rob"o*rant, n. A roborant drug; a restorative or tonic.
The keyword matched 89 entries.
Read Stephen Hicks book to find out how a crazy philosophy got mixed up with the politics of the Left.
Think economics is a deep, dark subject beyond the ken of mere mortals? Fear not Thomas Sowell has your back.
Benjamin Roth lived through the Great Depression. His diaries have a lot to say to us today.
Robin Dunbar's book is full of interesting, thoughtful developments from the field of evolutionary biology.
Hurlbut was a general, politician and all-around scoundrel.
Storytelling is an old art that is undergoing a startling transformation.
The Athenian navy ruled the seas for 150 years, but sank to almost nothing practically overnight. What happened?
One of the best novels ever written, Kim deserves better treatment in modern times.
Star Beast is Heinlein's first attempt at a humor novel in the juvenile series. The whole novel leads up to a punch line that is actually pretty funny.
Cosmology has gone from speculation and wonder to cold, hard facts. How this came about is the subject of a very good book.
One of the least-told, but most heroic of all voyages of exploration.
People always seem to have it in for anyone else who is successful.
Giglio's book about the Kennedy presidency is well-written and easy to read, but there are some odd things about it.
FDR's New Deal policies were a disaster for most of the people they were trying to help. It was really FDR who put the "Great" in the Great Depression.
Tobias Buckell's new book is pretty damned good.
Neal Stephenson's novel is targeted precisely at an audience. So precisely, you probably won't want to bother with it unless you're a member of that audience.
H.L. Mencken was about eighty years ahead of his time. Not many people can toss off a newspaper column that's so smart it predicts a scholarly shift eight decades later.
Axelrod's book is more annoying than edifying.
Daniel Flynn's book takes us on a tour of the neglected parts of the history of the American Left. We meet lots of weird stuff along the way.
Mary Shelley certainly knew what she was doing back in 1817.
Was Woodrow Wilson really a fascist President as Jonah Goldberg claims? Let's check some additional sources and find out.
Margaret Sanger is considered a hero of feminism, but her own book shows that she was a racist, elitist, eugenicist who thought that three-fourths of humanity should never have been born.
Goldberg's book is a startling look at the political history of the twentieth century.
The idea that the US can achieve "energy independence" is both wrong and dangerous, according to Robert Bryce. I think he's right.
Norbert Wiener is one of the heros of the Information Age, but you've never heard of him. That's mostly because of his own paranoia and a rather nutty wife.
Gibbon's book is a classic and deservedly so. He clearly explains the decline and fall of the Roman empire and has fun doing it.
Charles Darwin and his amazingly diverse mind.
This is the final essays and a series that has spanned six months. I'm going to declare victory now, and wind it up.
This novel is, in its own way, the ultimate of the juveniles. It provides a sort of closure to the series.
Our next Heinlein juvenile is considered by many to be his best work.
This is one of Heinlein's best juveniles. The plot moves briskly along and the characters are memorable.
This isn't Heinlein's best effort. In fact, it's the weakest of the juveniles, in my opinion.
This time around, Heinlein gives us a tale of pioneering and survival.
This is another in the series about the Heinlein Juveniles. What do we get this time? This time we get a discussion about fairness and breaking rules.
This Heinlein Juvenile tackles a whole new set of life lessons. It's also one of his most fun to read.
Heinlein actually wrote one juvenile novel that contains no lectures on science and a protagonist who isn't particularly smart or competent.
Farmer in the Sky is my favorite of the Heinlein Junveniles. It's also a perfect example of my thesis that Heinlein was intentionally crafting a generation of youngsters.
Red Planet is Heinlein's third juvenile novel and he shows us that he has already mastered the form.
Heinlein sets a new standard for the juvenile novel. With complex themes and rich characters, he shows that kids aren't the idiots the publishing industry always thought they were.
This book is Heinlein's first juvenile novel. It fits in perfectly with the concept of a "boys book", except for one thing.
The Heinlein juvenile novels were the inspriation for generations of engineers. I think, however, that Heinlein had a big plan behind the whole thing.
Marge Piercy presents us with a feminist version of the utopian/dystopian novel. While it works pretty well as a novel, the utopia is somewhat hackneyed.
Island is Huxley's second shot at the genre, but utopias are much harder to create than dystopias.
