We Are Not Saved

1- Operation Overflight By: Francis Gary Powers and Curt Gentry Published: 1970 384 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? An autobiographical account of Powers' experiences before, during, after and around his U-2 spy plane being shot down over the Soviet Union, including his 21 months of imprisonment in a Soviet prison and his long campaign to rehabilitate his reputation upon his return to the...

Come for the unreplicatable science, stay for the promise of a planetary heart beating out peace for a thousand years. The HeartMath Solution: The Institute of HeartMath's Revolutionary Program for Engaging the Power of the Heart's Intelligence By: Doc Childre, Howard Martin, and Donna Beech Published: 1999 304 Pages (But somehow this translates to only 2 hours 45 minutes on audio…) Briefly, what...

A book full of potential comparisons to our own day for the motivated, and strangely removed from our own day if you're really going to be honest about it.  The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany By: William L. Shirer Published: 1960 1250 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? A comprehensive history of Nazi Germany, from Hitler's birth to the Nuremberg trials. Written by...

Policy proposals from the White Queen. (It's a Lewis Carroll reference. No, I'm not talking about the Mad Hatter or the Red Queen. It's from "Through the Looking Glass".)  Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society By: Eric A. Posner and Eric Glen Weyl Published: 2019 384 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? A series of radical proposals for restructuring property, v...

One part documentation of a strange AI hallucination. One part panic about whether I'll be put out of business by AI.

Using the Stone of Democracy to Slay the Goliath of Inequality Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse By: Luke Kemp Published: 2025 592 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? By most accounts, civilization, which is to say the large Hobbesian state, is a good thing. Kemp doesn't necessarily agree. In his account, states are lumbering, tyrannical, extractive Goliaths, cursed...

I was promised useful stories to assist me in a quest for justified belief. Instead I got a lesson in the limits of expertise. Unfortunately it was the author's expertise that was limited.  Knowing Our Limits By: Nathan Ballantyne Published: 2019 344 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? Regulative epistemology as opposed to descriptive epistemology. Put more simply, this is about how to find tr...

The Westmark Trilogy by: Lloyd Alexander RoadKill by: Dennis E. Taylor Slicing Pie Handbook: Perfectly Fair Equity Splits for Bootstrapped Startups by: Mike Moyer Fables for Young Wolves by: Thomas O. Bethlehem

Would you like some genetics in your politics? The Origin of Politics: How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations – Social Disintegration, Birth Rates, and the Path to Extinction By: Nicholas Wade Published: 2025 256 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? Wade offers up an evolutionary psychology account of how to make politics actually function; how, when you try to disconnect politics...

I feel like I should make some clever connection between this book and the discussion which raged about the Shroud of Turin, but nothing occurs to me. A Case for Latter-day Christianity: Evidences for the Restoration of the New Testament's "Mere" Christian Church By: Robert Starling Published: 2019 360 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? A broad, and intensive defense of the theology of The Ch...

In which I mostly talk about the Shroud of Turin. Murray only spends seven pages on the it, so my review is not comprehensive. Actually, never mind. That's what the top sections are for. Taking Religion Seriously By: Charles Murray Published: 2025 152 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? Murray's journey from agnosticism to belief, a journey that is largely intellectual rather than spiritual. B...

Back when Rome was just one Italian settlement out of many, but a settlement with a dream! Children of Mars: The Origins of Rome's Empire By: Jeremy Armstrong Published: 2025 288 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? The deep history of Rome. What we actually know about its legendary founding, its early rise to prominence, and the shape of its military. Additionally, the development of Roman ide...

We have a lot of nice things. We're really good at making nice things. We should preserve these nice things. But also nothing lasts forever? The Origins of Efficiency By: Brian Potter Published: 2025 384 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? The clever and incremental ways we've vastly increased humanity's ability to make stuff. We're constantly finding ways to build stuff cheaper, faster, and w...

Everything you wanted to know about 1st Century Palestine, but were afraid to ask… The New Testament in Its World: An Introduction to the History, Literature, and Theology of the First Christians By: N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird Published: 2019 992 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? An deep dive on the New Testament covering (as the subtitle suggests) the history: Second Temple Judaism ag...

Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart By: Nicholas Carr Published: 2025 272 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? On its surface, this is a fairly typical anti-social media book, though Carr does have some interesting things to say about weaknesses inherent to the medium: content collapse, algorithmic engineering, and hostility generation. All things I'll get to in a bit. What...

A story of one Palestinian's fight against brutality, bureaucracy, and bishops.  We Belong to the Land: The Story of a Palestinian Israeli Who Lives for Peace and Reconciliation By: Elias Chacour and Mary E. Jensen Published: 1990 212 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? An autobiographical account of Chacour's struggles as a Palestinian Christian working to build up his community in Galilee (I...

Asterios Polyp by: David Mazzucchelli The Last Equation of Isaac Severy: A Novel in Clues by: Nova Jacobs The Impossible Fortune: A Thursday Murder Club Mystery by: Richard Osman The Moviegoer by: Walker Percy Academy of Outcasts by: Larry Correia

The power of positive thinking and cocaine! The Kid Stays in the Picture By: Robert Evans Published: 1994 432 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? This is the autobiography of Robert Evans. It jumps around a lot, but it's mostly built around his time as head of production for Paramount pictures from basically 1966-1974. Evans had basically zero experience, but by working himself nearly to death...

Chesterton mostly lost me after Arthur and Alfred, but I feel like I got his point in spite of that. A Short History of England By: G.K. Chesterton Published: 1917 107 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? The book is titled the "History of England", but it's really a book about the soul of England. Chesterton examines this soul chronologically from the "Age of Legends" down to the time the book...

I actually never got around to discussing the Lord of the Flies element of this book. But trust me it's in there! The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder By: David Grann Published: 2023 352 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? This book is about what happened to HMS Wager, a Royal Navy ship that was shipwrecked on the south coast of Chile in 1741. The journey before the shipwreck was...

Banned in most prisons! That feels like a point in the book's favor, but I'm not entirely sure I can articulate why. The Daily Laws: 366 Meditations on Power, Seduction, Mastery, Strategy, and Human Nature By: Robert Greene Published: 2021 464 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? A "page a day" book collecting bits of wisdom from Robert Greene's other books (Laws of Power, Art of Seduction, Str...

If John Wick and Judge Dredd loved each other very much… Saga of the Forgotten Warrior By: Larry Correia 1- Son of the Black Sword 2- House of Assassins 3- Destroyer of Worlds 4- Tower of Silence 5- Graveyard of Demons 6- Heart of the Mountain Briefly, what is this series about?  The series is set on the continent of Lok, in a world inspired by feudal India and Southeast Asia, meaning that there a...

When "stigmatizing" has become a bad word and a bad thing everywhere and for every one, one brave British curmudgeon dares to demand it's return!  Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy By: Theodore Dalrymple Published: 2006 160 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? This book aims to shatter some of the myths around opioid addiction. The first part covers the myth...

Maybe the answer really is to be found in early 1970's Chilean socialism…  The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind By: Dan Davies Published: 2024 304 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? The development of accountability sinks, a construct used by governments, corporations, and really any large-scale organization to deflect responsib...

Pick it up because it's short. Continue it because of the brutal Bavarian accent. Finish it because maybe he's on to something? The Future of Truth By: Werner Herzog Published: 2025 128 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? Legendary badass, and sometimes filmmaker Werner Herzog weighs in on the concept of truth, how best to represent truth, and what's happening to it. Drawing on his own experie...