Favorite Books of 2013

2013 was a very fine year in books as I look over my blog. I began this post thinking that I'd limit myself to five books, but I realized that I would fail as soon as I typed in the title. So some random thoughts by category: 

Political thinking: The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom by James Buchanan. Runner-up: Garments of Court and Palace: Machiavelli and the World He Made by Phillip Bobbitt. Special mention: The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government by Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer.

Classic revisited: The Prince by Machiavelli, tranlated by Tim Parks. Runner-up: Lila by Robert Pirsig. Special mention: The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

Classic discovered: A Passage to India  by E.M. Forster. Runner-up: I and Thou by Martin Buber (translated by Ronald Geiger Smith). Special mention: A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf.

History: A Thread of Years by John Lukacs. Runner-up: Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire by Alex Von Tunzelmann. Special mention: Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan

Travel: The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen. Runner-up: In Motion: The Experience of Travel by Tony Hiss. Special mention: A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Detection & Mystery: Swag by Elmore Leonard. Runner-up: Wolves Eat Dogs: An Arkady Rendo Mystery by Martin Cruz Smith. Special mention: The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing: From the Files of Vish Puri, Most Private Investigator by Tarquin Hall

SF/Fantasy: 11.22.63 by Stephen King. Runner-up: Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood.

Writing: Storycraft: The Complete Guide to Writing Nonfiction by Jack Hart. Runner-up:To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction by Phillip Lopate. Special mention: Karl Klaus, TheMade-Up Self: Impersonation in the Personal Essay. 

Nonfiction: Antifragility by Nassim N. Taleb. Runner-up: Why Priests? A Failed Tradition by Garry Wills. Special mention: David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell. 

Living Better: Bonds That Make Us Free:  Healing Our Relationships, Healing Ourselves by C. Terry Warner. Runner-up: Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations: Ancient Philosophy for Modern Life by Jules Evans. Special mention: Saving God: Religion After Idolatry by Mark Johnston (yes, again). 

Contemporary Affairs: Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents by Ian Buruma. Runner-up: State Building: Governance and the World Order in the 21st Century by Francis Fukuyama. Special mention: Talking to the Enemy: Violent Extremism, Sacred Values, and What It Means to Be Human by Scott Atran

And finally . . . . drum roll, please, 

The book of the year: A Time for Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Gorgeous and delightful.

Some left off the list that were mighty good books, but we have to keep some limit on it. Happy reading to all in 2014.

Nicolo Machiavelli, The Prince, translated by Tim Parks

I first encountered The Prince in the spring of 1972, a time when we might say an archetypical Machiavellian figure occupied the White House. I read it as an assignment in my introduction to political theory course. I don't remember a great deal about the book (although I do remember the "C" I took in the course!) Anyway, the topic of political theory took with me anyway, and I've returned to Machiavelli again by assignment and of my own volition. Why? He is (perhaps along with Thucydides) the supreme political realist. As James Burnham made clear in The Machiavellians, a keen understanding of how politics really works, as opposed to how we would like it to work, provides us with a knowledge that we can ignore only at our peril. Not that we shouldn't think or work for a better political system, but that we had better understand how it really is working.

For a paper for a course in Renaissance history, I wrote about the mirror of princes literature that preceded Machiavelli. These were medieval tracts that advised rulers to act according to the Church and Aristotelian standards. In other words, to act like goody-two-shoes. Then comes Machiavelli like a Tammany Hall ward captain at Girls State, pulling the would-be leader aside and telling her, "Hey, kid, listen up. If you wanna get ahead here, here's whatcha' gotta' do". The intuitive ruler always knew these things, or at least some of them, but never before had anyone of any notoriety ever stated the real practices so blatantly. (And, by the way, while Machiavelli didn't offer his advice to young ladies, he did write The Prince to try to woo the Medici family into retaining his services. It didn't work.)
  
I'd seen that #JLF speaker Tim Parks had recently completed a translation of The Prince and that Jared Diamond (who looks quite mellow) had given The Prince a shout out in an interview asking what he'd recommend to the president to read, so I took up Parks's translation. Parks, a Brit who lives and writes in Italy, and whose book Teach Us to Sit Still I greatly enjoyed, has performed a great service and provided us with a very useful translation. I don't have any expertise on translations, but Parks explains his intent in the introduction--to give a sense of the "handbook" style that Machiavelli wanted to use to convey his practical wisdom--and it works very well. For instance, Machiavelli's famous description of fortune (Fortuna) as a woman was not written--nay, was intentionally not written--to be politically correct. Parks recognizes this and translates the passage with the machismo that Machiavelli no doubt intended to convey. This everyday, contemporary English gives this translation a feel that matches its practical usefulness for today.

I was going to go on to discuss Machiavelli, who still intrigues and puzzles me. However, such an undertaking isn't easy, as he has perplexed and challenged thinkers since he published The Prince. But good luck rode to the rescue, and I happened upon this piece by Isaiah Berlin, the British political philosopher and historian of ideas, in which he thoroughly reviews the literature on Machiavelli and arrives at his own assessment. I can't do better and won't try, except to say that the "evil Machiavel" is worth the read to challenge and inform you. Here's a teaser snippet from Berlin's article that I'll close with: 

But the question that his writings have dramatized, if not for himself, then for others in the centuries that followed, is this: what reason have we for supposing that justice and mercy, humility and virtù, happiness and knowledge, glory and liberty, magnificence and sanctity will always coincide, or indeed be compatible at all? Poetic justice is, after all, so called not because it does, but because it does not, as a rule, occur in the prose of ordinary life, where, ex hypothesi, a very different kind of justice operates.

The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom by James Burnham

James Burnham's The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943, 305 p.) came into my possession in 2001 upon purchase from Great Expectations Bookstore in Evanston, Illinois. It languished--or should I say waited for me--on my shelves until last summer, when it made the cut to India. It proved its merit, and I can only regret the wait. 

Burnham, better known for his The Managerial Revolution and then later as a writer at William F. Buckley's National Review, writes at a midway point in his odyssey from Trotskyite to Buckleyite. In this work, Burnham, starts by dismissing the claims of Dante's De Monarchia as anything other than at attempt to cover a naked political agenda. After dismissing Dante, he moves into a discussion of Dante’s fellow Florentine, political realist, Niccolo Machiavelli. Burnham argues that only by knowing politics as it's actually practiced, and not how we might wish it practiced, can we obtain and hold a measure of freedom. 

After discussing Machiavelli, Burnham moves forward a several centuries to discuss lesser known political thinkers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, names familiar but not often read: Mosca (theory of the ruling class), Sorel (myth and violence), Michaels (iron law of oligarchy), and Pareto (famous for several things, but here about elites and beliefs). Each of these thinkers, early practitioners of political science as a discipline, looks at the stark realities of politics. For instance, the dominance of elites, the role of political parties (and elites within those parties), and beliefs based on something other than empirical science. In other words, how politics, even in nascent democracies, works. 

Burnham's argues that only by understanding how politics actually works can we preserve a measure of freedom, and his point convinces. Naive understandings of our political system only lead to frustration and failure. These individuals and their successors, the men and women who have studied politics since this was written (and even earlier, as Pareto is the most recent thinker considered) give us greater insight into our ways of practicing politics. Of course, ideas and even ideals are important, and perhaps Burnham undervalues these, but they do not overcome many hard realities. Machiavelli, ever the fascinating character, sets the tone not as a purveyor of evil, as the naive suppose him to be, but the consummate realist. Burnham and his thinkers add to this tradition, and by doing so can help us become wiser about the political world in which we live.