A bunch of books

I didn't blog much in March and April, but I did read.

In honor of our trip to Virginia, I started with His Excellency: George Washington, by Joseph J. Ellis. Ellis, a Pulitzer winner, is a fantastic and extremely readable author and his biography of Washington is very manageable. Exhaustive it isn't, but it provides fascinating insights into the development of Washington's character. I was amazed at how much I didn't know about Washington.

I'm having a hard time restraining myself from typing all the quotations I copied.

When historians debate Washington's most consequential decisions as commander in chief, they are almost always arguing about specific battles. A compelling case can be made that his swift response to the smallpox epidemic and to a policy of inoculation was the most important strategic decision of his military career. p 87

Lafayette was the major outlet for Washington's human side, and their letters provide the clearest evidence that he had one. p 116

Most tellingly, the outcry over the society [of Cincinnati] forced him to realize, probably for the first time, that the American Revolution had released egalitarian ideas that he was at pains to understand, much less find compatible with his own version of an American republic, which was elitist, deferential, virtuous, and honorable—in short, pretty much like him. p 151

I also finished The Virtue in the Vice: Finding Seven Lively Virtues in the Seven Deadly Sins, the basis of my church's Lenten study group this year. It was a pleasant, but unremarkable read.

I picked up Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 at the library, in an attempt to shore up my very weak economics background. (It's not my high school's fault. They tried to require two economics classes, but I kept finding loopholes.) This is an engaging and interesting, if ultimately depressing, look at world economics.

The point is that because speculative attacks can be self-justifying, following an economic policy that makes sense in terms of the fundamentals is not enough to assure market confidence. In fact, the need to win that confidence can actually prevent a country from following otherwise sensible policies that would normally seem perverse. p 113

I'll talk about the fiction books in another post.