Saturday Books

David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: As mentioned below, I'm really enjoying it.  Yes, I know his examples sometimes don't hold water and his sociological brush is broad enough to use Australia as canvas, but it's still fun, he still has fascinating thougts and ideas, and he still brings a better, more incisive eye towards a certain subset of people than most anyone else writing about them.  Other books of this sort suffer from an unrestrained contempt towards their subjects or a desire to lionize.  Brooks, I think, likes living this life, but is nevertheless a bit ashamed at its inconsistencies and oddities, and the tone that that his conflicted indulgence results in is delightful.  Since I'm a Bobo in good standing, I'm loving the book.

Chris Matthews Kennedy and Nixon:  Yeah, that Chris Matthews.  Before he ran an inconsistent television show, he apparently wrote books.  More surprising yet, they're pretty good.  This one focuses on the troubled relationship between the two presidents when they were rising political stars.  They had an affinity for each other because they were both, basically, bloodthirsty.  Kennedy won Congress using an array of dirty tricks and bribes that make DeLay look like a choirboy.  As for Nixon, his red-baiting was legendary and actually provided the template for McCarthy's later perfection of the form (the Wisconsin Senator actually cribbed whole speeches from Nixon).  He was a nasty, lying campaigner and an absolute workaholic.  The two of them, in the end, were the same sort of folks.  It's just that Kennedy's looks, charm and money allowed him to get away with his tactics, even be admired for them while Nixon went down in disgrace.  In some ways, that's a much more profound judgment on Americans and how we treat criminals from different classes than it is a verdict on either man.

Rodney Stark's The Rise of Christianity: A sociologist's study of what sort of conversion rate Christianity needed to explode as it did (the answer?  About 40%.) and what sort of conditions allowed it to maintain the growth.  I'm not too far into it, so that's all I know for now.

What's on your nightstand?