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‘The Lost Cities Of Africa’ By Basil Davidson


This 1959 book is a reminder that even someone who was relatively forward thinking on racial issues can still come across as pretty cringey now. But I appreciated that Davidson frequently reiterated that the civilizations of ancient and medieval Africa were both uniquely African, i.e., not founded by Phoenician, Arabic, or Person settlers, and the equal or superior to other, contemporary world civilizations.

But, the options for a book on African civilization before the Europeans began conquering and generally messing stuff up were limited and I learned a lot.

I imagine many readers will already have had some awareness of Kush and perhaps the Mali empire and its literary center of Timbuktu, but learning more was a pleasure. What I most enjoyed was reading about the strange isolation of the southeastern kingdoms. They did not interact much with other African cultures, but instead looked east to their trade across the Indian Ocean with the empires and kingdoms of Indian and China.

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Tocqueville: A Very Short Introduction


I read this not so much because I wanted to learn about Alexis de Tocqueville (I read Democracy in America many years ago, but could stand to dip into it again), but because I wanted to read something by Harvey Mansfield and this was all the DC Public Library had. My YouTube blackhole led me to Bill Kristol’s channel (Conversations with William Kristol), specifically to an interview with Harvey Mansfield about Leo Strauss. I used to see Kristol all the time; he and I got our coffee at the same dinky coffee/bagel place on the ambiguous border between downtown and Dupont Circle, near the Cathedral of Saint Matthew the Apostle. It felt like a personal affront. But, he’s anti-Trump and I try to be relatively broad-minded, so I was feeling generous with my time (and also, I like to fall asleep to videos like that). Well, I can still say that Bill is a shallow and tendentious thinker, but he does sometimes like to talk to interesting people are not shallow and tendentious.

So books like these are not really great introductions to either the supposed topics or to the authors of these little things.

Did I learn anything about Harvey Mansfield? That he is not afraid how the ‘liberal’ has been perverted to use it in something closer to it’s traditional sense (though I don’t necessarily agree with his hints at a more comprehensive definition, which somehow fails to primarily be about more or less free markets, rule of law, and respect for civic institutions). That he wants Tocqueville to be respected as a political philosopher, even if the man himself was dismissive of ‘philosophers’ (a fair point by Mansfield). Where he lost me completely was calling France of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s ‘socialist.’ If you’re going to call Louis-Napoleon president and later emperor or a socialist country, you can’t just drop that remark and move on. Back that thing up, please.

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Dark Rising: Magic And Power In The Age of Trump


Does… does… does Gary Lachman believe in Chaos Magick? And, yes, that’s how he spells it. Because Aleister Crowley spelled it that way.

There is some fascinating stuff about how, similar to other fascist groups, the alt-right has developed connections to occult ideas and, yes, The Power of Positive Thinking is, when you think about it, simultaneously stupid and weird and vaguely occult (and cultish).

The stuff on Traditionalism is slightly different from what’s in The War for Eternity, though not sufficiently so to justify itself.

But, but, but… does he believe it’s real? I spent most of the book asking myself, I am reading the work of a crazy man?

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‘The Cartographers’ By Peng Shepherd


Ever since I read Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, I have been looking for it in other conspiratorial novels about learning and books. The closes I have come is Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, which I still recommend and now want to read again (which would be, probably, the fourth of fifth time).

The Cartographers doesn’t really come close, but it’s still pretty good. The villain’s motivation never really seems that evil (or, if it is, then the protagonists couldn’t have known about the really evil part, which is an underdeveloped criticism of a certain breed of technofetishism/technoutopianism) and their identity is rather crudely telegraphed about one hundred pages out.

But, listen, it’s still good. Not being as good as Eco or as good as one of my favorite novels published in the last twenty years can’t be the criteria here. I enjoyed and I’m glad I read it. I learned something about map making and the premise, which is held secret for long enough in the book that I don’t want to give it away here, is pretty clear. The primary protagonist is a pleasantly flawed, obsessive, and intelligent woman, even if the rest of the cast can feel a little thin.