On Liberty – John Stuart Mill, 1859 ★★★½

Pocket Revolution 

Free-thinking used to be a crime but is critical to any healthy civilization. This is one point explicated by English philosopher John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, which also addresses the need for intellectual progress and where our right to do as we please begins and ends.

In five sprawling essays tied together by the theme of liberty but also the objectives and needful limitations of society, Mill lays out one of his most famous cases, for why people should be able to do pretty much whatever they want so long as they hurt no one doing it.

He also has at orthodoxy in many forms, which no doubt disquieted religious readers but clearly impressed a large part of England’s educated classes. On Liberty was a milestone in the development of civil liberties and democratic institutions around the world.

The High Window – Raymond Chandler, 1942 ★★★★

Blood and Tax Brackets 

Class isn’t as big a theme in American literature as one might expect, but it crops up often enough. In Raymond Chandler’s The High Window, it comes into play two ways, as income and moral refinement.

Protagonist Philip Marlowe is a very classy guy who relates to what it is to be down-and-out. When he pays a visit to the palatial Pasadena home of Mrs. Murdock, a wealthy widow who marinates in her port-soaked seclusion, he takes it in with the air of a jaded Bolshevik:

“The sidewalk and the parkway were both very wide and in the parkway were three white acacias that were worth seeing. There was a heavy scent of summer on the morning and everything that grew was perfectly still in the breathless air they get over there on what they call a nice cool day.”

John Adams – David McCullough, 2001 ★★★

Looking Out for Number Two

Popular historians need more than get their facts straight; they must entertain while they edify. Few did this better than David McCullough, whose biography on John Adams won him his second Pulitzer Prize. 

Often overlooked for his contributions to the American Revolution and its aftermath, or else depicted as duller or plainer than his fellow Patriots, Adams was due for a reappraisal. But in rebalancing Adams’s legacy as a selfless prime mover of his nation’s birth, did McCullough push too hard in the other direction?

Short answer: Yes. Longer answer: You don’t mind it so much when the case presented – however dubious in several particulars – is this engaging, humorous, and enjoyable to read. Adams at times seems to breathe through these pages.