular, but he makes a good case. People who try to reduce the success of the West to race ought to read it as well (although really, shouldn’t the fact that Asians are demonstrably smarter put the lie to that anyway?)
Click my name to read his book in PDF, or buy it to send a little money his way:
http://www.amazon.com/Truth-Social-Reform-Vishal-Mangalwadi/dp/0340426306
“Dear Reader …”
When I first saw that title I thought maybe you were going to apologize for that awful BNP post.
The Leaning Tower of Babel by Richard Mitchell
If you want to understand the modern Education Establisment read The Leaning Tower of Babel, especially the chapter “The Children of the State,” the best essay I have ever read about contemporary American education. It is available online at http://www.sourcetext.com/grammarian/leaning-tower-of-babel/index.html
James Burnham’s Machiavellians is available here:
http://committeeofpublicsafety.wordpress.com/2009/06/05/the-machiavellians/
Shame on Sam Tanenhaus. The Machiavellians is one of the most important books on understanding politics ever written.
Sorry to disappoint you, Red. Why not put in your favorite obscure book, though? (You’re welcome to pick anything you like. How about Nick Griffin’s ‘Who Are The Mind Benders?’)
Is “Winesburg, Ohio” really that obscure? It was assigned reading for my 11th grade high school English back in 1992.
“Franklin Pierce: Young Hickory of the Granite Hills” by Roy Nichols really offered some insight into the failure of one of the few presidents paleo-cons can appreciate.
I read “A Foregone Conclusion” by William Dean Howells to a friend of mine when she was stuck in a hospital bed. For reasons that I do not truly fathom, I am convinced that this charming romance is one of the reasons we are now engaged.
Time and Western Man, by Wyndham Lewis. For the style, and the hilarious and devastating chapter on Ulysses, not for its considerable amount of gobbledygook.
Journey to the Land of the Flies, by Aldo Buzzi. A combination of travel writing, literary criticism, food appreciation, and memoir. Buzzi died Oct. 9, at the age of 99.
Tetrasomy Two by Oscar Rossiter. An entertaining and original novel science fiction fans will like more than I did.
The Gray Cloth, Paul Scheerbart’s novel on glass architecture. It’s about flying around in a blimp and glass architecture.
Operette Morali, by Giacomo Leopardi. Brilliant and allusive little fictions, in the form of essays and dialogues, which have been obscured to an extent by the polymathic prodigy’s poetry.
Decadence, by C. E. M. Joad. An English philosopher who was a celebrity in the 1940s. After fare dodging for years, in 1948 he was convicted of riding the Waterloo-Exeter train without a ticket. Many believe the humiliating episode led to his premature death in 1953.
The True History of the American Revolution, by Sidney George Fisher. Of all the books on this list the one most dangerous to your brain. The discovery of my friend Mr. Moldbug, he provides more informatin about it here.
Time’s Children, by Chester Northmour. Absolutely one of the best novels of the 1980’s. Arguably one of the best novels of the 20th century.
Time and Western Man, by Wyndham Lewis. For the style, and the hilarious and devastating chapter on Ulysses, not for its considerable amount of gobbledygook.
Journey to the Land of the Flies, by Aldo Buzzi. A combination of travel writing, literary criticism, food appreciation, and memoir. Buzzi died Oct. 9, at the age of 99.
Tetrasomy Two by Oscar Rossiter. An entertaining and original novel science fiction fans will like more than I did.
The Gray Cloth, Paul Scheerbart’s novel on glass architecture. It’s about flying around in a blimp and glass architecture.
Operette Morali, by Giacomo Leopardi. Brilliant and allusive little fictions, in the form of essays and dialogues, which have been obscured to an extent by the polymathic prodigy’s poetry.
Decadence, by C. E. M. Joad. An English philosopher who was a celebrity in the 1940s. After fare dodging for years, in 1948 he was convicted of riding the Waterloo-Exeter train without a ticket. Many believe the humiliating episode led to his premature death in 1953.
The True History of the American Revolution, by Sidney George Fisher. Of all the books on this list the one most dangerous to your brain.
Time’s Children, by Chester Northmour. One of the best novels of the 1980’s. Arguably one of the best novels of the 20th century.
Alessandro Manzoni’s “I Promessi Sposi,” Italy’s greatest novel but totally incomprehensible to anyone who is not Italian. I nver made it past page 17.
Rob’s charming Howells anecdote above is my new favorite two-sentence short story, O. Henry for the hurried traveler.
The roundtable entry in the print edition by Alexander Waugh includes a Viz scat-saurus, whose correct title is Roger’s Profanisaurus (not Roget’s). Other titles in that series are subtitled Profanisaurus Rex and The Magna Farta.
Those in search of The London Dialogues by David Hirst (hailed by Peregrine Worsthorne) at used-book sites such as Bookfinder might wish to use “Tiresias” as the author, under which name it was published in 1986.
My own entries here include Memoirs of a Superfluous Man by Albert Jay Nock (see my review at Amazon.com).
I also nominate the spellbinding book-length essay William Lloyd Garrison by that great lost critic of the Gilded and Progressive eras, John Jay Chapman (1862-1933), a fiery and prophetic writer who, in my experience, gets under the skin of everyone who reads him like itching powder: Edmund Wilson tub-thumped for him in the 1930s; Jacques Barzun edited a selection of his pieces (including Garrison) in 1957 (Edward Gorey, of all people, even did the NYRoB-like design and typeface for the Anchor paperback), and placed him, along with Mark Twain, Finley Peter Dunne, H.L. Mencken and Albert Jay Nock within what he called “the great American tradition of the judicious eccentric”. Andrew Delbanco blurbed generously another Chapman collection, Unbought Spirit, from a decade ago, and anyone who attempts a comprehensive anthology of the modern essay (e.g. former TLS editor John Gross, Joyce Carol Oates, &c.) is virtually compelled to include a Chapman piece, such as “Coatesville” (Oates included it in Best American Essays of the Century), which immortalized a notorious 1911 lynching (as opposed to the more frivolous sort? – Ed.). As with Garrison, the entire essay collection in which it appears, Memories and Milestones, is also free online via Google Books (facsimile copies of Harvard library copies in the case of both Chapman volumes).
One of Chapman’s signature themes was the ways in which the hold of commerce over every aspect of our national life had foreclosed a fully open, honest and grown-up social and intellectual life, and in Garrison, that foreclosure as effected in the early C19 by the slave power is, to borrow from John Cleese, the very nub of his gist. I remember soon after I began reading it in 1993, while selling books daytimes in Brentano’s Pentagon City to divers Beltway grandees (Brian Lamb primus inter pares), I felt like tearing off my shirt, grabbing a 1927 Underwood and hopping Mr. Peabody’s WABAC machine to 1835, even – or especially – if it meant I’d be thrown into the Ohio River by a febrile mob and watch my warehouse torched to ash. That, as Billy Mays might say, is The Power of John Jay Chapman. It has been said that he wrote Garrison to, as it were, hallucinate himself back into the great moral struggle he had been born too late to attend, and he succeeded with electromagnetic force.
Here he is amid a sea of caps, gowns and Wagstaffs before the Class of 1900 at Hobart College:
“When I was asked to make this address I wondered what I had to say to you boys who are graduating. And I think I have one thing to say. If you wish to be useful, never take a course that will silence you. Refuse to learn anything that implies collusion, whether it be a clerkship or a curacy, a legal fee or a post in a university. Retain the power of speech no matter what other power you may lose. If you can take this course, and in so far as you take it, you will bless this country. In so far as you depart from this course you become dampers, mutes, and hooded executioners.
“As a practical matter a mere failure to speak out upon occasions where no opinion is asked or expected of you, and when the utterance of uncalled-for suspicion is odious, will often hold you to a concurrence in palpable iniquity. Try to raise a voice that will be heard from here to Albany and watch what comes forward to shut off the sound. It is not a German sergeant, nor a Russian officer of the precinct. It is a note from a friend of your father’s offering you a place in his office. This is your warning from the secret police. Why, if any of you young gentleman have a mind to make himself heard a mile off, you must make a bonfire of your reputations and a close enemy of most men who would wish you well.
“I have seen ten years of young men who rush out into the world with their messages, and when they find how deaf the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little eminence from which they can make themselves heard. ‘In a few years,’ reasons one of them, ‘I shall have gained a standing, and then I will use my powers for good.’ Next year comes and with it a strange discovery. The man has lost his horizon of thought. His ambition has evaporated; he has nothing to say. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don’t be gagged. The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time.”
William Lloyd Garrison is available free in PDF, wherever fine browsers are pointed. I’d bet my O’Reilly Factor falafel holder it can still flush up the neck-hairs in armchairs from Ketchikan to Keokuk. In a time when, to borrow from Dwight Macdonald sixty-five years ago on the after-dinner comments of Bull Halsey, powerful people say things in broad daylight that would get the rest of us locked up in the psycho ward at Bellevue, it is a pleasure to come upon such writers unexpectedly – much like the professor mentioned by Jacques Barzun in his foreword to the Cogitations of Albert Jay Nock, who for the same reason of serendipity kept macaroons tucked among his heaped-up papers.