Teg lives in a nearly perfect future world where everyone has equal opportunity, equal material goods and equal happiness. Yeah, right.
I don't find Anthem to be a very serious entry in the utopian/dystopian category. Not much of a novel, either.
Robert Heinlein's novel is much more complex than a simple utopia or dystopia. In fact, it's one of his most important novels.
This isn't the perfect dystopia, but it's pretty close.
We is one of kind and one of the few dystopian novels to directly inspire other dsytopian novels.
1984 is a textbook explanation of the machinations of a totalitarian state. But it's also a love story, an exploration of the use of language in politics, an indictment of nationalism and, above all, a study in the breaking of the human spirit.
Noah Smithwick lived a full and rich life during Texas' formative years. Somehow, he lived to write about it.
This was Kurt Vonnegut's first book and he certainly showed his potential early on.
Huxley was a real writer. Unlike so many utopian/dystopian writers, Huxley knew his way around the novel. His chilling future contains a message that is still quite relevant today.
Edward Bellamy's notion of Utopia is centered around the problems of the late 1800's. Problems that we have mostly managed to solve without drafting everyone in the country into the army.
Utopia isn't all that it's cracked up to be. It never was.
This book is a part of the feminist canon, but I don't think it was written as a feminist book at all. It's a deeply human work that deserves closer analysis than simply slapping a label on it. It has its flaws, but I think I see what Ms LeGuin was trying to accomplish.
Let's actually read The Communist Manifesto and see what it says. Were Marx and Engeles really altrustic pioneers out to help the human race? Or just a new breed of tyrant?
A reading list for dealing with and understanding the War on Terror. Also, some notes about what you will learn as you study the big picture.
In this book Andrew Parker attempts to explain a long-time mystery of science: what explains the mysterious blast of evolution known as the Cambrian Explosion? Parker thinks he knows and I wouldn't be surprised if he's right.
The ultimate Calvin and Hobbes compendium, comprised of every strip that was ever published. It doesn't get much better than this.
The world is becoming a tightly connected place. Not only is this a good thing, it's an essential thing.
Tobias Buckell's book is good. Really good. We can expect a lot more from this new science fiction author.
Reza Aslan's book does more than explain the history of Islam. It explains a lot about the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East today.
Dorothy Parker lived a hard life, but she managed to leave behind some nice short stories.
Hobbes' attempt to put philosophy on scientific grounds and "prove" that the idea of monarchy is good for us isn't very convincing.
The book's reputation as a classic is well deserved.
Voltaire had it all: he was rational, successful and witty.
Steinbeck was a terrific writer, even if you disagree with what he's saying.
A look at Hitler's methods during WWII. Not surprisingly, a lot of the conventional wisdom is suspect.
My answers to a book meme that is going around...
Willy Ley is a hero of the "space race" and this book was one of his most influential.
The most dangerous books of the 19th and 20th century. Right.
Wylie spits in America's eye, but then turns on a dime.
The second installment in our discussion of Mill.
John Stuart Mill's book is a milestone in democratic thought. Locke set up what government is supposed to do, Mill explains what it must not do.
Ted Nelson had the world wide web figured out in 1973.
This anthology is from the 1960's and reading it shows us what a joke that decade was — even in science fiction.
Mr Sterling's new work is a little underwhelming.
This is Locke's most important work, in my opinion. It is the blueprint for a democratic government made up of multiple branches, with checks and balances between them.
If Kohn's ideas are from the mainstream of pedagogical thought, it's no wonder the US can't seem to educate it's children.
A screed against the monarchy that any modern blogger will recognize as a first-rate fisking.
Alexis de Tocqueville was an amazing man. In a mere nine months he
traveled the length and breadth of the United States of the 1830's and
came to understand it better than most citizens who live in the US
their whole lives.
Finally a mystery about Somerset Maugham's books is solved!
John Birmingham's look at alternative history and future warfare is interesting, but a little uneven for my tastes.
Jonathan Foer's book about a young boy who lost his father in the World Trade Towers is stunning.
It's an oldie, but still a goodie.
Temple Grandin has some unique insights when it comes to animal behavior: she's autistic.
Can you figure out who wrote a passage just by its style? Sometimes, yes you can.
Paul Berman's book takes a deep look at the origins of Islamist Extremism.
Michael Shermer thinks he knows why people are good or evil. Amazingly, he has some science to back up his opinions.
