Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2022?
Yearly thread. It can be books published in 2022 or in previous years (but that you read this year.)
2 comments
If a message is said to be information-rich if its contents are unexpected, then Matthew Rose's A World After Liberalism: Five Thinkers Who Inspired the Radical Right was (for me, anyway) jam packed with information. I am a conservative, but I had only heard of one of these five thinkers. The writers profiled here could justly be considered the lunatic fringe of the right, but Rose is surprisingly effective at making us see what their allure was and continues in the present to be. Perhaps the biggest surprise of all is that common element among the five is that they were all pretty hardcore atheists -- and indeed had great contempt for Christianity, a religion in their view that coddles the weak. Rose is a remarkably lucid prose stylist, and yet he is quite reticent about his own core beliefs (which I found a bit odd).
I refer to these radical right thinkers as living in the past, but it may be that one or two of them is still alive; I don't recall.
I refer to these radical right thinkers as living in the past, but it may be that one or two of them is still alive; I don't recall.
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari